Multiculturalism Without Culture

The meeting of November 27, 2007 was devoted to the presentation by the British philosopher Anne Phillips (London School of Economics) of chapter 4 of his last work, Multiculturalism Without Culture (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007 ; http: //press.princeton.edu/…).

In this chapter, which has the title “ Automy, Coercion, and Constraint “, The author wonders about the tendency, common to supporters and adversaries of multiculturalist orientation orientation policies, to represent individuals members of minorities considered to be devoid of recognized autonomy to members of the majority group. Can such policies be defended without the arguments formulated in their favor based on this somewhat embarrassing postulate, which erects the “ culture »Minorities – and of them alone – in insurmountable constraints fully determining the choices of interested parties ? The author responds in the affirmative and undertakes to lay the foundations of a multiculturalism issued by her current presuppositions as to the homogeneous and uniformly obliging character of minority cultures. In doing so, it participates in a recent and welcome evolution of Anglo-Saxon political theory devoted to these questions, which today comes, on the one hand, to deconstruct and criticize the frequently established equivalence between “ breed And culture “-In the American context in particular-, on the other hand, to nuance the opposition between the values ​​of gender equality and respect for cultural differences initially underlined by Susan Moller Okin.

Like Sarah Song in another recent and innovative work, Anne Phillips intends to show that these values ​​can be articulated without entirely subordinate them to each other. It also advocates the extension to the culture of the paradigm of indirect discrimination today in force concerning the variables that constitute sex and “ breed “, As well as the standardization of its mode of application. More specifically, for the existence of such discrimination to be established, there should not be necessary to show that the rule or procedure thus qualified make the members of a minority to the property considered impossible impossible to ; It would suffice that they make it more difficult, that is to say less statistically likely. Thus one might avoid appearing to hold as absolutely restrictive the prescriptions attached to ethnic or religious belonging, to the detriment of the recognition of the free will of the individuals concerned. Because the problem lies, among others, tells us the author, in the fact that most often alone the members of ethnic or racial minorities are described as having a “ culture Who would obstruct their autonomy. There is the matrix of composite discrimination there that it is important to identify as such.

Introduced by John Crowley (Unesco), the discussion focused in particular on the tendency of the theories of multiculturalism – including the most sophisticated and the best argued, such as that of Anne Phillips – to avoid approaching the question of the conditions of training and the preservation of communities proper policies.