ABSTRACT
As the promotion of heterogeneity over homogeneity, difference over sameness, or the dispersal of power over its centralisation, pluralism has informed social theory in appropriately multiple ways. It can take the form of an empirical or metaphysical claim (that reality, culture, truth, values, or practices simply are irrevocably plural in nature) or a normative agenda (positing diversification, devolution and openness as values), but mostly the two will be interlinked. A concern for the tolerance of difference (in beliefs and social
practices) has motivated liberal thinking from Milton and Locke, through Kant and Mill, and down to Berlin and Rawls-whether based on scepticism about the superiority of any single conception of the good life (and thus about the state’s right to enforce one), or on a conception of the autonomous individual capable of choosing his or her own ends and taking responsibility for his or her actions. Various aporias and dilemmas have emerged: is it possible, desirable, or responsible for a state to remain neutral between competing ideals? Does one grant freedom of speech to those who would deny it for others? Does liberal (representative) democracy really allow for the articulation and pursuit of the full diversity of citizens’ inclinations? How does liberalism account, or cater, for the possibility that ideas of the good stem from (rather than exist prior to) particular historical forms of social organisation? And so on. Significantly, contemporary pluralist thinking emerges strongly in the work of those communitarian thinkers (such as Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer) and in the discourse ethics of Ju¨rgen Habermas, which reject the atomistic individualism of traditional liberalism in favour of some account of the intrinsically social nature of subjectivity. A spin-off in political science is the form of pluralism (prominent
since the 1950s) associated with a largely American tradition of ‘polyarchic’ democracy theory, represented notably by Talcott Parsons and Robert Dahl, linking Western democratic practice to a wide dispersal of power and authority through a range of relatively autonomous forums and institutions. This is one way to counteract the potential tyranny of the state: ensure that rival interest groups and other factions have a definite checking and balancing role in the political process. As with classical liberalism before it, this position has been rejected, by Marxists among others, as a straightforward apologia for the systematic inequalities of liberal capitalist societies: a smokescreen to obscure the typical concentration of power in the hands of an ultimately unaccountable elite.
