ABSTRACT
IT is HARD TO BELIEVE that the German philosopher Nietzsche should have written this analysis almost one hundred years before
the word multiculturalism was even thought of. For whatever was wrong with Nietzsche, he envisioned living people as the active negotiators of culture and cultural difference. Such a view was unheard of when other prominent social thinkers were working out the “scientific” doctrines of colonial domination and underpinning them with racialist theories of “high cultures” and “low cultures.” What Nietzsche was reacting to was, most probably, the urbanization of the West, in which the burgeoning cities attracted scores of new groups, each with their own “folk cultures.” Far from entertaining some naive melting pot vision, Nietzsche predicted a period of cross-cultural comparison that, if all went well, would then give way to a new understanding of culture. All did not go well in Western history, and even a lot of present-day multicultural thinking has not gone beyond Nietzsche’s stage of comparison, as we will see in chapters 8 and 9. The new understanding of culture that the long-dead philosopher predicted still has a long way to go; but one hundred years later, it is high time to sketch some of its requirements.
