The return of the repressed: Constitutionalism, religion, and political pluralism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Chapter 1 - The problem of pluralism(s)
Ever not quite: Pluralism(s) in William James and contemporary psychology, 2023
The past several decades bear witness to the emergence of a cause that has become tremendously, even wildly popular in contemporary scholarship. The cause in question is pluralism. We use the term "cause" rather than "concept" for two reasons. First, pluralism itself is a set of concepts; among our tasks is to explore the extent to which the varying concepts cohere, and in what ways. Second, we say "cause" because our focus is principally pluralism in psychology, within which pluralism is frequently encouraged or endorsed rather than merely analyzed in a distanced way on a conceptual level. We find that since the s there have been many references to pluralism in psychology and explicit calls for psychology to embrace a pluralistic framework for reasons that are sometimes cast as moral in nature, suggestive of a cause and, perhaps, a therapy for the discipline (e.g., Goertzen & Smythe, ; Kirschner, ; Slife & Wendt, ; Teo, a; Ussher, ; Viney, ; Wertz, ). As we will make evident in Chapter , promotion of pluralism or a pluralistic approach to psychology comes in many forms and appears in an array of diverse contexts. Not surprisingly, with great variation in context comes multiplicity in meaning, and with this, differing implications. We can see this as problematic if considered against the assumption that pluralism is a necessary cure-all for psychology. At stake is more than an unfortunate conceptual cloud to further embarrass psychological science. For if there is little agreement about the nature of the cure, its implementation can hardly be straightforward. Every level of the production of psychological knowledge is impacted: what projects count as acceptable research questions and methods to address them, the standards by which they are evaluated, what is published, what is applied, and what is funded. If a pluralistic psychology is to be viable and do the redeeming work for which it is intended, it is vital to be as clear as possible what we mean by pluralism in the first place.
2005
Much of contemporary Anglo-American Liberal political theory is still living under the shadow of Max Weber. In particular, it seems to accept the idea of disenchantment and has more recently discovered the problem value pluralism. Max Weber’s idea of the political still serves as an antidote to the prevalence in much of this kind of theory of the priority of the moral over the political. Unfortunately, Weber’s own theory is incomplete and needs to be supplemented. «If one accepts Weber’s premises, it is easy to be imprisoned by them».(1) It is a striking feature of much contemporary political theorising that it seems to be living in the shadow of Max Weber without, with a few notable exceptions, recognising or admitting that fact. The nature of the answer to the question of what is still alive in Weber’s thought will naturally depend upon the interest of the questioner. The main claim being made here is that Max Weber is still our contemporary with respect to the problem of value pl...
Pluralism: Problems and Promise
2015
The Pluralism Project began twenty-five years ago as a research project, investigating the many ways in which America's religious landscape has changed with the renewed period of immigration launched 50 years ago this year, in 1965, with the passage of the Immigration and Nationalities Act. This issue of the Journal of Interreligious Studies brings together several perspectives on pluralism, each of which raises important issues, drawing for the most part from research in on-the-ground studies. This gives me the opportunity to reflect on the roots of the Pluralism Project, why it began, and what are the problems and the promise of this research. The project began during the early 1990s when the University of Chicago, under the leadership of Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, had commissioned scholars from across the academy to write about the dynamic phenomenon loosely identified as "fundamentalism" that seemed to have new relevance in global life. A term that had a particular identity in American Protestantism was used as a marker for the phenomenon. The term was used, not without controversy, but also not without full awareness of its deficiencies on the part of the remarkable group of scholars who contributed to the first of the five volumes published, Fundamentalism Observed (1994). As important as the Fundamentalism Project was in its time, and in ours, I was not tempted to participate. For intellectual reasons, and as a matter of temperament and personal history, I was not drawn to this aspect of human religious life. I was far more interested in finding out what was happening at the other end of the spectrum, in those places, those movements, those coffee shops where people of every faith were expressing themselves anew in more hopeful and positive ways, even in contexts fraught with the religious and ideological energies of extremism. I had seen some of those places, those movements, those coffee-shop thinkers and the emerging relationships between and among people of different religious traditions. For most of the 1980s, I had served on a working group of the World Council of Churches on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies, a twenty-five person commission of people from member churches of the W.C.C. from Korea to Kenya, charged with thinking anew about the relation of Christians to neighbors of other faiths. It marked a turn in a history that had long been driven by mission and evangelism, a history that to be sure had grown over the centuries in the entourage of empire and colonialism. And yet that same history had given rise to vibrant churches that now asked tough and complex questions about their relations with people of other faiths in their own societies. There was, of course, a range of responses to the challenge of living in communities and contexts of religious difference. There were and are exclusivists whose life as Christians is secured by theological and social exclusivism that could be seen as part of the "family resemblance" of fundamentalism. There were inclusivists who had a more benign incorporative vision, including strangers and neighbors at the table they had already set in the Christian household. But there were also those who had a different vision, one based on the conviction of mutual witness-that Christians did have a faith and witness to share, but
Ingrid Salvatore and Volker Kaul (eds), Pluralism, London, Routledge, 2019
Both Max Weber and Isaiah Berlin saw pluralism as the defining feature of a disenchanted liberal world. But this was not simply for them a historical fact. They argued that the liberal age revealed the ‘true’ nature of human beliefs, that, in the end, these are mere subjective preferences and that the main argument for liberal toleration was then value-pluralism and some form of relativism and scepticism. However, there is another way of understanding liberal pluralism. Instead of seeing pluralism as “an unfortunate condition of human life”, John Rawls suggests that we take into account two facts. First, that not all disagreements and conflicts are the upshot of self- and class interests or of irrational preferences, but that conflicting views, in particular religious views can be seen as reasonable in the sense that they can offer reasons for disagreements. Second, that the reasons offered in the public sphere are distinct from the beliefs and values shared in the non-public domain. The possibility of a limited political consensus based on public reasons is thus real. I will argue that such a view rests on a central epistemic distinction between the diversity of goods or values and the diversity of moral and religious doctrines. Value-pluralism is a first-order pluralism that exists among goods or values. Liberal pluralism, because of its reflective nature, is a second-order pluralism that concerns the various conceptions of the good and their reasons. Political liberalism aims at an overlapping consensus among second-order beliefs systems.
2014
Pluralism proceeds from the observation that many associations in liberal democracies claim to possess, and attempt to exercise, a measure of legitimate authority over their members. They assert that this authority does not derive from the magnanimity of a liberal and tolerant state but is grounded, rather, on the common practices and aspirations of those individuals who choose to take part in a common endeavor. As an account of the authority of associations, pluralism is distinct from other attempts to accommodate groups like multiculturalism, subsidiarity, corporatism, and associational democracy. It is consistent with the explanation of legal authority proposed by contemporary legal positivists, and recommends that the formal normative systems of highly organized groups be accorded the status of fully legal norms when they encounter the laws of the state. In this book, Muniz-Fraticelli argues that political pluralism is a convincing political tradition that makes distinctive and radical claims regarding the sources of political authority and the relationship between associations and the state. Drawing on the intellectual tradition of the British political pluralists, as well as recent developments in legal philosophy and social ontology, the book argues that political pluralism makes distinctive and radical claims regarding the sources of political authority and the relationship between associations and the state.