ABSTRACT
Pluralism, advertised as a diverse, tolerant form of life, is again on the discussion agenda in Europe and America. Its resurgence reflects the contingent confluence of several elements. They include the collapse of communist states, accompanied by the post-Marxist appreciation of energies in civil society exceeding the unity of command economies;1 the acceleration of population flows accompanying the globalization of economic life, as affluent managers step up the pace of transnational mobility and postcolonials migrate to the centers of former empires; the acceleration of speed in military delivery systems, cultural communications, civilian transportation, disease transmission, ecological change, and political mobilization, accentuating the experience of contingency, porosity, and uncertainty in territorial boundaries and national identities; the eruption of new claims to positive identity among constituencies whose previous identifications along lines of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, class, religion, or irreligion were experienced as injurious or degrading; and the devolution of the individualist/communitarian debate of the 1970s and 1980s in AngloAmerican political theory into a set of compromises that reposition many of its participants as conventional pluralists.2
