Presentation on: Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Preface, Chapters 1-2) 2002, Princeton, USA: Woodstock, UK: Princeton University Press.

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Presentation onSeyla Benhabib, The Claims of
Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global Era
(Preface, Chapters 1-2) 2002, Princeton, USA
Woodstock, UK Princeton University Press.

• by Marek Mikuš
• 7th semester
• Institute of Ethnology
• Faculty of Philosophy and Arts
• Charles University, Prague

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Seyla Benhabib Biographic Outline

• born in 1950 in Istanbul, Turkey Sephardic Jew
  origin
• received BA in Humanities at the American College
  for Girls in Istanbul
• emigrated to USA in 1970
• received her BA in Philosophy at Brandeis
  University and her MA and PhD (1977) in
  Philosophy at Yale University
• has been Professor of Government, Department of
  Government, and Senior Research Fellow, Center
  for European Studies, at Harvard University (1993
  - 2000)
• currently Eugene Meyer Professor of Political
  Science and Philosophy at Yale University (from
  2001 onwards)
• areas of specialization 19th and 20th century
  continental social and political thought,
  feminist theory, the history of modern political
  theory and multiculturalism in liberal
  democracies

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Seyla Benhabib Bibliography

• The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in
  the Global Era. Princeton University Press,
  2002.
• Transformation of Citizenship. Dilemmas of the
  Nation-State in the Era of Globalization. Van
  Gorcum, Amsterdam, 2000.
• The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Sage
  Pub., 1996.
• Feminist Contentions A Philosophical Exchange
  (co-authored with Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser
  and Drucilla Cornel). Routledge, 1996.
• Situating the Self. Gender, Community and
  Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Polity
  Press, 1992.
• Critique, Norm and Utopia A Study of the
  Foundations of Critical Theory. Columbia
  University Press, 1986.

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Being a Political Philosopher

• What does a political philosopher do? To be a
• political philosopher is more a vocation than a
  career. We can be in our universities, and in
  some context one can be a journalist, one can be
  a human rights activist, but basically I would
  say that it is a vocation for thinking about the
  political. Not just day-to-day
• politics, but about the phenomenon of the
  political, that all communities of any degree of
  complexity
• organize themselves according to certain
  principles of justice, equality, reciprocity, and
  authority.
• Source Conversations with History, Institute of
  International Studies, UC Berkeley.

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Main Topics

• social-constructivist position in the debate on
  multiculturalism vs. reductionist sociology of
  culture mosaic multiculturalism
• narrative view of actions and culture
• communicative or discourse ethics
• practical discourses
• interactive universalism
• dynamic model of identity groups
• institutional plurality in liberal democracies
• typology and defence of universalism(s)
• challenge of cultural and moral relativism

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Central Quotation

• () as long as these pluralist structures
  (multiple legal, jurisdictional etc. systems for
  multiple groups note by mm) do not violate
  three normative conditions, they can be quite
  compatible with a universalist deliberative
  democracy model. I call these the conditions of
  egalitarian reciprocity, voluntary
  self-ascription, and freedom of exit and
  association ()
• p. 19, original emphasis

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Preface

• makes clear 2 basic points that underpin much of
  her reasoning
• cultures are constituted through contested
  practices (p. viii) /
  social-constructivist approach
• she speaks from the position of democratic
  theorist, distinguished from one
  of multicultural theorist
• this position is one of supporting movements for
  cultural recognition under the condition they
  apply for political and institutional inclusion,
  justice and cultural fluidity (p. ix) as well
• the most strongly she opposes so-called mosaic
  multiculturalism (a term basically referring to
  left-essentialist, communitarian and
  primordialist tendencies in the multiculturalism
  debate)

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Chapter 1 Introduction. On the Use and Abuse of
Culture. 1/4

• Herderian concept of culture and the
  reductionist sociology of culture
• narrative view of actions and culture
• first-order deeds
• second-order narratives
• social construction of cultural differences
• example Turkish nation-building project
• the normative principles of her reasoning
  communicative or discourse ethics
• universal respect
• egalitarian reciprocity

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Chapter 1 Introduction. On the Use and Abuse of
Culture. 2/4

• three types of practical discourses
• moral discourses about universal norms of
  justice
• ethical discourses about concepts of the good
  life
• political-pragmatic discourses about the
  feasible
• the actual participation of all concerned
  subjects in discourses as a source of legitimacy
  of all norms
• recursive validation, intercultural
  communication, resignification
• declares her proclivity to interactive
  universalism vs.
  substitionalist universalism
• the boundaries of moral discourses are set only
  by the extent of our doings as a
  consequence of which we affect one
  anothers well being and freedom (p. 14)

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Chapter 1 Introduction. On the Use and Abuse of
Culture. 3/4

• narrative construction of individual identities
  (selves)
• example from anthropology of kinship rule of
  universal reciprocity
• individual life stories shaped by multiple
  affinities
• dynamic model of identity groups
• communitarian MC concentration on classifying,
  delimiting and describing supposedly
  homogeneous cultural systems
• dynamic model means turn towards emphasis on
  what these groups demand, instead of what
  they are
• example of application the process of
  channelling of class politics into
  ethnic politics

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Chapter 1 Introduction. On the Use and Abuse of
Culture. 4/4

• 3 normative conditions, under which plurality of
  legal, jurisdictional etc. structures is
  compatible with universalist democratic model
• egalitarian reciprocity
• voluntary self-ascription
• freedom of exit and association
• criticism of Rawls' theory of political
  liberalism
• constitutional essentials vs more specific
  institutional arrangements
  and policies the private sphere
• deliberative democracy model (Jurgen Habermas)

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Chapter 2 Nous et les autres. Is
Universalism Ethnocentric? 1/3

• deconstructs the notion of ethnocentrism of
  universalism
• universalism - necessary grounds for the right to
  cultural self-determination
• differentation between four basic types of
  universalism all rooted in
  certain form of belief
• essentialism and existenstialism (Hobbes, Hume,
  Adam Smith, Sartre)
• justificatory universalism (Habermas, Dworkin,
  Rawls, Putman)
• moral universalism
• legal universalism universalism, like justice,
  can be political without being metaphysical (p.
  28)

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Chapter 2 Nous et les autres. Is
Universalism Ethnocentric? 2/3

• deconstructs the notion of radical
  incommensurability
• draws on Lyotard phrase, regimen, genre of
  discourse
• If frameworks, linguistic or conceptual, are so
  radically incommensurable, then we would not even
  be able to know that much our ability to
  describe a framework as a framework in the first
  place rests upon the possibility that we can
  identify and select certain features of these
  other frameworks as sufficiently like ours to be
  characterized as conceptual activities in the
  first place (p. 30).
• moral reservations against the concept of
  incommensurability
• the hermeneutic truth of cultural relativism
• Gadamer a melting or merging or blending into
  one another of horizons
• real confrontation ? communities of
  interdependence
• pragmative imperative for pluralist ethical
  universalism

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Chapter 2 Nous et les autres. Is
Universalism Ethnocentric? 3/3

• the problem of moral relativism
• if the cultures function as equal participants in
  a dialogue, the moral discourses of each culture
  concerns all the rest
• can we separate moral discourses from cultural
  discourses or cultural contexts? (holistic
  paradox)
• Benhabib's solution differentiation between the
  moral, the ethical and the evaluative
• take the best and leave the rest
• this type of differentation as an invention of
  modernity

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Textual Connection

• Political society is not neutral between those
  who value remaining true to the culture of our
  ancestors and those who might want to cut loose
  in the name of some individual goal of
  self-development. It might be argued that one
  could after all capture a goal like survivance
  for a proceduralist liberal society. One could
  consider the French language, for instance, as a
  collective resource that individuals might want
  to make use of, and act for its preservation,
  just as one does for clean air or green spaces.
  But this can't capture the full thrust of
  policies designed for cultural survival. It is
  not just a matter of having the French language
  for those who might choose it. (...). But it also
  involves making sure that there is a community of
  people here in the future that will want to avail
  itself of the opportunity to use the French
  language.
• Charles Taylor on Canadian bilingualism
• The Politics of Recognition. In
  Multiculturalism Examining the Politics of
  Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann. 1994,
  Princeton University Press, pp. 58-59.

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Suggestions of Questions

• Is the claim that even completely independent
  sociocultural systems should conform to universal
  moral norms still to be considered as an
  implication of the interactive/plural
  universalism, or rather of a different
  universalism?
• Is it possible for the participants in
  communities of conversation to be actually
  equal in the situation of the growing structural
  inequality on a global scale?
• Is there an option to secure the legitimacy of
  legal universalism in face of the rejection of
  certain cultures to participate in a dialogue on
  the topic of their moral discourses? If there is,
  is it viable to export our legal norms or even
  to impose them in the fashion we witness today?

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Thanks for your attention!

• contact marek_at_mgzn.cz