ABSTRACT
Remaking a commitment to the accommodation of difference from a 'weak' liberal call for toleration into a 'strong' communitarian demand for recognition brings losses as well as gains. The modern liberal formulation of the principle of toleration, bequeathed by J.S. Mill, had upheld a general commitment to the accommodation of the dissenting and unfashionable point of view. It was to this generaliseable principle, and not to the contingent judgement of any communication community that oppressed difference might appeal. Habermas agrees with those critics who find a loss of critical power in Taylor's turn towards the problematic of recognition. In particular, he cites Susan Wolfs concern at the critical limits of his neocommunitarianism. In her view:
At least one of the serious harms that a failure of recognition perpetuates has little to do with the question of whether the person or the culture who goes unrecognised has anything important to say to all human beings. The need to correct those harms, therefore, does not depend on the presumption or the confirmation of the presumption that a particular culture is distinctively valuable to people outside the culture. (1994, p.79)
Habermas rejects the paradoxical postmodern proposition according to which the affirmation of difference rules out the search for shared commitments through which the reasonableness of the accommodation of difference might be justified (1987). He cannot, on the other hand, overlook the neo-communitarians' failure to offer an account of those principles to which dissenting difference might appeal against the empirical consensus achieved by a given communication community. And yet, there is, for Habermas, no going back. As we will see, according to him, liberalism has lost the capacity to persuade us of the rationality of its own
commitment to the principle of toleration. It is, therefore, necessary to identify a new basis from which a universalising commitment to the principle of tolerance can be normatively grounded.
