Abstract
Practical liberalism addresses the problem of political legitimacy by assuring all groups in the polity a maximum amount of group autonomy compatible with an equal amount of autonomy for all other groups. Given the fact of pluralism—that is, given the presumption that groups exist in a pluralist social setting typified by differing and most likely conflicting group ways and beliefs—this is the most reasonable and prudent choice for groups to make in order to secure, as far as possible, the great civil good of social peace and political stability. Insofar as groups recognize this (instrumental) good as a precondition of all else that matters to their members, they can be expected to converge upon and accept the liberal principle as the keystone of civil association. So, under practical liberalism, civil association is properly conceived as a practical and prudential necessity. Government supplies the organizational structure and institutional mechanisms required to implement and enforce policies designed and intended to make the political ideal of a maximum amount of equal freedom for all groups in the polity an existential reality. This is not the only job for government in the liberal polity, of course, but it is the primary job that must be done in order to cultivate an atmosphere of social justice.1
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Notes
For a more functional account of government offering an expanded, though by no means exhaustive, account of the jobs a polity will look to government to do, see Craig L. Carr, Polity: Political Culture and the Nature of Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 36–45.
See, for example, David Miller, “In What Sense Must Socialism Be Communitarian?” Social Philosophy and Policy 6, 2 (1989): 51–73;
Derek Edyvane, Community and Conflict (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 25–32.
Cf. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4–6.
See Craig L. Carr, The Liberal Polity: An Inquiry into the Logic of Civil Association (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Chs. 3 & 4.
John Neville Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, 2nd ed. (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1914), 225.
Lucas Swaine, The Liberal Conscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 38.
Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 151.
Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Jeff Spinner-Halev, Surviving Diversity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 82.
Less generously, Leslie Green has characterized Kukathas’s liberal archipelago as a “mosaic of tyrannies.” Green, “Internal Minorities and Their Rights,” in Will Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 270.
In Joseph Carens’s thoughtful phrase, “culture is dynamic.” Joseph H, Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 257.
This imagery has been developed to good effect in the American context by Lawrence Fuchs. See Fuchs, The American Kaleidoscope (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1990).
As we noticed when discussing Galston’s defense of pluralism, so-called theories of comprehensive liberalism are committed to the eradication of perceived injustice when the substantive demands of liberal morality are compromised by intragroup actions. (See William A. Galston, The Practice of Liberal Pluralism [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 3.) But liberal theories that derive their defense of group autonomy from the notion of individual autonomy, will also be sensitive to intragroup injustices and necessarily so. Perceived intrusions upon the autonomy of group members by means of intragroup practices must be considered objectionable by these thinkers. Their problem, however, is to decide what the state should do about this sort of thing.
Cf. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 94, 168.
On the right of group exit under practical liberalism, and the problems associated with it, see Carr, The Liberal Polity, 116, and George Crowder, “Two Concepts of Liberal Pluralism,” Political Theory 35 (2007): 121–46. As Benhabib has noticed, there is reason to question whether a right to exit should also entail a right of entrance. If secession is not an option, and if some group wishes to leave the state, is there an obligation on other states, particularly those wishing to defend a right of exit, to take in wanderers? Here, I suppose, it makes some sense to insist that “ought” implies “can”; a right of entrance would seem to exist only if the host state is able to accommodate wanderers. It would also require, under practical liberalism, that immigrant groups be willing to accept the liberal principle and the standards of social justice it implies within the particularities of the host state. See Benhabib, 11.
Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 26–7.
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© 2010 Craig L. Carr
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Carr, C.L. (2010). Political Unity and Pluralism. In: Liberalism and Pluralism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106055_5
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