Abstract
Charles Taylor and John Gray offer competing liberal responses to the contemporary challenge of pluralism. Gray's morally minimal ‘modus vivendi liberalism’ aims at peaceful coexistence between plural ways of life. It is, in Judith Shklar's phrase, a ‘liberalism of fear’ that is skeptical of attempts to harmonize clashing values. In contrast, Taylor's ‘hermeneutic liberalism’ is based on dialogical engagement with difference and holds out the possibility that incompatible values and traditions can be reconciled without oppression or distortion. Although Taylor's theory is superior to Gray's because it recognizes that dialogue is crucial for respecting pluralism, both theories fail to fully articulate the ethical ideal of citizenship that they imply. Citizens who are able to dialogically engage with pluralism must be cultivated through liberal education to possess certain ethical traits, and this requirement inevitably limits the range of pluralism liberal societies can accommodate. The theoretical overemphasis on pluralism in recent liberal theory serves to obscure this point.
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Notes
Besides Taylor and Gray, Galston's nonexhaustive list of other prominent pluralists includes Bernard Williams, Stuart Hampshire, Joseph Raz, Steven Lukes, Michael Stocker, Thomas Nagel, Martha Nussbaum, Charles Larmore, and John Kekes.
As Stephen Macedo puts it, ‘The problem of normative diversity is the original problem of modern politics…’ (Macedo, 2000, 28). Indeed, Rawls writes that we can trace the provenance of liberal ideas to arguments for religious toleration that emerged in the midst of wars among believers of plural religious creeds in post-Reformation Europe (Rawls, 1996, xxvi).
Macedo writes that ‘Liberalism is held to be guilty of the cardinal sin of ‘denying difference’ and is therefore condemned as outmoded and unfair’ (2000, 1).
Of course, Gray's interpretation of Berlin's pluralism has been disputed (see, e.g., Weinstock, 1998).
Shklar acknowledges similarities between her liberal theory and Berlin's, but also distinguishes them on the ground that hers does not rest on a theory of value pluralism (1989, 28–29).
Much of Taylor's political writing, of course, emphasizes communal identity as the ethical basis of citizenship (see, e.g., the essays in Taylor, 1993). Nevertheless, nowhere does he emphasize the importance of education, which I would argue must be liberal in nature, for producing the ethical characters of liberal citizens who are willing and able to engage in sort of hermeneutic dialogue he prescribes.
In recent work, Taylor has brilliantly explored the Sittlichkeit of modern societies (see Taylor, 2004). What is interesting about this work is that, while Taylor declares that there are ‘multiple modernities’ and that European and North American modernities should not be accepted as global models, most of the text is spent demonstrating the unity and coherence of the ‘modern social imaginary’. (Bernard Yack makes this observation as well in his review of Taylor, 2004 (Yack, 2005)). Clearly, Taylor's struggles with pluralism continue, but exploring how Taylor's understanding of modernity relates to his theories of liberalism and pluralism is beyond the scope of this work.
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Curtis, W. Liberals and Pluralists: Charles Taylor vs John Gray. Contemp Polit Theory 6, 86–107 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300260
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300260