ABSTRACT
Multiculturalism has attracted its fair share of critics over the years, but few have been more influential than Brian Barry. Barry takes the champions of multiculturalism to task for a wide variety of perceived failings, including a refusal to set principled limits on minority rights and minority autonomy, a misguided hostility to the common sense of citizenship that binds together the members of a democratic community, an unhealthy preoccupation with questions of cultural difference, and a disturbing indifference to the challenge of redressing deeply entrenched socio-economic injustice (Barry 1998, 2001, 2001a, 2002). Barry's discussion of culture has already been taken up in Chapter 2, and I will examine his arguments about social cohesion and the limits of multicultural accommodation in Chapters 7 and 8. In this chapter I will focus exclusively on his claim that multicultural policies are incompatible with a liberal conception of equality. This claim receives its most extensive treatment in Culture and Equality, which is the most comprehensive critical examination of multiculturalism yet to be penned by a political philosopher.
