ABSTRACT
American multiculturalism is, without a doubt, more of a movement than a doctrine. As well as the communitarians of the 1980s, this movement places into question the traditional principle of state neutrality. In a somewhat diffuse manner, it offers a new way of thinking about associative plurality. It also questions the characteristic of communities from which individuals draw their identities, the interaction between cultural factors of social cohesion, and the political practices involved in defining the public interest. At the center of this movement, we encounter a challenge – on both an anthropological and a moral level – to the complex idea of the citizen that has presided in the past. It questions the basis upon which the citizen was constituted namely, the universality of human beings as revealed by God or nature and on the faculty of judging that transcends the socio-historical conditions in which it develops. From this questioning a profusion of discourses and analyses have been bom. For all their differences, each of these positions shares a common claim against universality that leads them to reject eurocentrism, sexism, or scientism.
