ABSTRACT
This chapter confronts directly the problem of negotiation between cultural systems that is central to this volume. Jeremy Lane focuses on the clash in multicultural France between its traditional French values of liberty, equality, fraternity and its current problems with its Islamic community. French republicanism seems not to have extended to Arabic culture and language, including in the work of sociologists claiming otherwise; he speaks particularly of the ways in which the ostensibly radical sociological method employed by Pierre Bourdieu in dealing with ethnic difference ends by producing the very problems it purports to solve. Bourdieu’s high profile political interventions in support of ethnic minorities, illegal immigrants, the unemployed, gay and lesbian civil rights have all been couched in a rhetoric that appears to be of the most classical French republican kind, but Bourdieu disclaims any such ‘false universalism’. Lane argues that such methods only replicate in different terms the same series of hierarchies and exclusions that underlie the intractable problems of cultural difference. Lane compares Bourdieu’s methods with those of several other writers, in particular Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, whose methodologies he finds better suited to the postmodern condition.
