Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Michael Dusche
ABSTRACT
Radical multiculturalism claims that cultural groups, not the individual, should be the yardstick for considerations of
justice, because the group offers the individual the indispensable good of being rooted in a community and since
membership in a culture is not voluntary, abolition of culture would lead to uprooting of individuals. Thus, by taking
this good away on grounds of justice, liberalism perpetrates another injustice. Against this, liberalism upholds the
principle of normative methodological individualism, arguing that groups cannot be defined without recourse to the
individual. Furthermore, the concept of cultural group is notoriously vague and not suitable to replace normative
methodological individualism. Moreover, radical multiculturalism risks falling prey to self-defeating normative relativism.
Since there is also a danger for the liberal to fall prey to culture-centrism, both parties agree on internal universalism.
They also agree on the difference between membership in an association and membership in a cultural community.
However, the liberal concludes that the state must not add its might to cultural dependence, but enable the individual to
grow out of it. Furthermore, liberalism maintains that normative methodological individualism is sufficient for even
group-related needs provided the group conforms to basic principles of justice. To this, radical multiculturalism objects
that even if all cultural groups abide by the principles of justice of the larger society, liberalism still produces injustices
for those whose language is not among the official languages of the polity. Since any democratic polity needs a medium
of debate and deliberation that is universally understood, liberalism has to grant this point. Liberalism can only diminish
its impact through intermediate levels of government and subsidiarity.
KEYWORDS
Multiculturalism; Language politics; Pluralism; John Rawls; India; Liberalism; Subsidiarity
AUTHOR INFORMATION: Michael Dusche, PhD. Assistant Professor-DAAD Lecturer, Centre for German Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi - 110 067, India. E-mail: dr_m_d_dusche@hotmail.com.
Notes
1
Narendra Subramanian, Family Law and Cultural Pluralism. Basic Features and Directions of Family Law Policy
in India, in Encyclopedia of India, ed. Stanley Wolpert and Raju G. C. Thomas (New York: Charles Scribners Sons,
forthcoming).
2
Ibid., Hindu daughters have rights to shares equal to those of sons in intestate succession to their parents self-earned
property, in contrast with Muslim daughters having rights to only half the shares that Muslim sons do. However, the
succession rights of Hindu daughters are restricted to intestate cases, i.e. cases in which the parent did not leave a will.
Hindu parents are free to will self-earned property as they wish, and typically will all or most of such property to their
sons and perhaps other male kin. Besides, male coparcenaries control ancestral Hindu property in much of India and
daughters do not have the right to demand the partition of such property so that they may control their shares... Muslim
daughters have the right to half the shares of sons in all forms of parental property. One may will only up to a third of
ones estate under Muslim law, and that too not to a legal heir. The rest of ones estate is divided among ones children,
spouses and kin according to prescribed shares. So, Muslim parents cannot deny their daughters rights to inherit shares
in their property by willing self-earned property to male kin alone, or by effectively presenting more of their property
as being of ancestral origin... From 1973 onwards, indigent Hindu women (and other non-Muslim women) had the right
to alimony until their remarriage or death. Many courts did not recognize the right of divorced Muslim women for main-
tenance from their ex-husbands beyond a three-month period after divorce... [until] the Supreme Court... recognized the
alimony rights of Muslim women and placed conditions for the validity of unilateral Muslim male divorce in two
landmark judgements of 2001 and 2002. The courts allow Muslim men to marry up to four wives while not permitting
Muslim polyandry, in contrast with the statutory ban on Hindu bigamy. The ban on Hindu bigamy is however not very
effective as courts set high standards to recognize the validity of Hindu marriages in bigamy cases...
3
See the authors Der Philosoph als Mediator. Anwendungsbedingungen globaler Gerechtigkeit (Vienna: Passagen
Verlag, 2000), 5, where the term is introduced, and the same Experts or Mediators? Philosophers in the Public Sphere,
Ethical Perspectives 9, no. 1 (2002): 21-30, where the concept is further developed.
4
In India, compensation is often sought on the basis of communities as the smallest unit of reckoning based on a
conception of collective and trans-historical responsibility. A positive expression of this are the many affirmative-action
programmes that attempt to make good the historical discrimination against outcasts and under-casts, tribals and women.
A negative expression of this sense of collective responsibility is the justification given for acts of violence against
members of a community somewhere on accounts of some transgressions by some elements of that community elsewhere
(this was the recurrent explanation of the recent pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat as voiced by the Hindu right).