The Skillful Self: Liberalism, Culture, and the Politics of Skill

The Skillful Self

The Skillful Self Liberalism, Culture, and the Politics of Skill

JOHN STOPFORD

L E X I N G TO N B O O K S A division of ROW M A N & L I T T L E F I E L D P U B L I S H E R S , I N C . Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stopford, John, 1953The skillful self : liberalism, culture, and the politics of skill / John Stopford. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-2334-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-3508-2 (e-book) 1. Liberalism. 2. Culture. I. Title. JC574.S75 2009 320.51—dc22 2008049569 Printed in the United States of America

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

Contents

Preface

vii

Introduction

ix

1 2 3 4 5 6

Liberalism, Culture, Cultural Participation Community, Culture, Autonomy Culture and Identity Education Skill, Technology, Capability Politics of Skill

1 17 57 91 115 175

Bibliography

203

Index

225

About the Author

235

v

Preface

I began work on this book in Oxford during the 1992–1993 academic year. My first attempts to formulate the problems it addresses yielded an article on the place and role of culture in liberal political theory. The book itself took shape in a series of lectures on culture and politics delivered at the University of Hanover, Germany, in 1997 and 1998. Since then, I have recast the manuscript a number of times, supplementing the philosophical argument with discussion of current cultural controversies and hard cases. My main intellectual debts will be evident from the text. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the contribution of friends, teachers, and colleagues, including Jonathan Davis, Richard Evidon, Elisabeth Fleisch, Jeffrey Librett, Klaus Oehler, John Ormrod, Helmut Pape, John Rawls, George H. Roeder, Jr., Sibyl Schwarzenbach, and Martin Stopford, who offered comments, encouragement, or academic support at various times. I would like to thank the President and Fellows of Wolfson College, Oxford, for their hospitality while I was beginning the book; and my students at the University of Hanover in the 1990s for listening and understanding what I wanted to say, often before I could say it. Special thanks are due to the publisher’s reviewer who, besides providing helpful criticisms and suggestions, proposed the title the book now bears. I am also grateful to Helen Glenn Court and Angela Schumacher for their help in editing and correcting earlier versions of the manuscript, and to Joseph Parry, Lynda Phung, Jana Wilson, and their colleagues at Lexington Books for their support of this project. My family has borne the burdens of writing along with me, and my greatest debt is to them, Andrea and Tom.

vii

Introduction

Everyone thinks they know what culture is, but little reflection is needed to realize that it may mean many things. We distinguish “culture” from “cultures,” and “high culture” from “low culture.” We speak of the “culture” of a society, but also of a particular individual as being “cultured.” To some, culture means concerts and museums, for others their entire way of life and everything they regard as valuable. Some regard culture as superfluous, to be enjoyed only when basic needs have been met, while others are prepared to live and die for it. This book discusses the meaning and role of culture in liberal political theory. Liberalism has seldom paid much attention to the politics of culture. It has, on the contrary, focused on legal and economic institutions and the basic structure of society. Reflection on cultural questions has been left to others—to critical theorists and cultural critics, to postmodernists and the priests of high culture. That is a significant oversight. The question of culture should occupy a central place in liberal politics. But to pose this question it is necessary to know how it should look. Chapter 1 is introductory and focuses on culture in present-day constitutional democracies. A brief survey of the cultural politics of these regimes since World War II reflects uncertainty about the proper goals of cultural policy. The ideal of cultural participation, which many regard as central to the selfconception of such democracies, is subject to the distorting influence of state perfectionism, paternalism, consumerism, and ideology. These distortions and the problems they raise are intensified by the forces of globalization, which are discussed in the final section of the chapter. Chapter 2 begins by considering cultural participation in the form communitarians would have it—as a force that binds people and communities. The appeal to community is often animated by frustration with the conditions of everyday life in complex, culturally diverse societies. Even pluralistic communitarians ix

x

INTRODUCTION

have difficulty in reconciling the need for a common life with the fact of spiritual and religious pluralism. A brief exposition of John Rawls’s liberalism and its implications for the politics of culture follows.1 Rawls rejects perfectionism and with it the idea that principles of social justice should promote a comprehensive conception of the good, community, or cultural ideal. This is not to deny the importance of culture and community values to individual associations and life projects. It is, however, to reject perfectionist justifications of government policies and actions. Governments may frame nonperfectionist policies by treating culture, or that which affects culture, as a public or a primary good. In this and the following chapters, I argue that the liberal virtues and the claims of community should be held together in a single view, the elements of which Rawls lays out in his political psychology.2 When Rawls claims justice is the first virtue of social institutions, he is not denying the meaning and value of community relationships. He is asserting a relation of priority the claims of which become paramount at certain times and in certain situations. Communities contest, not only outside us but also within, confronting us first with complexity and then, sometimes, with choice. On such occasions justice, in the words of Dworkin, may trump the claims of community.3 Yet this relation of occasional priority neither requires nor encourages us to declare the independence of the political subject from its situation. Nor does it license social antagonism or authorize a social structure that undermines the capacity for community relationships. Where communitarians blame the crisis of community on liberal individualism, critical theorists see it as evidence of a deeper set of problems that arises from the impact of modern economic and administrative systems on the “culturally transmitted and linguistically organized” fabric of everyday life, or what Habermas calls the “lifeworld.”4 Modern societies become dysfunctional when the forces of system rationalization encroach on the lifeworld, fragmenting everyday consciousness and impoverishing the processes of intersubjective understanding on which communicative rationality depends.5 Habermas attributes the “colonization” of the lifeworld not merely to one-sided processes of secularization and system rationalization, but to “an elitist splitting-off of expert cultures from contexts of communicative action in daily life.”6 Rawls’s theory of justice, Habermas claims, is the product of such an expert culture, a symptom of the cultural problems of modernity rather than their solution. Though it can be argued that he misunderstands the role of the original position in Rawls’s argument, and though we may question the dualism of system and lifeworld around which he builds his case, Habermas raises important questions about the impact of social and technological modernization on political culture and the culture of everyday life. The criticisms of both communitarians and critical theorists suggest that liberals, while holding on to the priority of justice, need to pay more attention to the

INTRODUCTION

xi

role of culture as a context of choice. Freedom cannot flourish in a cultural vacuum. Culture is important to autonomy. If we accept the possibility of autonomy, then we must also accept the existence of a cultural space within which that autonomy can be exercised. The final section of chapter 2 introduces a distinction between the objective and subjective cultural conditions of autonomy. These terms do not imply a metaphysical or epistemological subject-object opposition of the kind we are familiar with from traditional epistemology. They are useful in distinguishing two aspects of culture: the part we understand and the part we do the understanding with. The term “conditions,” similarly, does not imply that what we need just now is a rigorous account of the relations of entailment between cultural conditions and human choices. Before examining such relations, it is first necessary to map out the conceptual framework within which they make sense. The distinction between the objective and subjective cultural conditions of autonomy is important to our understanding of the politics of culture. There is a difference between policies designed to promote and protect cultural contexts and those designed to promote the subjective cultural conditions of autonomy— the skills, competences, and abilities that enable people to exercise their autonomy in meaningful ways. Both approaches to the politics of culture are possible. But if we are interested in the rights and cultural needs of individual human beings, and not just the groups they belong to, then the subjective cultural conditions of autonomy have a special claim on our attention. The investigation of the relationship between culture, skill, and autonomy is not without philosophical precedent. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that if nature has an ultimate purpose (letzter Zweck) it must be culture rather than mere happiness. But not any culture: “The culture of skill is indeed the foremost subjective condition for an aptitude to promote [befördern] purposes generally.”7 It is as cultural beings that humans learn to use nature in ways that are purposive. We are not just planners, but shapers of the world. It is because human beings can shape their ends as purposive agents within the natural world that they can also think of themselves as the final purpose (Endzweck) of the system of nature—as the kinds of beings that can choose ends freely. The culture of skill (Kultur der Geschicklichkeit) thus prepares “man for what he himself must do in order to be a final purpose.”8 Individual freedom presupposes not merely the abstract capacity for moral agency, but also the cultural competences and skills without which action is possible but choice is not. At the end of the chapter, I turn to political culture and outline a parallel account of the cultural conditions of political autonomy in a liberal democracy. Taken together, I suggest that we can think of the competences and skills implicit in these conditions as constituting a basic cultural competence. The final chapters of the book seek to deepen our understanding of such a competence in the context of what I shall refer to as the politics of skill.

xii

INTRODUCTION

The intervening chapters prepare the way for this final argument by reviewing two areas of political disagreement in which questions of culture and cultural competence play an important role. Chapter 3 tackles the politics of recognition. Misrecognition and social exclusion are disfiguring features of the modern liberal state. But when the politics of recognition abandons the horizon of justice, it cultivates ressentiment and a culture of the victim. Recognition calls for justice even as justice presupposes recognition. This requires us to spell out the meaning and content of what Fraser calls “participatory parity” in a way that respects the complexity of the identities and roles that are defining for each individual. The chapter concludes with a discussion of indigenous identity and the rights of indigenous peoples. What is indigenousness and to what extent should liberal legal institutions recognize it as a source of special rights? These questions lead to a closer examination of the distinction between a cultural structure, viewed as a context that makes meaningful choice possible, and the cultural capacities exhibited by people who are able to grasp and participate in such structures. Chapter 4 discusses the role of education in a pluralistic democracy. Schools are the microcosm within which the larger question of a society’s self-conception is worked out. It is in the classroom that problems of cultural participation, community, and recognition show up in their most pressing forms. Education must negotiate the difficult boundary between respect for cultural difference on the one hand, and cultivating reasonableness and the capacity to have value on the other. This is something that mere sensitivity training cannot attain. Reasonableness is a many-sided competence, and the abilities on which it relies may differ from one culture to the next. Multicultural education is a matter of balancing the claims of such competences. The discussion turns to what Rawls calls the “burdens of judgment” and the means by which educational institutions can enable students to deal with the difficult relationship between public and private morality, while also encouraging the growth of reasonableness. When it is recognized that to disagree may be not merely to hold a different view but to think in a different way, the first step of a reasonable person is not to seek agreement but to determine what it is possible to agree about. It is sometimes assumed that culture is chiefly a property of groups. The question is how the rights, liberties, and other interests of the individual can be balanced with the cultural claims of the nation, the community, the emancipation movement. If people have a right to cultural participation, does that entitle them to participate in some particular culture, or will any culture do? How can a society strengthen communities without jeopardizing individuality? How can we recognize the cultural claims of marginal social groups, yet simultaneously respect the rights of the individuals who compose them? Chapter 5 approaches these and other questions in terms of the politics of skill. For the politics of skill, culture is a function not of groups but of what individual human beings are able

INTRODUCTION

xiii

to do and be. This change of paradigm assigns skill a central place in political conceptions of the self. Questions about culture can be reformulated as questions about the skills and capabilities of individuals. Rather than asking what we can do for this or that culture, or how the claims of the individual can be reconciled with the claims of culture, we can ask what this or that cultural group, aided by government and particular communities, can do for the skills and capabilities of this or that person. Support for this approach is derived from the work of Nussbaum and Sen, who have made a conception of human capability central to their views about public policy and the design of political institutions.9 Government needs a normative account of human functioning to guide principle and policy. Such a view should be rich enough to specify the kinds of capabilities people need to live a decent human life, but not so rich as to encourage interventionism and state perfectionism. Nussbaum’s list of central human functional capabilities lays the basis for such an account. But the politics of skill modifies the capability approach by arguing that the central capabilities should be conceived as functions of the skillful self. In particular, it corrects the tendency to think of capabilities as paradigms of flawless functioning. Skill is more than just an important aspect of capability. Understanding the role of skill in human life lays the basis for a conception of social justice that respects individuality without embracing voluntarism or perfectionism. It explains the relevance of skill not only to the life of the individual but also to the individual’s participation in the broader human community. Recognition of the role and importance of the skillful self also draws attention to the question of the usability of goods and resources. Usability is not the same as utility. Nor is it merely a measure of convertibility into a certain kind of functioning. To be usable, goods must be available for use. Goods are available for use if they can be incorporated into the everyday activity of the skillful self. Usability is an important consideration when we are trying to reach agreement on the legitimate and generic reasons “that people have in virtue of their situation.”10 It is best conceived as a relational property descriptive of the interaction between the skillful self and things. For the most part, the usability criterion is overlooked by political theories that are concerned with specifying what government should do rather than with how it should do it. Recognition of the phenomenon of usability enhances our understanding not only of goods such as rights, education, or health care, but also ambient influences, which, though they shape and often distort the conditions of everyday life, liberal political theory largely ignores. Social and administrative systems, the media, and technologies are the buildings in which a modern society lives. Even as they order our lives, they fashion the skillful self in ways that, though hard to characterize, are decisive.

xiv

INTRODUCTION

As soon as we connect culture with skill, we must also take account of technology. Technology is a cultural force. It restructures our experience as skillful selves and conditions our ability to act as free agents. Chapter 5 includes a discussion of the concept of deskilling and the relationship between skill and technology. Deskilling, which can take many forms, may be occasional or systematic. Here I follow Feenberg’s suggestion that a cultural critique of technology is needed to identify and address the structural sources of deskilling.11 We can think of technology as a language, the elements of which can be configured in various ways. Technological change is a process by which the skillful self assimilates and accommodates to transformations of this “technical code.” The various types of deskilling are human effects of a dysfunctional integration of particular configurations of technical elements into the activity of the skillful self. We need not appeal to a metaphysical conception of the person or of human history to ground the critique of technology. Nor can the basis for such a critique be found in Habermas’s theory of communicative action which, as Feenberg suggests, suppresses the internal structure and cultural variability of technological development.12 I believe that this approach to technology can, however, be integrated within the normative framework of a capabilityconstrained resourcism in which the central capabilities, viewed as functions of the skillful self, play a heuristic role. The final chapter of the book focuses on the conclusion of this argument. There, along with a typology of basic skills, I introduce and compare several different modes of skillful activity. Most significant, perhaps, is the distinction between representable and nonrepresentable skills. I believe that this distinction, by throwing light on the relationship between skill and human individuality, also offers an important insight into the ways in which political institutions can and should be permitted to shape the central capabilities of citizens and the character of the skillful self.

Notes 1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 2. Rawls, Theory, 453–96. 3. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), xi. 4. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 124. 5. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2: 355. 6. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2: 330.

INTRODUCTION

xv

7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 319. 8. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 318–19. 9. Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capability Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Amartya Sen, “Equality of What?” in Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 1, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 10. Thomas M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 204. 11. Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), v. 12. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 178.

CHAPTER 1

Liberalism, Culture, Cultural Participation

The political right uses the term “liberal” to denote a big government, tax-andspend philosophy that curbs individual initiative and burdens citizens with inflated taxes and excessive demands on their tolerance.1 The political left, on the other hand, associates it with an ideology of possessive individualism, consumerism, and free market economic policies.2 But it is possible to characterize liberalism in a way that avoids these extremes.3 Our concern here is with liberalism as a philosophical view for which individual autonomy and moral selfdetermination are the primary political values, a view that aspires to a fair rapprochement between the desire for economic prosperity, the claims of individuality, and the values of community. This is a liberalism that combines respect for the diversity of human interests and the fact of pluralism with individual liberty, openness to a variety of economic schemes, and the acknowledgment of community values whenever these are compatible with individual liberty.4

Liberalism and Culture Many of the challenges liberalism faces are cultural. The fact of pluralism, from which Rawls begins, can hardly be distinguished from the fact of cultural diversity.5 Culture wars and a growing awareness of ethnic and religious difference threaten the stability of liberal democratic political arrangements.6 Liberalism is faulted both for tolerating cultural diversity and for slighting the claims of marginal groups. Conservatives deplore the leveling of high culture and the loss of traditional values. Communitarians object that liberals overvalue individual rights while disregarding community values.7 Postmodernists complain that liberal institutions cultivate elitism and suppress cultural difference. Critical 1

2

CHAPTER 1

theorists denounce the culture industry for which, they say, liberals deliver the ideology and legitimation.8 Many of these controversies rage amid processes of economic, political, and cultural globalization that are evidently undermining local communities and the political, economic, and cultural sustainability of traditional forms of life. The word “culture” stems from the Latin cultura (meaning “cultivation” or “tending”) and perhaps from colere (meaning “to care for,” “till the earth,” or “nurture”).9 But it was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it came to denote the high culture associated with a refinement of manners and superior art forms.10 Frequent usage in this latter sense still encourages governments to focus cultural policy on the cultivation of authentic values and self-contained ends, as opposed to the practical world of social utility. Plato’s Republic furnishes the model of a society in which social arrangements, including a publicly recognized class system, are harnessed to a realm of superior values.11 Aristotle integrates Plato’s perfectionism within a pluralistic metaphysical conception that underlines the embodied character of the Ideal and allows for a greater diversity of goods. The public culture of present-day democracies is still influenced by perfectionist ideals, though state perfectionism is often intensely antiegalitarian. Cultural policy is also influenced by the methods of natural science and moral empiricism. With the expansion of empirical science in the nineteenth century came renewed efforts to circumscribe and specify the concept of culture. One early social scientist defined it as a “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”12 By the mid-twentieth century, many scientific definitions of culture were under discussion. Empirical approaches were modeled on the methods of positive science and approached culture from the perspective of the observer rather than the participant. After World War II, the new field of “cultural studies” established the study of culture as a discipline in its own right, emancipated from the limitations of traditional normative conceptions of culture and the identification of culture with high culture.13 Economic theories—those that compare outcomes based on their contribution to human welfare—often provide the theoretical underpinning for the cultural policies of modern democracies.14 The economic approach to culture abstracts from qualitative distinctions between higher and lower cultural values, arguing that citizens’ preferences should be the touchstone of cultural policy. Welfarists can point to the democratic and rational character of such policies. Critical social choices affecting cultural values should reflect what people want, compensating only where necessary for market anomalies, honoring citizens’ desires rather than attempting to sway them toward perfectionist ideals. Economic theory thus challenges perfectionism and disarms principles of social distribution based on hierarchy and class.15

LIBERALISM, CULTURE, CULTURAL PARTICIPATION

3

Many philosophers and social scientists question this approach. Welfare economics works with a narrow definition of well-being that ignores the extent to which people’s preferences are shaped by social and political influences over which they may have no control. To make preference the measure of policy may be to underwrite injustices that arise from such influences.16 Some add an ideology critical dimension to these objections. Critical theorists still use the term “culture industry” to refer to the mass production of culture in advanced capitalist economies in a way that systematically distorts people’s preferences for goods and commodities. The semblance of competition between cultural products should not be mistaken for cultural pluralism.17 Rather than fulfilling truly human needs, the machinery of culture manufactures willing consumers to satisfy the demands of capital. The standardized products of the culture industry mask class conflict, create the illusion of a harmony of social interests, and disguise the role of political and economic institutions in generating and sustaining false needs.18 But where critical theorists denounce the homogenizing influence of mass culture and the tendency of global capitalism to erase cultural difference, others point to the increasing incidence of conflicts between ethnic, religious, and cultural groups and to an intensified awareness of cultural diversity. Globalization and religious revivalism swell the tensions between modernization and traditional forms of life. The disintegration of the great ideological systems and the confrontation of “an economistic paradigm that privileged production with one that privileges culture” mark the onset of an era in which concerns about cultural diversity are central to political theory. Liberalism can no longer take the cultural identity of anyone or anything for granted.19

Cultural Participation The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims that all human beings have the right freely to participate in the cultural life of their communities.20 But what does this mean in practice? Cultural rights, however defined, occupy a subordinate and murky position in the pantheon of internationally recognized rights. The significance of a right not to be imprisoned without fair trial, to express one’s views without fear of reprisal, or to take part in free and fair elections is readily understood. The identification and monitoring of such rights does not normally pose special theoretical problems. Many of the so-called secondgeneration human rights also have tangible implications for policy, though some governments remain skeptical.21 What the right to cultural participation requires, however, is less obvious.22 It is easiest to make sense of when the customs and practices of a minority are under attack by a government, or by the members of another culture or

4

CHAPTER 1

community. Such attacks may threaten the ability of that minority and its members to engage in traditional practices and ways of life. Governments that outlaw ethnic clothing, forbid tribal marriage customs, or proscribe indigenous forms of bequest and inheritance may be said to violate the cultural rights of those on whom these sanctions are imposed. But what are the cultural rights of the ordinary citizen in a modern democracy? Participationists sometimes regard culture, like a Platonic ideal, as something in which all should take part. The cultural policy of the nation-state must make the temples of high art—opera, museums, theaters—into the focus of social value. Participationism, on this view, is a form of state perfectionism in which the distinction between high and low culture plays a key role. Participationism and perfectionism often combine with assimilationism when governments respond to immigration with policies that encourage political, commercial, and linguistic homogeneity.23 What results, usually, is not a common but a dominant culture.24 Perfectionist participationists may call for the protection of a national culture–– what Germans call a Leitkultur––from the forces of pluralism, multiculturalism, and immigration. Such appeals sound strange to the democratic ear.25 Germany is home to many religions. Its cultural life reflects profound regional differences of class, dialect, and history. It is the culture of Goethe but also of Hitler. Many view the suggestion that immigrants should pledge a commitment to German history and loyalty to the German nation as tendentious.26 Such calls rest “on a Romantic understanding of culture that obscures fundamental internal differences within majority cultures and further marginalises minorities.”27 But participationism can also have a more democratic face. In the United States, the aim of New Deal arts policies was to use art and art education to help those hindered by social, educational, and geographical contingencies from acquiring cultural experience. The target of such policies was not culture itself but opportunities to enjoy culture.28 Federal arts projects recruited the services of unemployed artists and writers to introduce the fine arts, literature, and theater to provincial areas. Culture should not be the preserve of a favored few but a source of skills, capacities, and valuable experiences to which all have access. It was in this spirit that public arts institutions were created, to broaden cultural participation and cultural creativity, and expand the cultural opportunities of people from a wide range of social groups, classes, and backgrounds.29 Yet it is difficult to influence opportunity without also shaping culture or succumbing to the influence of those who would do so. Organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts or the British Arts Council were seldom able to implement the democratic ideal of bringing culture to the masses. In their prime, they were regarded by some as vehicles of a modernist cultural ideology. Their policies and the procedures for their implementation encouraged a diver-

LIBERALISM, CULTURE, CULTURAL PARTICIPATION

5

gence of artistic production and popular taste, focusing on high art and providing a safe haven for progressive but unpopular artists. The rapid growth of popular culture turned subsidized art into a preserve for the elite, reducing the demand for traditional high art such as classical music and theater. Attendance of publicly funded cultural institutions declined. Government-sponsored culture alienated the average citizen, and cultural conservatives seized the opportunity to criticize procedural flaws and sources of bias in democratic participationist cultural policies.30 The temporary discrediting of publicly funded cultural institutions led not to the abandonment of participationism but to its reinvention as a different kind of ideological force. The new participationists saw a difference between providing equitable access to culture and promoting elite cultural institutions. It was the task of the state not to make judgments of quality, but to encourage the satisfaction of cultural preferences. Demand-oriented participationism reflected a shift in sentiment associated with postmodernism in the arts and neoliberal economic policies. It focused on consumption rather than production. Government policies must compete in the cultural marketplace, strengthen diversity, and respond to the cultural preferences of different taste constituencies. Demandoriented participationists called for ease of access to cultural goods and services. Cultural policy should, where possible, model the preferences of market participants without lecturing or patronizing. The subsidy of projects for which there was little or no demand should be avoided. Creative artists who pursued lucrative commissions should not be considered mercenary, and museums should use sophisticated marketing techniques to attract a large and diverse public. The rejection of cultural elitism and the replacement of serious subsidized culture by preference-oriented participationism make it the task of government to provide citizens with more of what the market says they want—compensating for imperfections, exaggerations, or other defects of market mechanisms—rather than giving them more of what government, critics, and experts think they should want. Paternalistic modernism bows to the sovereignty of the citizen as consumer. State-sponsored invitations to cultural participation were once wed to the requirements of high culture, to the readiness to adopt a critical view of things and show good taste. It was now understood that culture should adjust to its clients, to their ability to understand the world, to their attention span, to their readiness to expand their horizons, and to the threshold set by the willingness to tolerate aesthetic difficulty or countenance conflict. This culture of accessibility grants a special authority to the citizen as consumer. Desires, claims, and needs are no longer subject to critical restraint. They constitute a turf to be reconnoitered and serviced by government. The institutions charged with anticipating and satisfying public taste no longer owe allegiance to a dominant aesthetic or cultural goal. Their task is to facilitate

6

CHAPTER 1

consumption, connectedness, and communication. Many intellectuals and artists attached themselves to this movement, abandoning a progressive stance that had exhausted its critical reserves. These postmoderns seemed unconcerned that they were supplying the aesthetic ideology for the neoliberal economic trends of the 1980s and 1990s.31 Postmodernism offered to embrace and reappropriate the market for art, literature, and philosophy. Modernist skepticism about the media and the culture industry was rejected as liberal dogma.32 The point was not to attack or negate the system, but to reclaim it, to make everyone a manipulator of images and signs. In contrast to the sterility of late modernism with its depleted vocabulary of forms and aesthetic possibilities, postmodernism would make it possible to speak again, to appropriate forgotten aesthetic languages.33 But postmodernists also tended to overlook the distinction between the appropriation of the market in the name of culture and the appropriation of culture by the market. In a culture that is appropriated by the market, consumerism and the advertisement become decisive forces. Consumption expands beyond the realm of necessity to increase the demand for goods and services until the superfluous become the indispensable.34 The expansion of commercial advertising embraces not only new areas of life, but also new spheres of the psyche, new human groups, new physical and virtual spaces. Populations are segmented, sorted, scrutinized, and analyzed. Immediate purchase data and point of sale electronics constitute a circuit of culture to which commerce can respond with instant marketing solutions for all stages of the human life cycle.35 From the moment of conception, the child is a consumer-to-be. The uncertainty and malaise precipitated by the breakdown of traditional roles and identities are healed by cultural intermediaries—lifestyle designers, image-makers, and suppliers of branded and product-linked identities.36 The diffusion of advertisement throughout the world of everyday life is no longer confined to the proliferation of corporate brands. Nations, religious organizations, and political parties are also products offering customer satisfaction and competing for brand loyalty. For some, consumerism is a democratizing force that reduces the price of status and recognition to affordable levels. Its champions argue that its critics are puritanical and elitist. Critical modernism’s contempt for mass culture was neither critical nor progressive. Its perplexing experiments were fueled by elitism and social perfectionism. In an age in which the highest values have lost their binding power, products and the systems of meanings they compose constitute a common language that helps people to construct an identity and define their goals. But for others, the exaltation of consumption has gone too far. Consumer society nourishes social and cultural frustration when expectations surpass satisfactions. Critics do not merely cavil when they argue that consumerism, fortified

LIBERALISM, CULTURE, CULTURAL PARTICIPATION

7

by the proliferation of the mass media, has degraded public culture. The fusion of the commercial and the critical leaves little scope for journalistic independence. It occupies the public sphere with the appearance of criticism and the game of system and critic.37 Important issues are discussed and hard-hitting questions posed in the name of a public right to know. But the newspapers and television programs are products to be sold, their production values a function of their profitability. The culture of accessibility establishes the parameters not only for political platforms and manifestos but also for governments who see themselves in the roles of publicists and managers, privatizing public institutions and using market mechanisms to dispense benefits and entitlements. The readiness of public opinion to respond reasonably and realistically to moral and political problems wanes. Debate, critical reflection, and the public use of reason require memory and the capacity for sustained argument. Postmodernism and the culture of accessibility are faces of an information society in which the critical point of view has lost its bearings.

Globalization and Cultural Participation There was a time when it seemed reasonable to think of a pluralistic political community as having a culture. Cultural difference had not yet become a decisive dimension of political conflict. Meanwhile, identity politics has become symptomatic of a fissioning of cultural life.38 Indigenous peoples have raised their voices.39 Fraser uses the term “cultural turn” to characterize these developments.40 The globalization of capital markets and the flow of people, goods, and information across the world have increased the salience of culture. This salience is experienced as an intensified awareness of difference.41 Culture ceases to reflect political economy and becomes a force in its own right, a vehicle of social ordering. The interaction between culture and economics is complex. The more pervasive the global traffic in money, goods, and information, the more striking the fact of cultural diversity. It can no longer be assumed that the long-term tendency of social, scientific, and administrative modernization is to cancel cultural difference.42 The popularization of the concept of globalization reflects a nexus of changes and developments across many dimensions—technological, cultural, social, political, and economic.43 The protagonists of globalization see it as a process that restores heterogeneity and “the boundlessness of culture and promotes the endless renewability and diversification of cultural expression.”44 The affected parties, on the other hand, find that it shares with modernization the tendency to destroy the contexts and communities that give human life meaning. Economic globalization

8

CHAPTER 1

is nurtured by the emergence of potent communication and information technologies into a cosmopolitan space that is regulated only imperfectly by international agreement or local law.45 It is facilitated by deregulated financial markets and reduced tariff controls. “The New Leviathan is not the state, but a newly invigorated system of global capitalism.”46 The logic of the multinational corporation, and the economic system that it has come to symbolize, is to emancipate itself from the use values of everyday life. Computerized logistics and flexible methods of production are allies of outsourcing and control from a distance.47 Corporations are virtual entities, wed neither to a specific commodity nor to a particular branch of production or geographical location. “Never before . . . has there been such a concentration and centralization of capital in so few nations and in the hands of so few people.”48 Some argue that the largest and most powerful corporations form strategic alliances to control the global economy while socializing risks and costs. Supported by friendly trade agreements, these alliances devote themselves to regimenting the public mind.49 Privileged strata of many societies prosper and are integrated into the global economy, but others are excluded. Power is concentrated in the upper reaches of business and industry. World Trade Organization rules are often favorable to the global corporation, providing for it to be treated on a par with national or local companies. The Multilateral Agreement on Investment, rejected by members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development only after long negotiations, would have required national governments to treat foreign enterprises on an equal footing with––or even better than––domestic companies, depriving local economies of many of the long-term benefits of investment and technology transfer.50 As the means and methods of production spread from the advanced industrialized nations throughout the rest of the world, traditions, values, and beliefs confront technologies and norms with which they are incompatible. Multinational corporations strive for efficiency and seek to exploit market differences for profit. The habits and expectations of local cultures are often an obstacle, so that even as it flourishes a developing globalized market economy may erode the cultural capital and social cohesion of the societies it affects.51 Global corporations rarely show loyalty to particular communities and may contribute to their disintegration.52 Free trade treaties deprive national governments of control over taxable revenues. Organizational flexibility, mobility, and the ability to deploy capital quickly allow multinationals to enter and leave communities at will, frequently dislocating local businesses as they do so. Often their profits do not reflect the social and environmental costs of growth. Social insurance systems are compromised, sharpening tendencies to polarization between different socioeconomic groups.53 Sometimes the impact of economic globalization is direct and brutal, disrupting ways of life that were once sustainable and creating new classes of the penniless, voiceless, and disenfranchised.

LIBERALISM, CULTURE, CULTURAL PARTICIPATION

9

Globalization also means the import and export of culture. “This is, no doubt, a matter of business; yet it also presumably foretells the contact and interpenetration of national cultures at an intensity scarcely conceivable in older, slower epochs.”54 Exchange of goods with cultural content has become an increasingly prominent component of world trade.55 Yet cultural trade is asymmetrical, a handful of powerful countries accounting for most cultural exports. U.S. American media products, benefiting from increases in television ownership, play an important role in this development. American television shows are often less expensive and produced more professionally than programs originating elsewhere. Economies of scale encourage the intensive global marketing of a few successful products. “It is enough to think of all the people around the world who watch exported Northamerican television programs to realize that this cultural intervention is deeper than anything known in earlier forms of colonization or imperialism, or simple tourism.”56 Such asymmetries in cultural trade may contribute to an identity crisis in the nations and peoples on whom they impinge. Nations feel compelled to protect their culture when it is threatened, though routine efforts at linguistic and cultural protectionism are often futile in the face of the powerful commercial and cultural powers they oppose.57 In the past, some European countries imposed taxation on foreign films to fund their own media industries. Many still impose quotas on imports of non-European television programs, at least if they are EU member states or have signed up to the acquis communautaire.58 Some also set quotas for locally produced programming. Many countries resist the complete deregulation of their audiovisual cultural industries.59 Yet the systems of ratings and quotas imposed to protect local content are often ineffective and their implementation awkwardly bureaucratic. It can be argued that it is the right to cultural participation that warrants protectionism in the face of the onslaught of global cultural products. Usually a perfectionist line of reasoning is invoked to justify such measures. It is French, German, or Canadian culture that suffers from foreign influences. Yet the states that nourish such defensiveness can hardly lay claim to a unified national culture. Their populations embrace not only ethnic groups and minorities engaged in the struggle for cultural recognition, but also sophisticated citizens who have grown skeptical about national cultural ideals and stereotypes. All states are amalgamations of earlier cultures and most have evolved through the repression of disparate cultural elements. Even as France wards off American cultural influences, it discourages its own citizens from using the Breton language. In many countries, the members of minority cultures and linguistic communities are prevented from setting up and running their own television stations, newspapers, and other media. Cultural identities are sometimes more construction than fact. What does it mean to speak of Latin American or European identity? For

10

CHAPTER 1

Hispanists, Latin America has its origins in the Spanish Conquest. Indigenists seek identity in pre-Hispanic history, cultures, and civilizations that have hardly figured in official history for centuries: “the very idea of a coherent structure of beliefs and values and practices depends on a model of culture that does not fit our times.”60 Once the fact of cultural diversity is recognized, the point of protecting culture and, even more so, of the right to cultural participation becomes uncertain. What, if anything, has to be protected against the forces of globalization? When and to what extent is a state justified in shielding its citizens from the impact of cultural forces? What constraints can reasonably be imposed on cultural trade? The answers to such questions must reflect the cultural complexity of the modern nation-state and a conception of cultural participation that is adequate to this complexity.

Notes 1. Oren M. Levin-Waldman, Reconceiving Liberalism: Dilemmas of Contemporary Liberal Public Policy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), ix, 9–10. 2. Otto Newman and Richard de Zoysa, The Promise of the Third Way: Globalization and Social Justice (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 14; C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 3. On the definition and philosophical usage of the term “liberalism,” see for example Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), ix–xi; Klaus Oehler, “Pragmatismus und Religion,” Philotheos. International Journal for Philosophy and Theology 3 (2003): 30. Oehler cites Böckenförde’s dictum that “the liberal, secular state owes its existence to normative presuppositions that it cannot itself guarantee.” Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Staat, Gesellschaft, Freiheit: Studien zur Staatstheorie und zum Verfassungsrecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 60 [author’s translation]. 4. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); on liberalism and pluralism, see Fred D’Agostino, Free Public Reason: Making It Up as We Go (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 7–8; also William A. Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4–5; for a critical interpretation of the “supposedly close connection between pluralism and liberalism,” see John Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 199–217. 5. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xix, 36, 63–66. 6. Richard Bolton, introduction to Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, ed. Richard Bolton (New York: The New Press, 1992), 3–26; Steven Kautz, Liberalism and Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 6–7. 7. Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991), 1–16; Samuel Walker, The Rights Revolution: Rights and Com-

LIBERALISM, CULTURE, CULTURAL PARTICIPATION

11

munity in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 26; Kautz, Liberalism and Community, 1–10. 8. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), 120–67. 9. Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Random House, 1952), 15. Kroeber and Kluckhohn cite Wilhelm Wundt, Völkerpsychologie (Leipzig: Kröner, 1920), volume 10, Kultur und Geschichte, chapter 1, §1. 10. Giles B. Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11; also Kroeber and Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review, 11 fn. Present-day definitions sometimes combine elements from several sources. See, for example, David B. Pankratz, Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1993), 10. Pankratz distinguishes “(1) the use of culture as a synonym for a body of artistic and intellectual work; (2) a process of individual cultivation leading to an ideal state of human perfection; and (3) the use of culture to refer to the whole way of life of a society, with varying emphases on meanings and values or the material organization of social life.” 11. Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 12. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol.1, repr. from the 5th ed. [1913], retitled The Origins of Culture (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), 1. Tylor, following Gustav Klemm’s Allgemeine Culturgeschichte der Menschheit (Leipzig: Teubner, 1843–1852), uses “culture” and “civilization” more or less interchangeably. The management of the complex semantics of the terms “civilization” and “culture” is an established problem for lexicographers and cultural historians. Many dictionary definitions incorporate and mix elements associated with both terms. For a contemporary view of the distinction, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” in Kwame Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 83–84. 13. Rob Burns, introduction to German Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Rob Burns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1. Early champions of cultural studies sought to move beyond the “traditional, narrow view of culture as coterminous with the arts to the broad, anthropological and extended sociological use of the word to indicate a ‘whole way of life.’” See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1850 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958) and The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961); Dennis L. Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 14. William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts—the Economic Dilemma: A Study of Problems Common to Theater, Opera, Music and Dance (Modern Revivals in Economics) (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1966); Arjo Klamer, The Value of Culture: On the Relationship between Economics and Arts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 16–17. 15. Klamer, The Value of Culture, 17. 16. On adaptive preference, see Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capability Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 114–15,

12

CHAPTER 1

136–42; Cass R. Sunstein, Free Markets and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 256–58. 17. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 124–27; also Burns, German Cultural Studies, 2. Adorno likes to contrast the seamless, affirmative illusion of wellbeing disseminated by the mass media with the critical negativity of authentic modern art. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 27. 18. Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” trans. Anson G. Rabinbach, New German Critique 6 (1975): 12–19. 19. Nancy Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition: A Rejoinder to Axel Honneth,” chapter 3 in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A PoliticalPhilosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke (London: Verso, 2003), 211; Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); also Philip E. Devine, Human Diversity and the Culture Wars: A Philosophical Perspective on Contemporary Cultural Conflict (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1996), xiii–xviii. 20. United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), U.N.G.A. Resolution 217A (III), entered into force December 10, 1948 (Geneva: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights). www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm (accessed January 8, 2008). According to Article 27: “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” See also United Nations, International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), December 16, 1966, U.N.G.A. Res. 2200A (XXI), entered into force January 3, 1976 (Geneva: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights). http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/a_cescr.htm (accessed January 8, 2008). Article 15 states that everyone has the right to “take part in cultural life.” Other articles in ICESCR also suggest “recognition of legitimate differences in belief and tradition,” including the right of minorities to pursue their own “economic, social, and cultural development” without interference on the part of the state, and “the right to establish and choose schools other than those established by the public authorities.” See Matthew C. R. Craven, The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights: A Perspective on Its Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 189. 21. On the distinction between first- and second-generation rights, see Craven, The International Covenant, 8. See also Chandran Kukathas, “Are There any Cultural Rights?” Political Theory 20, no. 1 (1992): 105–39; The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 188–89; Will Kymlicka, “The Rights of Minority Cultures: Reply to Kukathas” Political Theory 20, no. 1 (1992): 140–46, and Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 154–55. 22. Should we think of the relation between persons and cultures as a kind of Platonic methexis? Is that relation “external,” in the sense of Russell, or “internal” in the sense of Bradley and Hegel (Bildung)? Or can we reconstruct it in the form of a competence that is “political not metaphysical”? See Rawls, Political Liberalism, xvi, 10. 23. Julius Drachsler, Democracy and Assimilation: The Blending of Immigrant Heritages in America (New York: Macmillan, 1920). Assimilation was a major concern of immi-

LIBERALISM, CULTURE, CULTURAL PARTICIPATION

13

gration policymakers in the United States between 1890 and World War I. The concept of differential assimilation was invoked to justify immigration quotas favoring immigrants from some geographical regions rather than others. By the 1950s, many academics had begun to speak of “adjustment” because “the term ‘assimilation’ as customarily used suggests a complete loss of cultural identity on the part of the immigrant.” William Bernard, Carolyn Zeleny, and Henry Miller, eds., American Immigration Policy, a Reappraisal (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 265 fn. On assimilation, exclusion, and legitimacy in deliberative democracy, see Anthony Simon Laden, Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 8–11. 24. On the distinction between a common culture and a dominant culture, see Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 87. 25. Leitkultur can be translated as “leading culture” or “guiding culture.” See Bassam Tibi, Europa ohne Identität? Die Krise der multikulturellen Gesellschaft (München: Bertelsmann, 1998). 26. The Leitkultur debate was triggered in October 2000 by remarks of the then leader of Germany’s CDU/CSU parliamentary group. See Ernst B. Haas, Sally Roever, and Anna Schmidt, “Germany and the Norms of European Governance,” German Politics and Society 20, no. 2 (2002): 148–75. 27. Douglas Klusmeyer, “A ‘Guiding Culture’ for Immigrants? Integration and Diversity in Germany,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 519. 28. Kenneth Goody, “Arts Funding: Growth and Change between 1963 and 1983,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 471 (1984): 144–57; Hilda Baumol and William J. Baumol, eds., Inflation and the Performing Arts (New York: New York University Press, 1984). 29. Terri Lynn Cornwell, Democracy and the Arts: The Role of Participation (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990), 128–30. 30. The problem was to specify procedures that would escape the distorting influence of both private corporate philanthropy and government. The National Endowment for the Arts had the mandate to promote particular works and cultural organizations on the basis of their quality. Decisions as to what constituted quality were to be made by panels of qualified professionals. The intermittent controversies about arts funding since the 1980s demonstrate the difficulty of defining procedures for implementing participationist cultural policies that neither favor political interest groups nor succumb to the influence of government. See Ann Lee Morgan, “Cultural Commitments: Rethinking Arts Funding Policy,” Afterimage 23, no. 4 (1996): 12–15; and Richard Jensen, “The Culture Wars, 1965–1995: A Historian’s Map,” Journal of Social History 29 Supplement (1995): 17–37. 31. Some theorists viewed this development more critically. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 351–53. On the Western states’ “forced capitulation to capital” and the impact of globalization on the social welfare state and the lifeworld, see the title essay in Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); also Deborah Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society (New York: Routledge, 2004), 68. On the relation between

14

CHAPTER 1

education and enterprise culture, see Ruth Jonathan, “Agency and Contingency in Moral Development and Education,” in Education in Morality, ed. J. Mark Halstead and Terence H. McLaughlin (London: Routledge, 1999), 62–78. 32. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” New Left Review 64 (1970): 13–36. 33. Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 65–72; John Stopford, “The Death of the Author (as Producer),” Philosophy and Rhetoric 23, no. 3 (1990): 184–91. 34. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), xxii–xxiv. 35. Paul du Gay and others, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 3–4, 10–13, 21–24. 36. du Gay, Doing Cultural Studies, 62–74; Ben Crewe, Representing Men: Cultural Production and Producers in the Men’s Magazine Market (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 18–27. 37. Jean Baudrillard, “The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 207–19. 38. Kenneth R. Hoover, James Marcia, and Kristen Parris, The Power of Identity: Politics in a New Key (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1997), 7. 39. Michael Yellow Bird, “What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples’ Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels,” American Indian Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1999): 1–21. 40. Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition,” 211. 41. Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition,” 212. 42. Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 119–23. 43. It has been argued that technology, economy, communications, and culture are the chief dimensions of globalization, and that the role of national political institutions is primarily reactive. See Martin Shaw, introduction to Politics and Globalisation: Knowledge, Ethics, and Agency, ed. Martin Shaw (London: Routledge, 1999), 1. It is misleading to think of globalization as a peculiarly recent phenomenon. Elissa Braunstein and Gerald Epstein suggest that, by some economic measures, globalization in 1913 was as extensive as in the 1990s; see their “Creating International Credit Rules and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment: What Are the Alternatives?” in Global Instability: The Political Economy of World Economic Governance, ed. Jonathan Michie and John Grieve Smith (London: Routledge, 1999), 113–16. 44. Martin Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 144; as quoted by Mauro F. Guillén in “Is Globalization Civilizing, Destructive or Feeble? A Critique of Five Key Debates in the Social Science Literature,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 251. 45. Global economic interdependence has challenged traditional assumptions about the self-sufficiency of the nation-state. See Braunstein and Epstein, “Creating International Credit Rules,” 123–25; and Dani Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1997), 4–6.

LIBERALISM, CULTURE, CULTURAL PARTICIPATION

15

46. Robert J. S. Ross and Kent C. Trachte, Global Capitalism: The New Leviathan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 2. 47. Ngaire Woods, “Order, Globalization, and Inequality in World Politics,” in Inequality, Globalization and World Politics, ed. Andrew Hurrell and Ngaire Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21. 48. Sherif Hetata, “Dollarization, Fragmentation, and God,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 274. 49. Noam Chomsky, Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (Boston: South End Press, 2000), 199, 202; “Free Trade and Free Market: Pretense and Practice,” in Jameson and Miyoshi, Cultures of Globalization, 362–66. 50. Chomsky, Rogue States, 118, 123. Braunstein and Epstein argue in “Creating International Credit Rules,” 114, that the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) would transform property relations in such a way as to favor global corporations “at the expense of citizens, labor and communities. Because of its domestic policy intents and impacts, it is a mistake to see the MAI as simply a benign vehicle for structuring international economic relations.” 51. Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? 69–70. 52. See, for example, Kai Mander and Alex Boston, “Wal-Mart: Global Retailer,” in The Case Against the Global Economy: And for a Turn Toward the Local, ed. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1996), 335–43. 53. Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? 6. 54. Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in Jameson and Miyoshi, Cultures of Globalization, 58. 55. UNESCO Institute of Statistics, International Flows of Selected Cultural Goods and Services, 1994–2003: Defining and Capturing the Flows of Global Cultural Trade (Montreal: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2005). 56. Jameson, “Notes on Globalization,” 58. Many modernization theorists think that mass media exports from richer to poorer nations promote cultural modernization. Critics consider them to be instruments of cultural imperialism, promoting economic dependency and preparing the way for global corporations. But the flow of programming may be more complex than either approach suggests. Factors such as language, cultural capital, cultural proximity, and class influence and mitigate acceptance of imported programs. Programming moves “horizontally from one developing country to another,” and national and regional television productions often inhibit interest in imports. See Joseph Straubhaar, “Choosing National TV: Cultural Capital, Language, and Cultural Proximity in Brazil,” in The Impact of International Television: A Paradigm Shift, ed. Michael G. Elasmar (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003), 79. 57. See Christoph Beat Graber, Michael Girsberger, and Mira Nenova, eds., Free Trade versus Cultural Diversity: WTO Negotiations in the Field of Audiovisual Services (Zürich: Schulthess, 2004); Kirsten L. Kessler, “Protecting Free Trade in Audiovisual Entertainment: A Proposal for Counteracting the European Union’s Trade Barriers to the U.S. Entertainment Industry’s Exports,” Law and Policy in International Business 26, no. 2 (1995): 563–611.

16

CHAPTER 1

58. Emile G. McAnany and Kenton T. Wilkinson, introduction to Mass Media and Free Trade: NAFTA and the Cultural Industries, eds. Emile G. McAnany and Kenton T. Wilkinson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 11. The situation has changed over the past decade, and taxation of nondomestic European films is now prohibited under European Union law. (My thanks to Jonathan Davis, Strategy Advisor to the UK Film Council, for pointing this out.) 59. Fritz Franzmeyer, “The Consequences of the Uruguay Round for the OECD Countries,” in World Trade after the Uruguay Round: Prospects and policy options for the twenty-first century, eds. Harald Sander and András Inotai (London: Routledge, 1996), 53, 60. 60. Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 85.

CHAPTER 2

Community, Culture, Autonomy

Cultural participation is often connected with community membership. The communitarian insight, as formulated by John Christman, is “that the pursuit of human goods and a fulfilled life is . . . not an individual matter.”1 It depends on a network of human, social, and cultural relations, a nexus of practices and beliefs that define people’s goals and give their lives meaning. A community is not merely an association or a cooperative venture. People draw their selfunderstandings and conceptions of the good from the communities of which they are members.

Community, Justice, Culture Part of the appeal of communitarianism lies in its evocation of a small, close-knit society in which most people know each other and share the same language, traditions, institutions, and basic values.2 Yet this view of community hardly fits the present-day world. Fraser notes that past communities were often hierarchical, integrated economically and culturally by a single system of social relations.3 Cultural modernity is complex, “hybridized, differentiated, pluralistic.”4 Cultures interpenetrate as never before: “Thanks to mass migrations, diasporas, globalized mass culture, and transnational public spheres, it is impossible to say with certainty exactly where one culture ends and another begins.”5 No single institution or set of institutions underwrites an unambiguous body of cultural practices that regulates society as a whole. Society is ethically pluralistic and values are everywhere contested. The wish for community, in its most elementary form, is for a condition free from complication, contradiction, and conflict. The conservative attack on the 17

18

CHAPTER 2

media and on the coarsening of culture is an attack on experiences too complex to classify. The confusion of the categories of art, information, advertising, and pornography has become a transgression to be punished. Dissatisfaction and dissent, once carefully formulated and tentative, become undifferentiated and strident, blaming the media industries for all kinds of social ills. Such attacks may reflect frustration with the day-to-day life of a democracy. Communitarians regard liberal ideals as too complicated. Some regard them as self-contradictory. Toleration and respect for the liberties of others impose a burden on reason and judgment. Public evocations of community appease cultural discontent and relieve feelings of uncertainty, especially during times of economic difficulty. Respect and toleration alone cannot constitute the social bond. It is participation in the good of the community and accountability to common values that hold the key to a valuable life.6 Social and political institutions should reinforce public morality when confronting issues such as sexual orientation, pornography, or drug use.7 Society is an “old and very rambling house which has grown over the centuries in a variety of styles, but which has nevertheless a distinct character of its own.”8 The law must protect the fabric of the house as well as the individuals who live in it. But community standards, once scrutinized, are rarely self-evident. The plea for their legal enforcement is problematic when a single political community contains many such houses. The discontinuities that mark the history of the modern state make talk of cultural unity hard to fathom, and many liberals doubt whether public toleration of private immorality is destructive of the social bond, such as it is.9 Mill considered individuality, rather than community, to be the first and most serious casualty of modern institutions. “The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.”10 The chief threat to democracy is not private immorality but the suppression of individual difference, the reduction of human nature to a common form, and the mediocrity imposed by universal uniformity. Democracy may be more oppressive than autocratic tyranny because it is more potent in extracting conformity. Although they champion responsibility, communitarians have little to say about how we are to deal with social and political diversity, conflict, and disagreement. As soon as we speak of community we must also speak of communities, and face the problems that arise when the values of one conflict with those of another. The family is one community, the group of colleagues at work another, the circle of friends yet another. One person may belong to several communities and feel accountable to all. Perhaps we can think of the nation as a community, but what of the neighborhoods, regions, or particular countries that compose it? What of the community of humankind, or the community of living beings? If a one-to-one relation between individuals and communities were the

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

19

rule, there would be no problem. But a modern society comprises many communities, and individuals are rarely members of just one of them. The more we develop an inner life, the more we may discover that the communities that rule our lives are plural. Each calls us in different ways. We are not free to reject such calls. We must entertain them, consider their consequences, and the consequences of responding to or ignoring them. The call of community makes itself felt in the call of different communities. Communities contest, not only outside us but also within, confronting us first with complexity and then with choice. What we need is a perspective from which we can balance claims and order judgments. To seek such a perspective is to seek the self within the world, not outside it. Is it so clear that liberal values are not enough to constitute the social bond? If we accept the fact of pluralism, there may be no alternative.11 Respect and tolerance are not simply any values. They are mature values, derived from the historical experience of political and religious conflict and intolerance. They imply a complex view of the world. Communitarians may think that liberal democracy lacks the ingredients of social and political stability because ordinary people are unable to tolerate and cope with moral disagreement. Yet this would be a controversial assumption. A grasp of social and cultural difference or complexity does not call for the intellectual achievement that makes someone good at mathematics or languages. It is a way of looking at things that can be cultivated at almost any stage of education. A tolerant society teaches tolerance through institutions and attitudes. A culture of oversimplification encourages labels, stereotypes, and ignorance. Some argue the plurality of communities need not be experienced antagonistically. It may take the form of overlapping roles and forms of life the coexistence of which is unproblematic. There is no need to subject our loyalties to constant, juridical scrutiny. To perceive such a need is to dramatize the human situation and make unreasonable demands on human consistency. The appropriate reaction to ideological and cultural pluralism is not to seek a rational ordering of commitments but to cultivate sensitivity to the disparate, sometimes overlapping claims of different social and cultural spheres, and in doing so acknowledge that different spheres may demand different things from different people. A unified view of ourselves and what we owe is no more necessary than a unified conception of social justice.12 But there is a difference between imposing order and seeking equilibrium in the evaluation of our attachments. When we introduce order into our judgments, we do not aim to erase or efface what is different. But we also do not deny ourselves. There is a difference between accepting or rejecting some part of what we find valuable, and removing ourselves from the act of balancing these claims altogether. To recognize the possibility of conflict is neither to embrace it nor

20

CHAPTER 2

desire it. To assert that this possibility may be present in any human situation is not to say that it is always there, or seek to provoke it. By countenancing it, we may also learn to forestall and avoid it. Pluralistic communitarians sometimes represent the liberal virtues as a subset of a more comprehensive family of values that are to hold society together in combination. Justice is a good but not necessarily the first political virtue.13 The modern state is a “community of communities,” a mosaic rather than a melting pot.14 It must avoid assimilationism on the one hand, and overdiversification on the other. Stability is achieved by encouraging shared core values within a framework of organized liberty, rejecting unmitigated multiculturalism, while affording the indigenous and the ethnic a generous degree of legislative autonomy. These shared values are based on respect for the dignity and rights of the individual, tolerance, social responsibility, honesty, and an array of other ethical goods.15 Yet invoking a core of shared values to reconcile community and diversity in this way conceals tensions between the claims of community membership and individual liberty. The pluralistic communitarian’s benign sounding list of core values, regulated by the principle of give and take, does not tell us what to do when values clash, or when the legitimacy of the consensus they embody is challenged. Small communities that find themselves in conflict with liberal antidiscrimination laws feel unjustly treated when the law presumes to determine their membership or impose limits on their traditions and practices. When ways of life conflict with liberty, even seemingly minor cultural differences may fracture the sense of community and the common social framework. Rawls’s response to such conflicts is to assert the priority of justice over community and of the right over the good. Pluralism is a fact about modern societies, a premise to argue from, not a consequence to be mitigated. Society is a system of cooperation in which people with different beliefs about what is right and good must somehow agree on the terms of their association. “The principles of right, and so of justice . . . impose restrictions on what are reasonable conceptions of one’s good” while securing the framework within which permissible conceptions can be pursued.16 Such principles are to be specified by asking how free and equal citizens would themselves choose to regulate their social and political arrangements. The main arguments for these principles are, as is well known, staged from the perspective of the “original position.”17 The point of this hypothetical agreement is to characterize justice as the result of a fair choice. To do this we must imagine this choice as taking place in a situation that is free of inequalities in bargaining power and other sources of bias. Symmetrically situated behind a veil of ignorance, the parties in the original position know neither their personal characteristics, their place in society, nor their particular conceptions of the good.18 Lacking this knowledge, but rational, they would, Rawls argues, vote for a social

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

21

scheme that secures for each of a fair share of primary social goods, such as liberties, income, and opportunities.19 Critics of Rawls’s method argue that a hypothetical choice of this kind lacks justificatory force. Only real agreements can obligate. The rationality of the parties is too limited and mechanical to mirror the complex motivations of real agents. It is also unconvincing to base a theory of social justice on a choice made by people who know nothing of their actual values and attachments.20 The fairness of the original position is secured by denying the parties knowledge of just those unchosen contingencies of history, culture, and context that communitarians believe to be integral to human identity. This concrete, particular knowledge cannot be left aside when considering the rightness of political arrangements. To address these criticisms, it is useful to distinguish between the argument in and the argument from the original position. The former is an argument about what rational persons would choose given only limited information on which to base their choice. The latter is a different argument, one that has to do with the choice the parties make, but also with what we regard as reasonable constraints on that choice.21 The original position is not so much a counterfactual thought experiment as a device of representation that plays a practical role in modeling and ordering our considered convictions of social justice.22 By adjusting the constraints on information and procedure that delimit the original position, we can examine and, if necessary, modify our assumptions about what just political arrangements require. Social justice, on this view, is to be grounded in our everyday judgments of justice as fairness. Such judgments form a web, or structure, the characterization of which is a complex and delicate task. The point of theory is to arrange and, where necessary, revise these judgments to achieve a balance between them and the principles they express.23 In time we hope to achieve what Rawls calls a “reflective equilibrium” between our considered judgments of justice and the principles that arguments from the original position would incline us to favor.24 Rawls’s conception of justice applies to a democratic society in which people cannot assume that others share their ideas about what is good or valuable.25 The original position does not ignore the importance of real-world values and attachments, or suggest that people should “lead lives separated from history, commitments, traditions, and communities.”26 But neither does it allow us to forget that others also have values and attachments that make claims on them, and that their values may differ from ours. The only common currency for working out principles of justice in such circumstances is a rationality that we can ascribe to all. Yet it is not just our rationality but our reasonableness that moves us to seek the kind of agreement the original position can furnish. It is sometimes said that Rawls is a resourcist.27 Resourcism, when invoked in this context, is the view that social justice should secure a fair distribution of

22

CHAPTER 2

certain primary social goods that people need, whatever their goals or way of life. In a just scheme, each member of society would enjoy access to a fair share of such goods and a fair chance of realizing their aims and goals. Rawls is a resourcist because he assumes the parties in the original position want to maximize their share of these basic goods. This interpretation can, however, be misleading if it encourages us to conflate the argument in the original position with the argument from the original position. To understand the former and, for example, to avoid the charge that Rawls instrumentalizes certain primary goods such as the basic liberties, we need to consider the parties’ reasons for wanting these resources. Rawls stipulates that the parties are rationally motivated to maximize their share of primary goods not merely in order to consume and enjoy such goods for their own sake, but to pursue the higher-order interests connected with two powers of moral personality: the capacity for a conception of the good and the capacity for a sense of justice.28 Situated behind the veil of ignorance, the parties have a compelling interest in avoiding principles of justice that might require them to sacrifice their values to some all-embracing social and cultural ideal.29 This means, Rawls argues, that they would reject the principle of perfection as a principle of justice. To endorse perfectionism would be to commit themselves to some independent standard of human excellence that might conflict with their still unknown conceptions of the good. Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas held perfectionist views, and many political ideologies embrace elements of perfectionism—along with the readiness to discourage or suppress ways of life and systems of thought and belief that do not correspond to publicly promulgated ideals. But it is as an account of the good for individuals that perfectionism is best known. Aristotle identifies the good life with realizing the essentially human capacity for rational activity. Pure rationality involves rational contemplation. Human flourishing is pictured as a “Godlike review of eternal truths as they march in orderly formation before the mind.”30 Practical rationality involves “weighing the various demands of everyday life and striking a reasonable balance between them.”31 Various forms of moral perfectionism, predicated on the idea of a human essence, follow Aristotle’s lead.32 One may disagree about the essential human attributes but still be a perfectionist if one thinks that a good life consists in realizing some such essence. The details of such a view will depend on what the essence is supposed to be. Liberals have no quarrel with perfectionism as an account of the good for individuals. What they reject is state perfectionism: the idea that a good society is one in which government uses its powers to mold citizens in conformity with some prior ideal of the person or human functioning. State perfectionism can take many forms, from the grand politics of Nietzsche to the more subtly modulated perfectionism of many communitarians. Nietzsche’s assertion that human lives should be lived for the benefit of the “rarest and most valuable specimens”

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

23

may seem extreme, but many philosophers held similar views well into the modern period.33 Indeed, once we have felt the force of genius and creative achievement, there is a certain plausibility in the idea that society should be harnessed to its encouragement. We are likely to become more wary of this aesthetic state perfectionism, however, when we remember that it has been invoked to justify some of the most violent and oppressive regimes in modern history. Even the proponents of a softer communitarian perfectionism, which links the standard of perfection to values prevalent in particular communities, recognize that their views may have coercive implications. This is not as objectionable as it sounds when we recall that any state is continually using its power to coerce its citizens, and will often do so in ways we find acceptable. It is the reasons perfectionists give to justify coercion, as well as the kinds of coercion they envisage, that liberals reject. Tutelage, persuasion, and the formation of character may be no less intimidating than explicit coercion. Indeed the less obvious their influence, the more cautious we should be.34 A perfectionist political order may subvert both liberty and equality, turning society into a political closed shop, forcing some to accept values that others have chosen. State perfectionism, like utilitarianism, fails to take seriously the distinction between persons. The design of the original position is intended not to promote individualism, but to protect individuality. Rawls thus argues that the parties in the original position would rank his own principles of justice higher than other conceptions of social justice (including perfectionism and classical and average utilitarianism) because they want to live in the kind of society in which they can pursue their as yet unknown conceptions of the good without unreasonable interference on the part of the state. The first principle, which takes priority over the second, gives each person “an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all” (the principle of liberty). This principle protects the right of citizens to have, pursue, and revise their own conceptions of the good.35 The second principle secures an egalitarian distribution of primary social goods among citizens, with the modification that inequalities are permissible if they improve the expectations of the least well off (the “difference principle”). Rawls’s idea is that a workable social scheme must not only protect individuality and secure an egalitarian distribution of primary social goods, but also motivate people to train for and engage in productive activity. He thinks the parties will only accept such arrangements if opportunities for participation in the system are open to all on a fair, and not merely formal, basis. The difference principle must therefore be constrained by a principle that guarantees fair equality of opportunity.36 The principles of justice establish not only the priority of the right over the good but also an ideal of human autonomy that lifts people above the

24

CHAPTER 2

contingencies of situation and happenstance, community and culture. Unlike a self defined through the community or communities to which it belongs, or cultivated in accordance with a public conception of perfection, the autonomous self is more than the sum of the factors that constitute its situation: “by acting from these principles persons are acting autonomously: they are acting from principles that they would acknowledge under conditions that best express their nature as free and equal rational beings.”37 Rawls subsequently modifies his account of autonomy, arguing that acting in ways required by justice involves political, but not ethical or private autonomy. Adopting the standpoint of justice does not presuppose that we think of ourselves as noumenal selves, or hold any particular comprehensive moral or metaphysical views. It is a way of approaching our roles in the public world.38 It involves a kind of reasoning that appeals not to the whole truth about life (as embodied in a comprehensive liberal view like that of Mill or Kant) but to public political values. Rawls’s rejection of perfectionism as a political principle has been taken to entail the abandonment of political support for culture to the private sphere and to the activities of individual associations. Raz argues that, though it is motivated by legitimate concerns about the dignity and integrity of the person, “anti-perfectionism . . . would lead not merely to a political stand-off from support for valuable conceptions of the good. It would undermine the chances of survival of many cherished aspects of our culture.”39 Others argue that Rawls fails to grasp the importance of a common cultural life in enabling people to develop their private values. Free and autonomous agents can only shape an identity against a background of common cultural institutions such as libraries, museums, and orchestras. Society may sometimes have to intervene to preserve and protect such institutions and should not fear the perfectionist consequences of doing so. But though he rejects perfectionist justifications for the public support of culture, Rawls does follow some economists in allowing for culture to be treated as a public good that government may promote, when, as with national defense, public health, and other nonrivalrous or nonexcludable goods, market mechanisms fail. In such cases, the background institutions of government will include an exchange branch, the task of which is to provide society with such indivisible goods in a way that is efficient. Public goods approaches to cultural subsidy presuppose a social consensus about which cultural goods are desirable and how much citizens—collectively—would want to pay for them.40 Where there is such a consensus, the provision and administration of such goods can be left to the background institutions of government.41 It is inaccurate, however, to suggest that Rawls must rely on public goods arguments alone to justify cultural policies. It is primary goods, rather than public

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

25

goods, that form the working core of his conception of justice. Rawls’s list of primary social goods does not explicitly mention a good such as cultural membership or cultural participation. However, many of the primary goods he does mention may have a cultural function. The equal liberties can contribute to the protection and promotion of culture by upholding freedom of expression and the right to cultural diversity. Resources for education would be allocated under the difference principle, not only to promote economic efficiency and social welfare, but also to enable a person “to enjoy the culture of his society and to take part in its affairs.”42 Fair equality of opportunity also presupposes that all citizens have access to a decent education and that chances to gain cultural knowledge and skills should not depend on class or social rank.43 Such considerations may justify substantial investments in cultural programs. Some critics doubt whether artistic education is essential to fair equality of opportunity. But if we think of culture as “equipment for living,” and if cultural participation provides “for each individual a sense of his own worth,” then there is no reason cultural goods, appropriately defined, should not figure in a resourcist index of primary goods.44 At the same time, it is not always clear in A Theory of Justice what Rawls means by the “culture” of a person’s society. Does he want to imply that a modern society has but one culture that citizens can enjoy and take part in? Or may a single political community embrace many cultures? If he holds the former view and is consistent in his rejection of perfectionism, what would cultural participation involve? It may be that Rawls merely intends to refer to what he later calls the “public political culture”—an understanding of democratic political institutions, their role, and their historical interpretation. Public support of art, culture, and science might then be underwritten by appealing to political values (not excellences). This interpretation, however, would not address important questions about the conditions of cultural participation in the nonpolitical sphere.45

Culture, Context, Autonomy Although it is possible to view culture as a public or a primary good, communitarians deny that such an approach captures its most important feature. Culture is not merely a commodity for consumption or a resource that can be distributed. Commodities and resources belong to the foreground of human life, a sphere of action that is defined by explicit beliefs, desires that are more or less perspicuous, and conscious agency. Within this foreground, it makes sense to speak of choices and preferences, plans of life and the goals of action. But human lives are also played out in a context or against what Charles Taylor has called a “background.” “Our explicit beliefs about our world and ourselves are

26

CHAPTER 2

held against a background of unformulated (and perhaps in part unformulable) understandings, in relation to which these beliefs make the sense they do.”46 Many communitarians think of culture as such a background. The practices, symbolisms, and ways of acting that shape the life of a community are not cultural experiences that people can simply accept or reject, but contexts that give their choices meaning. Culture is a formative influence that makes a common way of life possible. Communitarians reject as implausible the politics of an autonomous self that can dissociate itself from the contextual sources of cultural significance. The self is constituted through its efforts to orient itself in social space and by its self-interpretations. An agent free of all frameworks would be “in the grip of an appalling identity crisis.”47 The conviction that “the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it” leads Rawls to distinguish too sharply between the self and its situation.48 There are some values people cannot choose, and some contexts from which they cannot detach themselves. Communitarians sometimes invoke the original position as evidence that Rawls thinks of citizens as “unencumbered” selves, stripped of their morally and culturally relevant characteristics.49 It is to correct this misconception that Rawls emphasizes the role of the original position as a device of representation, an analytical tool that can be used to articulate and introduce order into our considered judgments of justice.50 To understand the analytical role of the original position, as we have seen, it is necessary to distinguish two viewpoints: the perspective of the parties in the original position on the one hand, and the perspective of everyday life on the other. The parties know neither their conceptions of the good nor their place in the social world. Real people, on the other hand, have this information and are aware of their attachments and obligations in the way that only fully situated selves can be. It is as fully situated selves that we use the original position to spell out the “totality of conditions that we are ready upon due reflection to recognize as reasonable in our conduct with regard to one another.”51 When communitarians invoke the original position as evidence that Rawls views persons as noumenal or unencumbered selves, they are invoking a conception of the self that he actually rejects. Worse, they are getting things back to front. Rawls’s argument does require people to distance themselves from their social involvements and affiliations. But this is only necessary because they are arguing about justice as real selves with concrete commitments and actual attachments. This common misunderstanding of the original position can be illustrated with the example of a map. A map is a device of representation, which, though it represents the world, does not do so by virtue of a straightforward likeness to what it represents. To adapt a saying of Nelson Goodman, a map of the world is more like any other map than it is like the world. Nevertheless, it represents the world and not another map—“not even the closest copy.”52 What makes a map

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

27

a map is not its similarity to something it depicts but the cartographer’s intentions in drawing it and the kind of symbol system within which it is interpreted. People use maps to identify features of the world they are interested in, and in doing so they adopt and abide by certain rules and conventions.53 A map that did not leave out facts or features that are arbitrary from a geographical point of view would be useless. It is because maps are selective that they can help people find their way around the world. But if someone focuses on a map too long and forgets the purpose for which it was created, they may come to believe the world is the way the map is, or even imagine the map is the world. In doing so, they have lost sight of what the map is for. It is when people confuse a map with a picture of the world that it ceases to function as a guide and begins to look like an unrealistic and inferior kind of picture. We can think of the original position as playing the role of a map in Rawls’s political philosophy. It is a moral guide to the social world that omits whatever is socially and culturally arbitrary. Its purpose is to provide direction and orientation in our search for a reasonable social order. As a guide, it omits the hills and valleys, mountains and rivers of social and cultural attachment. But it does not leave them aside because they are without value. On the contrary, we need some kind of map if we are to orient ourselves within the kind of world of which these landmarks are an essential part. To criticize the original position for stripping the self of its cultural characteristics is like faulting a mapmaker for not having painted a Caravaggio or a da Vinci. By holding up the communitarian masterpiece alongside the schematic figures that populate the original position, it is easy to demonstrate the impoverishment of the liberal map with its spartan lines and barren features. Yet this comparison only succeeds by misrepresenting the role of the original position in Rawls’s argument. Liberal apples fare badly when compared with communitarian oranges. But the communitarian masterpiece can never provide the model for a pluralistic society that is open to the diversity of human ways of living, doing, and being. The persuasiveness of a liberal conception of justice does not depend on its success in portraying the virtues of community life. Nor does the argument from the original position need us to “step back from each and every one of our ends.”54 Rawls recognizes the value of communal goods and the contexts that make them possible. All that he denies is that they have a special claim in the political sphere. “Liberalism rejects political society as a community because, among other things, it leads to the systematic denial of basic liberties and may allow the oppressive use of the government’s monopoly of (legal) force.”55 Rejecting a political community founded on perfectionism or some other teleological view does not, however, imply the values of community are to be abandoned. “Justice as fairness assumes, as other liberal political views do also, that the values of community are not only essential but realizable, first in the various associations that carry on

28

CHAPTER 2

their life within the framework of the basic structure, and second in those associations that extend across the boundaries of political societies, such as churches and scientific societies.”56 Despite such reassurances, many communitarians think the liberal ideal of autonomy flawed because it overlooks the sense in which people’s goals are a function of the cultural contexts within which their aims and purposes unfold and take shape. This criticism is most telling when directed against Rawls’s characterization of a third perspective on social justice, that of the citizen of a wellordered society whose good lies in the choice of a plan of life with deliberative rationality.57 Rawls argues that to form a rational plan of life a person must reflect on their preferences and draw up a rational schedule for their satisfaction.58 People have a general grasp of their “wants and ends both present and future” and are able to estimate and weigh the relative intensity of their desires.59 Using criteria of rational choice (counting principles) and prudence they can specify a rational plan that is consistent and efficient in realizing their goals over a complete lifetime.60 Communitarians object that this deliberative-reflective model of the good ignores the role of culture and context in constituting people’s aims and goals. Things can only show up among a person’s preferences because they are already identified as significant by their culture. Making their preferences into the focus of a theory of the good concentrates attention on the foreground of choice while overlooking the cultural background within which beliefs, desires, and preferences originate. It is not possible to characterize the good of a human being without recognizing the role of this background. Deliberation about one’s good is not a matter of moral accountancy but of achieving a self-understanding.61 The discovery of one’s good is bound up with an understanding of the good of one’s community because the “story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity.”62 Rawls thinks of a community as an association whose members share a scheme of conduct and a common final goal. What is important about communities is that people’s attainments and contributions to this goal can be recognized and valued within the common scheme of conduct.63 But communitarians hold that cultural contexts are not consciously chosen; they form a framework against the background of which specific goals take shape. Many of the practices and relationships that give human life meaning are never made explicit. They “involve playing out the defining value orientations within which one finds oneself.”64 Such contexts resemble a horizon that is as unnoticed as it is ubiquitous: “To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

29

ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.”65 Such a horizon may move with us even as we move within it. We cannot simply accept or reject it, and it plays a decisive role in establishing the scope and limits of the choices we can make. True, Rawls allows for deliberation about which goals and commitments are important enough to be included in a plan of life. He also invokes what he calls the “Aristotelian principle” as evidence that a rational plan is more than a schema for the efficient satisfaction of preferences.66 But reflection about how one wants to live is not chiefly a matter of scrutinizing, weighting, balancing, and scheduling future satisfactions. It is the social and cultural contexts people belong to that give their actions meaning. Because these contexts are woven into the structure of everyday life, a stronger type of evaluation is needed if people are to become aware of them and the practices that shape their everyday actions and objectives.67 Many communitarians think the pursuit of the good must begin with the question of who we are, and how we are defined, rather than what choices we should make and how we should act. Communitarians are surely right when they claim that certain aspects of the self are so dependent on a cultural background that we cannot simply accept or reject them at will. Cultural contexts shape our behavior and mold our preferences and expectations in ways that are rarely explicit. A theory of the good needs to take account of the impact of such contexts on the choices we make, and on our ability to make them. But does this mean we must abandon the model of goodness as rationality, and with it the idea that human beings can shape their lives as autonomous individuals? Or can we make sense of goodness as rationality, even if the choices we make are always in some sense context-bound? Rawls’s references, in Political Liberalism and elsewhere, to the powers of moral personality are not inconsistent with the idea that cultural situations constrain a person’s rational choices. The second moral power—the capacity for a conception of the good—includes not only the capacity “rationally to pursue a conception of one’s rational advantage or good” but also the ability to form and revise such a conception.68 Nothing in the words “form and revise” precludes the possibility that the goods and goals people reflect on when making their choices about how to live are set by their situations. Nor do these words exclude the possibility that a person’s reflection on their good may involve a sensitive, hermeneutical exploration of the practices and unchosen aspects of existence that communitarians charge Rawls with ignoring. Rawls has little or nothing to say about the character of such reflection. But this may be because he does not want to suggest that any one way of discovering such contexts is more suitable or appropriate than another. It is part of a view of the good to cultivate its own styles of thought and forms of self-understanding. A political conception of the self should not anticipate the

30

CHAPTER 2

various ways in which people may settle on a plan of life, or exhaust the possibilities of what a self can be. It treats the space in which human variety expresses itself as a variable. It is enough to recognize that people have values, that they understand this, and that this understanding shapes their self-conceptions. Different people may draw on different skills and capacities when planning their lives. A political conception of the person should avoid spelling out in too much detail the form that such reflection takes. On the other hand, Rawls’s view of how the members of a well-ordered society might live and plan their lives is clearly not as narrow or rationalistic as critics suppose. Rawls accepts that in planning and pursuing a conception of the good, people are influenced both by their immediate communities and by the human community in general. Everyone has ends to which they feel attached, derived from many sources, including history and tradition. History is a process of cooperation between individuals and generations over time. Ways of life already tried out by others are constantly being explored and reappropriated. Practices and influences may be refined and absorbed with more or less conscious effort and more or less reflection. But they are always there. Rationality is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of a good plan of life. The consistency of a plan does not imply that it is dominated by instrumental desires. It is the ends of a human life that determine its character. Goodness as rationality is “in some variant, taken for granted by almost any political conception of justice.”69 A plan of life is not a “detailed blueprint for action stretching over the whole course of life” but a way of scheduling significant goals and allocating resources.70 Choosing in ways that are consistent with the criteria of rational choice does not make the efficiency of a plan into an end in itself. The rational must find its place within a larger view. Within this broader perspective, any way of life will exhibit some features that are simply accepted without subjecting them to intellectual scrutiny. Part of what gives depth and meaning to choice is that it is grounded in an understanding of the human situation that is open to such unchosen aspects. If we can understand autonomy at all, then surely it must be in this way: as something exercised in the space between the consciousness of our situation on the one hand, and our wish to give shape to that situation on the other. Appiah has recently compared two views of what it means for a person to shape their individuality: the “romantic” idea that it involves the search for an authentic self within the self, and that “existentialist” view that it is a matter of making oneself up “as it were out of nothing.” 71 The former leaves too little space for creativity, while the latter allows too much. But the intermediate view that an identity is somehow constructed from the materials or social scriptorium that history and society make available is also misleading if it encourages us to focus too much on creativity and too little on the difficulty and challenges of being autonomous.

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

31

If life were simply a matter of delving into a postmodern ragbag to retrieve a few suggestive fragments of roles, scripts, and narrative forms that can be woven together into a self, then such a view might be satisfactory. But the problem of being an autonomous human being is not the problem of creating a script or a style sheet for life. Here, surely, communitarians are right: we cannot understand our world if we think of it as a mere asset or resource for the creation of narratives of the self. If we see history or the communities to which we belong primarily as means to our own self-creation, then we lose sight of both history and community. A self situated in this way would not be autonomous and its history would not be a history, but a past invented for the purposes of the present. The meaning of autonomy lies neither in freeing ourselves from the past nor in learning how to use it, but in coming to understand ourselves through the past and in doing so grasping the kinds of choices we have. This is surely a more satisfactory interpretation of goodness as rationality than one that concentrates on what are perceived as the rationalistic aspects of Rawls’s view. Constant reflective scrutiny is neither possible nor fully illuminating. Nothing in Rawls’s thought suggests that we must be able to accept or reject all our cultural commitments. Like Neurath’s sailors, we can examine and rebuild the cultural ship at sea.72 Reflection, in this sense, is not confined to the computation of scenarios and consequences. It embraces the processes by which we uncover the practices and traditions of which we are part. It is through developing an awareness of our cultural situations, commitments, and identifications that we can begin to question the value of the practices that engage us, and to speak the language of choices, options, and courses of action.73 It has been suggested that if their commitments are deep enough it may, as a matter of psychological fact, be impossible for some people to bring critical reflection to bear on these commitments: “hence seeing the power to engage in such reflective revision as the fundamental interest of all citizens misrepresents the values of many segments of the population.”74 A theory of social justice constructed around ideals of individual autonomy, the argument goes, is implausible if it jars with the self-conception of a significant number of ordinary people. This objection is most convincing if we think of a person’s autonomy as depending on the strength of purpose that we summon up in making a single difficult choice. But when we talk about the autonomy of a human being, we do not presuppose the ability to clarify every aspect of our lives, as though to be autonomous we must be constantly turning our world on its head. To be autonomous is to do what we can, not more than we can. Autonomy is not as much a matter of belief as of attitude, and—as Rawls sees it—an attitude to our values and beliefs about value over a complete life. A rational plan is not something we draw up at the beginning of adulthood rather than later, though some may try to plan their lives this way. It is a way of

32

CHAPTER 2

looking at life at any time. A thoroughgoing conservatism about our values is compatible with autonomy if we do not think of it as requiring us hastily to abandon central beliefs, traditions, and commitments. For we can be more than steadfast in our commitments and loyalties—indeed feel ourselves to be constituted by and inseparable from them—and yet accept that we may one day modify our understanding of them, or simply change our relationship to them. It seems unlikely that, given even slightly favorable circumstances, the citizens of a modern democracy would be unable to reflect on their basic values and commitments in this way. Many may not be ready to do so. But this surely has less to do with a lack of ability or inclination than with the prevalence of circumstances that discourage such reflection.

System, Lifeworld, Expert While communitarians focus on the social role of community as a source of values, beliefs, and practices, there is another kind of community we must now pause to consider. Critical theorists, like communitarians, argue that liberalism surrenders cultural and community values to the private sphere. But the problem is not merely that the citizens of democracies are unable to appeal to a common ethical life or thick conception of community to address divisive social issues. Democracies face a threat from what Habermas calls the “colonization of the lifeworld”––the processes by which modern systems of social organization encroach on the “culturally transmitted and linguistically organized” world of everyday experience.75 The threat to the lifeworld is a threat to the cultural roots of everyday existence. As they evolve from premodern modes of social integration, modern societies are increasingly coordinated not by communicative action oriented toward interpersonal understanding but by impersonal administrative and economic systems that strive for functionality, utility, and efficiency. The “delinguistified” media of money and power penetrate the lifeworld, supplanting everyday communication and undermining traditional forms of life and self-understandings. “Commodification” and “juridification” erode the competences by virtue of which people communicate and act as autonomous moral-practical subjects, nourishing a culture of management and control, privatizing human relationships, and reducing citizens to consumers and clients of government.76 The colonization of the lifeworld is reinforced by the emergence of expert cultures that develop their own languages and special criteria for addressing scientific, moral, and aesthetic issues.77 These elite cultures are increasingly estranged from the traditions and communicative practices of everyday life. Citizens are alienated by their specialized discourses, and unable to integrate them within ordinary discussion and reflection. As expert cultures replace traditional

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

33

value orientations with the discourses of theoretical justification, communicative action from the perspective of the culturally impoverished lifeworld becomes increasingly difficult. Social pathologies develop as people become incapable of the interpretive accomplishments on which communicative action depends. “Everyday consciousness is robbed of its power to synthesize; it becomes fragmented.”78 Yet Habermas argues that the deep threat that system rationality poses to the cultural integrity of modern communities cannot be overcome by abandoning the project of modernity of which expert cultures are an expression.79 Rather, it is necessary to find ways of preserving and reappropriating their enlightenment potential from the perspective of an intact linguistic community that is still firmly rooted in the lifeworld. In this way, Habermas arrives at the idea of society as a deliberative democracy striving for a balanced and undistorted communicative consensus based on the mutual recognition of criticizable validity claims. The linguistic community on which this renewal of cultural integrity depends has a “quasi-transcendental” character that stems from certain idealized presuppositions or discourseimmanent illocutionary validity claims that are implicit in acts of rational communication.80 People raise these validity claims when they offer reasons for their views, strive for mutual understanding, argue sincerely, and are ready to accept the force of the better argument.81 In doing so they avoid forms of argumentation used in strategic negotiations and bargaining situations, striving for a critical consensus that can be accepted by each participant because of the impartiality and reciprocity of the procedure that leads to it. This forum of ideal discourse is inclusive (open to all speaking and acting subjects), equal (so conceived that each can introduce and question any assertion), and noncoercive (each can express their attitudes, desires, and needs without fear of “external or internal coercion”).82 By engaging in rational discourse that satisfies the conditions of communicative rationality, the citizens of a modern democracy lay the foundation for a new lifeworld based on a posttraditional “transmission of culture” [Überlieferung] in which traditions, values, and norms are communicatively and critically reappropriated.83 The communicative power that develops in and through public discourse is the source of an innerworldly transcendence (innerweltliche Transzendenz) and context-transcending validity claims. The idealizations on which communicative rationality depends are quasitranscendental because their normative role is pragmatic and counterfactual.84 Habermas uses the word “transcendental” to refer not to the constitution of the conditions of possible experience, in the sense of Kant, but to the dialogical transcendence of factical contexts, contexts that are in every case “here and now,” toward “an objective world, identical meaning, accountable actors, and the validity of claims to truth and rightness.”85 “The ideal moment of unconditionality

34

CHAPTER 2

is deeply embedded in the factical processes of understanding, because validity claims have a Janus face: as claims they overshoot every context; at the same time, they must be both raised and accepted here and now if they are to sustain the kind of consensus on which effective cooperation depends.”86 Communicative rationality not only sustains political solidarity between individual citizens, but also builds a bridge between facts and norms, between public and private autonomy, and between the everyday contexts of the lifeworld and public institutions.87 Habermas’s conception of public reason is modeled not on the republican town meeting or a single set of representative public institutions but on the idea of a diffuse network of unofficial forums, citizen initiatives, voluntary associations, and social movements. It is in these independent, decentralized, networks that citizens exercise their public autonomy, forming the opinions that in turn influence the decisionmaking processes of more highly organized deliberative and administrative bodies.88 Through public deliberation, citizens come to view their political institutions as a project of which they themselves are the authors. The constitution and indeed the entire legal system of a democracy are a work in progress in which people from different backgrounds and cultures take part, not as experts or theorists but as citizens, in shaping the goals of society on a free, equal, and inclusive basis. Public deliberation in conformity with the ideals of communicative rationality supplies a framework within which competing political claims and viewpoints originating in different communities and cultures can be reconciled. Because of its performative role in integrating the posttraditional lifeworld, such a consensus cannot be anticipated by theorists and experts. Philosophers may analyze and clarify the logic of moral argumentation. But they cannot flesh out the moral implications of ideal discourse a priori. This citizens must do for themselves. Habermas thus makes a distinction between the procedural role of theory, on the one hand, and the performative role of citizens, on the other. Unlike the original position, the ideal discourse situation is not a hypothetical situation of choice, designed to generate principles of justice “in advance.” The adoption of norms and value judgments that are to guide social policy is justifiable only through public acts of political discourse. Though theory can specify the conditions of communicative rationality, binding argument about problematic moral judgments and validity claims requires citizens to confront and discuss each other’s views from the factical perspective of their distinct cultures, lifeworlds, and individual projects. These claims can only be understood contextually. Moral argument involves real discussion between those who are involved in and affected by the outcome of such deliberations. The a priori characterization of ideal discourse can no more take the place of such discussions than the study of formal logic can replace actual thought.89

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

35

Habermas claims that Rawls’s theory anticipates the kind of substantive moral reasoning that citizens must engage in for themselves. The original position is the work of a philosophical specialist and the principles of justice the product of expert culture rather than of public discourse.90 The parties in the original position do not engage in genuine dialog. There are no real differences of viewpoint behind the veil of ignorance. All have access to the same information, follow the same line of argument, and make the same choice. Although it is supposed to model an agreement between distinct individuals, the original position reflects the reasoning of a single individual. It is monological.91 Because of this monological and aprioristic bias, Habermas argues, the derivation of the principles of justice cannot reflect the importance of political autonomy to the social and cultural integrity of a modern democracy. When the veil of ignorance is raised, the parties find themselves governed by principles that have been anticipated in theory and institutionalized in practice. The citizens of the well-ordered society of justice as fairness confront institutions that are a fait accompli rather than a project still to be realized. Because the “essential discourses of legitimation” have already taken place, the political community is deprived of the communicative processes on which political autonomy depends for its practical validity.92 As we have seen, criticisms of this kind may depend on a misreading of the role of the original position in Rawls’s argument. It is not the choice made by the parties in the original position that justifies a conception of justice. Justification flows rather from the fact that real citizens accept not only the reasoning of the parties but also the fairness of the constraints on that reasoning. Rawls’s reply to Habermas is that the argument from the original position is indeed the focus of a real world consensus: “It is you and I—and so all citizens over time, one by one and in associations here and there—who judge the merits of the original position as a device of representation and the principles it yields. I deny that the original position is monological in a way that puts in doubt its soundness as a device of representation.”93 Habermas, like many communitarians, overlooks the distinction between the argument from the original position and the argument in the original position. Any argument for the principles of justice is also an argument for the way those principles have been arrived at. Without the use of abstract reasoning to develop concrete interpretations of reasonableness, moral argument cannot generate practical content. The original position does not anticipate arguments that can be actualized only by flesh and blood citizens. It proposes the kinds of argument that flesh and blood citizens must make if they want to give the idea of reasonable agreement practical reality.94 Rawls rejects the claim that the principles of justice are the product of an expert culture that is decoupled from the everyday life of the human community.

36

CHAPTER 2

Citizens are not expected to accept political principles from the hands of philosophical specialists without insight or criticism. Moral theory seeks, from within the social world, to bring order and priority to convictions and judgments about value that are widely accepted and often, taken separately, uncontroversial. “In justice as fairness there are no philosophical experts. Heaven forbid! But citizens must, after all, have some ideas of right and justice in their thought and some basis for their reasoning. And students of philosophy take part in formulating these ideas but always as citizens among others.”95 Political philosophers should not think of themselves as dispensing moral truth from a position of moral and intellectual superiority, though their work may call on them to develop special theoretical skills. Justice as fairness is not the property of specialists. People who are neither professional philosophers nor students of philosophy may not grasp the theoretical background to the original position. They may not have heard of primary goods or the priority of liberty. Indeed they may not have heard of Rawls or know that such a thing as political philosophy exists. But they can and do understand the idea of fairness. A social and political theory that introduces order into our ideas of fairness, right, and justice in this way is needed if political philosophy is to extend its reach beyond the academy. Rawls also rejects Habermas’s dichotomization of procedure and performance, and with it the suggestion that the constraints embodied in the design of the original position reflect the logic of an expert culture. Arguments from the original position do not involve a premature actualization of normative reasoning that should be conducted according to principles of communicative rationality in a public arena.96 Without the use of abstract reasoning to propose concrete interpretations of reasonableness, normative moral argument can make little progress. Everyday conceptions of fairness and reasonableness need a scaffolding––ideas of priority, relevance, and urgency, of the legitimate interests of affected persons, and of how competing claims are to be balanced––to help specify reasonable terms of social cooperation in a modern democracy.97 These ideas are not simply implicit in discourse and they are not purely formal. They have to be worked out. It is the attempt to address such questions that distinguishes Rawls’s proceduralism from the proceduralism of Habermas. Habermas thinks that public discourse according to the criteria of communicative rationality is the source of a context-transcending power by virtue of which citizens are able to view their constitution as an ongoing project of which they themselves are the authors. But claims about the context-transcending potential of discourse may depend on intuitions that are less widely shared than the idea of fairness invoked by Rawls. As Honneth notes, Habermas’s view can be traced back to the left-Hegelian tradition of critical theory and “the idea that a critical analysis of society needs to be tied to an innerworldly instance of tran-

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

37

scendence.”98 Apart from the difficulty of grounding a genuinely democratic theory in a “specific privileged instance,” where does this leave members of cultures in which discourse does not enjoy a privileged status?99 Rawls’s conception of reasonable cooperation avoids making a discourse-based ideal of political participation into the focus of social cooperation. He argues that Habermas’s prioritization of public communicative action reflects a perfectionist ideal of political participation according to which human nature “is most fully realized in a democratic society in which there is widespread and vigorous participation in political life.”100 Civic humanist ideals of this kind, Rawls argues, are too exclusive to provide the focus of a public political consensus. Indeed it seems gratuitous to take the culture of democratic political participation to be a culture of discourse. The competences on which political participation relies surely involve a broader palette of skills and capabilities, both verbal and nonverbal. Communicative rationality may enjoy a kind of preeminence among these competences. But focusing on linguistic intersubjectivity as the paradigm of the political can also distract our attention from the role of nondiscursive processes and systems of signification in shaping the conditions of both public and private autonomy.101 Kymlicka notes that Habermas comes to reject “the idea of politically evaluating people’s conceptions of the good.”102 But the influence of a culture of discourse and civic humanist ideals may extend beyond the political into private lives.103 Rawls regards the fact of pluralism—the diversity of comprehensive moral conceptions—as having a fundamental practical status that sets a firm limit to the political possibilities of a liberal state.104 The conflicts underlying the European wars of religion, for example, were resolved not by religious assimilation but by recognizing the diversity of values, agreeing to take certain questions off the political agenda, and coming to an understanding of the value of diversity.105 The intensity of the cultural conflicts that have emerged in the era of identity politics suggests that these insights are still relevant. Habermas’s critique of the apriorism of the original position is bound up with concern about the proliferation of the private sphere and purposive rationality (Zweckrationalität), and the threat this poses to free institutions. It is the problem of the “discursive desolidification of the (largely externally controlled or traditionally fixed) interpretations of our needs” that is central to his disagreement with Rawls.106 The theory of communicative action specifies the social and political conditions of an intact intersubjectivity that limits system rationality, cultural fragmentation, and the reifying tendencies of modern institutions. Habermas believes that only a powerful public sphere anchored in the “normative surplus” generated by the rational communicative accomplishments of citizens can play this role. Rawls does not think of public reason as a counter-ideological force that opposes the totalizing power of the “system,” or the expansionism of systems and

38

CHAPTER 2

steering media. It is neither metaphysical nor “postmetaphysical.” It is political. To understand reasonable agreement is to realize that those with whom we disagree may also be reasonable. The first step toward such a consensus is the readiness to accept what Rawls calls the “burdens of judgment.”107 When disagreement arises, people must look for arguments based on the kinds of reason that others can accept, even if they have different views on fundamental religious and metaphysical questions. By arguing in this way, they lay the basis for an “overlapping consensus” that each citizen can reasonably affirm from his or her own perspective.108 Habermas and Rawls agree that the public use of reason in a modern democracy cannot be launched from a point outside society. Where they disagree is on the philosophical interpretation of the place of reason within society. Part of this disagreement arises from methodological differences between Habermas’s critical theory and what Rawls calls “ideal theory.” Ideal theory does not appeal to special experiences or “an innerworldly instance of transcendence.” Its goal is to develop an account of the terms of reasonable cooperation between free and equal citizens. Ideal theory, as Rawls sees it, does not “idealize” by making unrealistic assumptions about social reality.109 But neither does it surrender to a social realism that leaves theoretical ideals without a practical space in which to exert their influence. It aims to develop a workable conception of a well-ordered society.110 In doing so, it assumes a practical scenario of reasonable disagreement, asking how democracy in good faith is possible.111 Citizens, it is supposed, can be reasonable while still disagreeing on a great many fundamental moral and metaphysical issues.112 In the social and political world with which we are familiar this may seem to be the exception rather than the rule. But ideal theory provides a “necessary complement to nonideal theory without which the desire for change lacks an aim.”113 At the same time, where Habermas holds that the long-term tendency of communicative action is normative reconciliation, Rawls’s appeal to Isaiah Berlin’s “no social world without loss” is less conciliatory.114 Political liberalism is not optimistic about the possibility of a social harmony that calls for more than overlapping consensus, and Rawls’s approach to situations in which cultural diversity threatens to breach the self-conception of the liberal state is uncompromising. Not only will value systems incompatible with justice be rejected; it is accepted that some views may fail to gain adherents simply because of the background conditions of the liberal state.115 “If a comprehensive conception of the good is unable to endure in a society securing the familiar equal basic liberties and mutual toleration, there is no way to preserve it consistent with democratic values.”116 As we have seen, Rawls’s rejection of perfectionism as a political principle does not imply the rejection of culture. Habermas’s analysis of the flawed ra-

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

39

tionality of modern societies arising from the dysfunctional integration of system and lifeworld raises legitimate questions about the impact of system rationality and its imperatives on the culture of everyday life. Habermas is surely right to hold that modern forms of social, administrative, and economic organization, underwritten by rapid technological change, affect our ability to experience value from the perspective of everyday life. Yet we need not be committed to the dualism of system and lifeworld, or to some form of civic humanism, to recognize this.117 There is a kind of interaction in which systems and everyday life meet that is not purely discursive. This space of interaction is determined by the specific ways in which the systems, technologies, and media on which the coordination of modern societies depends are integrated within human activity. As Feenberg has argued, we cannot infer the character of such interactions from the idea of a system in itself, from the unity of scientific technical reason, purposive rationality, or from the competences on which rational discourse depends. Even before discourse has begun to make it explicit, our experience of the everyday world, and of the cultural contexts that shape that experience, has been influenced by the form such interactions take. We return to this question later, when we consider Feenberg’s account of technology as a medium of system rationalization; the relations between culture, technology, and skill; and the implications of these relations for our understanding of the cultural conditions of autonomy in modern societies.118

The Cultural Conditions of Autonomy Although they may not prove fatal to the liberal project, the criticisms of both communitarians and critical theorists suggest that liberals need to pay more attention to the role of culture as a context of choice. If we accept the possibility of autonomy, then we can think of the space between our consciousness of our situation as something we have not chosen, and the awareness that we are somehow able to shape that situation––and in doing so exercise our autonomy––as a cultural space. To acknowledge the existence of such a space is to accept that autonomy cannot exist in a vacuum, and that choice is also a function of factors that constitute the cultural aspect of choice. The word “cultural” here encompasses not only language as verbal discourse but also the background composed of understandings, symbols, rituals, and ways of acting and doing that forms the cultural fabric of human communities. One way of developing a liberal theory of culture is to take a closer look at this space, at the relationship between culture and autonomy, and at the role of culture in the development and realization of conceptions of the good.119 We can

40

CHAPTER 2

distinguish two approaches to this question. The objective approach attends to the contexts of shared practices, traditions, and ways of doing things that are implicit in our everyday relation to the world and to other human beings. It is against such a background of unformulated understandings and practices that our explicit beliefs and wishes take shape, become perspicuous, and make sense to us. As Taylor’s remarks suggest, it is often difficult to thematize such a cultural background. The subjective approach to the cultural conditions of autonomy focuses on the particular competences and abilities implicit in our understanding of its objective cultural conditions.120 Everyone has many such competences. We exhibit them when we speak or understand a language or when we display familiarity with the appropriate use of culturally accepted signs and symbols. We exercise them when we take part in rituals and ceremonies, or when we grasp the common values and beliefs about history or the natural world that the members of a culture share with one another. Like the objective cultural conditions of autonomy, such competences and skills are hard to make explicit. They, too, may remain largely unformulated, perhaps unformulable. It can take a special event, such as travel to a foreign country, for us to begin to recognize their existence and the extent of their influence.121 The objective approach to the cultural conditions of autonomy is exemplified by theories that focus on what Dworkin has called the “cultural structure” of a society. Dworkin characterizes the cultural structure of a society as an inherently social framework that provides a vocabulary of options, a shared language of tradition and convention on which people can draw in making their choices about how to live. This framework can be compared to a language. Indeed the center of the cultural structure of a community, according to Dworkin, is its language. But such a structure encompasses not only spoken language but also the repertoire of meanings, aesthetic forms, and ways of acting and doing that flow into such choices.122 Without access to these “structural aspects of our general culture,” our choices about how to live would be impoverished.123 The concept of a cultural structure is important to liberal political theory because it operates within the conceptual space that surrounds the possibility of autonomy. It allows us to focus on the role of structure as a condition of choice. Originally invoked by Dworkin as part of an argument for public support of the arts, the concept of a cultural structure was modified by Kymlicka to analyze and clarify the rights claims of ethnocultural minorities in modern liberal democracies.124 Kymlicka argues that Rawls, like Dworkin, recognizes the role of culture as a context of choice. But Kymlicka finds it puzzling that Rawls does not treat cultural membership as a primary good. If culture is important to people’s choices, we would expect liberals to want to ensure that every citizen has access to it.

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

41

The explanation is that although Rawls recognizes the importance of cultural meanings to people’s choices, both he and Dworkin work with a “very simplified model of the nation-state, where the political community is co-terminous with one and only one cultural community.”125 For this reason, and not because of any fundamental flaw in the logic of the liberal project, they fail to recognize the significance of the primary good of cultural membership. Kymlicka concludes that if more than one cultural structure exists within the framework of a single liberal state, citizens whose choices are affected by such structures may be able to claim their preservation as a cultural right. Subsequently Kymlicka introduces the further idea of a “societal culture.”126 Liberals often assume that liberal democracies are culturally neutral or at least strive for cultural neutrality. But the modern liberal state has never been culturally neutral. It is the result of a process of nation building that presupposes the development of an institutionally embodied culture that supports liberal social and political arrangements. Kymlicka defines a societal culture as a “territoriallyconcentrated culture, centred on a shared language which is used in a wide range of societal institutions, in both public and private life.”127 Such a societal culture need not be culturally imperialistic. But minorities may have a right to form a “distinct and institutionally complete” societal culture of their own in order to protect the cultural conditions of meaningful choice for themselves and their members.128 Although there has been extensive debate about the objective cultural conditions of autonomy, recent political theory has had little to say about its subjective cultural conditions. The subjective cultural conditions of autonomy are the competences and skills implicit in an understanding of its objective cultural conditions. If the range and quality of a person’s choices are influenced by the structural aspects of culture, then they must also be influenced by the ability to understand and master these aspects. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Dworkin’s characterization of the cultural structure of a community refers not only to a “shared vocabulary of tradition and convention” but also to “the conceptual equipment to find aesthetic value in historical and cultural continuity.”129 Theories that focus on the objective cultural conditions of autonomy may be ill equipped to spell out the structure of complex cultural situations in which multiple cultural structures are adjoined, overlap, and interact. It is not easy to characterize the subjective cultural conditions of autonomy. Such competences are implicated in most aspects of cultural understanding, but they are exercised in a way that is largely transparent. To say that a competence is “transparent” is to say that we do not have to think about what we are doing while we are exercising it. Skilled tennis players, for example, do not have to pay constant attention to their basic movements as they make a stroke. It would be impossible to play good tennis if the motions of hand, wrist, arm, shoulder, legs,

42

CHAPTER 2

and back had to be steered by conscious reflection. This is not to deny that beginner and expert alike may sometimes have to pay conscious attention to the movements that are basic to their games. Most activities involve a complex balance between what we simply pick up as we are going along and what we have to appropriate reflectively and make our own. We can, if we wish, undertake a detailed reconstruction of the stages of skill acquisition, from novice to expert, and of the different kinds of attention and awareness they involve.130 The forms of cultural understanding play a role loosely analogous to a linguistic competence in speaking and understanding a language.131 A linguistic competence is something we exercise, but not something of which we have much theoretical awareness, unless we are linguists. We may no more notice the language we speak than we notice a window when we are looking through it. The reconstruction of an adult’s cultural competences, no matter what their level of education, class, group, or status, would be a difficult and complicated task. Not only are there many such competences and subcompetences; their structure is little understood. This is as true of the cultural competences that are basic to everyday life as it is of specific aesthetic competences. Most music theorists will agree there is much we do not know about the competences involved in understanding of a piece of classical music.132 Reconstructing such competences is different from analyzing the music. An art historian may be an expert on styles, epochs, and iconography, but have little to say about the competences involved in discovering meaning in a painting. Similar observations apply to cultural understanding in general. A real awareness of our cultural competences may only dawn when they no longer work; when we are in a country where we do not speak the language, or know the rituals, customs, habits, and traditions of its inhabitants. In such situations, when we find ourselves in the role of the outsider, it is normal to get a glimpse, however fleeting, of the abilities and skills on which the negotiation of everyday meanings depends. Such competences involve a grasp of the codes and schemata implicit in “the cultural processes that frame the behavioral expectations associated with the symbols of a culture.”133 The subjective cultural conditions of autonomy are not just linguistic and semiotic. Cultural understanding is exhibited in the way we deal with people and things. Everyday life involves a constant flow of structured, significant, and skillful ways of behaving and acting: how we grasp the handle of a door, turn a wheel, hold a glass, or walk down the street; how we look at each other, convey our interest or disinterest, shake hands, and say goodbye. These behaviors are influenced not only by our own physical and intellectual predispositions and constitutions, but also by the cultures we grow up in. Yet because of our involvement in everyday life, and because of our preoccupation with what we are doing at any given moment, they are hard to see.

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

43

Our discussion began with a consideration of several well-known communitarian criticisms of the liberal ideal of autonomy and we have considered several ways in which a liberal theory of culture can address such criticisms. Liberals can learn from communitarians that culture is important to autonomy. Freedom cannot be exercised in a cultural vacuum, and the roots of freedom reach through the self, deep into its cultural situation. This led to the distinction between the objective and subjective cultural conditions of autonomy; to the concept of a cultural structure, and to the cultural competences implicit in our ability to grasp and understand such structures. But there is another kind of culture we have not yet discussed: the political culture of a democracy. In a liberal democracy, the political culture is not the culture of everyday life, or of particular groups or minorities. It is the culture of citizenship. As we saw above, two kinds of autonomy can be attributed to the citizens of a liberal democracy: the autonomy exercised in self-rule and political participation, on the one hand, and the autonomy involved in making private choices about how to live as an individual or as a member of a particular community, on the other. The capacity to engage in self-rule and take part in democratic political institutions is often referred to as “public autonomy,” and contrasted with the “private autonomy” exercised by citizens as they pursue their individual conceptions of the good. The relationship between public and private autonomy is not harmonious.134 The demands of citizenship and loyalty to the state may conflict with private values and bonds. Dewey, who was concerned about the erosion of political values in modern democracies, underlined the sense in which democracy is “a shared way of life rather than a mere mode of government.”135 Sandel has argued that present-day American democracy must revitalize concern about self-government and the problem of civic character formation: “The republican conception of freedom, unlike the liberal conception, requires a formative politics, a politics that cultivates in citizens the qualities of character selfgovernment requires.”136 If we agree with his view, then we will be inclined to promote the values of citizenship and measures, whether economic, social, or cultural, that bind people to their public roles. Other philosophers have focused on the tendency of liberal democracy to encroach on individuality, and are correspondingly wary of expansionist tendencies in the name of political participation and public autonomy. Here, too, we must distinguish between objective and subjective cultural conditions. We can think of the presence and availability of a democratic political culture as the objective cultural condition of public autonomy. In characterizing political culture in this way, as a structure whose existence is a condition for people to exercise their public political autonomy, we must account not merely for the political arrangements that support choice—such as political liberties, representative democratic institutions, and freedom of the press—but also for

44

CHAPTER 2

the shared language, education, and political traditions that bind people to political institutions and the practices on which political participation depends. The public political culture is a source not only of democratic ideas and intuitions, but also of practices and ways of doing things that structure selfgovernment. Just as people cannot exercise the capacity for choice in a cultural vacuum, so they cannot exercise the capacity for self-rule without access to a political culture that enables them to view their political association as a meaningful project and develop a sense of “realized citizenship.”137 The subjective cultural conditions of public autonomy are the competences and skills that are implicit in an understanding of its objective cultural conditions. Such competences are difficult to reconstruct because they are rooted in aspects of everyday political life that are usually overlooked or considered selfevident.138 To help characterize them, we might turn to the ideas of civic virtue or soulcraft.139 There is a widely shared conviction that liberalism must not only furnish arguments for the political structures and arrangements that make a society just, but also some account of what it means to be a citizen at the other end of such structures. It is necessary to reintroduce a “political economy of citizenship” and an account of civic character formation.140 The lack of such an account can leave liberalism looking like a shell without a human core. But it is difficult to characterize civic virtue without advancing a conception of the good that is restrictive of the ideals of liberty that liberalism wants to uphold. Efforts to reinvigorate a republican formative project run this risk, even if they try to do without an antecedent concept of virtue, focusing on the collective search for a common good rather than prescribing that good. Liberals are wary of perfectionism and paternalism, in whatever guise. Yet they also realize that citizenship cannot flourish in a moral vacuum. Democracy depends on the disposition of its citizens to uphold democratic institutions. But it is the cooperative virtues that form the core of liberal soulcraft: reasonableness, toleration, and reciprocity. Some liberals argue that society should focus on the formation of the democratic character and the virtues of reasonableness: “creating virtuous citizens is as necessary an undertaking in a liberal democracy as it is under any other constitution.”141 For Rawls, on the other hand, cultivating democratic virtue is not the work of any single agency. It is the tendency of just institutions to generate their own support that is the chief source of soulcraft in a well-ordered society. We can think of the subjective and objective cultural conditions of political autonomy as subsets of what Weithman calls the “subjective and objective conditions of realized citizenship.”142 A citizen is “someone who is both affected by political outcomes and who is entitled to take part in bringing them about.” Citizenship in a modern liberal democracy is an achievement and a social role that “requires that those who are entitled to play it be equipped to do so.”143 To be equipped in this way presupposes the presence of certain conditions that enable

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

45

citizens to identify with their citizenship (“the bases for satisfying the subjective condition of realized citizenship”). When citizens enjoy not only the “legally guaranteed opportunity to participate in political decision-making” but also the resources to take advantage of that opportunity, they have access to the objective condition of realized citizenship.144 Weithman, like Rawls, uses the language of dispositions and resources to characterize and elaborate on the conditions of citizenship, including those that are psychological. But he also refers to the “availability” and the “realistic availability” of goods and resources.145 As we will see below, questions about the cultural conditions of political autonomy are in part questions about the availability and usability of resources. The distinction between the subjective and objective cultural conditions of both public and private autonomy may help clarify the sense in which a liberal democracy can secure the conditions of an autonomy that is substantive and not merely formal for its citizens. Our main concern in the rest of this book—though it will remain in the background for the next two chapters—will be with the subjective cultural conditions of autonomy. These capacities, taken collectively, can be viewed as constituting a basic cultural competence. That the skills and competences in question are cultural may be obvious—but that they are basic arises from the fact that we attribute them to persons not as members of specific cultures, communities, or associations, but as citizens of a democratic political community. If we want to understand the relationship between culture and autonomy, then we need to understand the human space within which autonomy can unfold. The space in question is not just a space of institutions and organizations, but also of competences, skills, and abilities. If this book has one argument, it is that it is here that the cultural roots of the liberal state must be sought. These roots cannot be discovered in communities or political institutions and the resources over which they dispose taken by themselves. Such structures have a role, often a critical role to play. But they only have weight because there are people for whom they have meaning and value, who know how they are to be used, understood, occupied. At the same time, we must avoid identifying the basic cultural competence of citizens with a particular conception of virtue. Before we can speak of virtue, we must know something about the kind of self that can be virtuous. In the final chapters of this book, we will turn to a discussion of these questions and a consideration of the cultural conditions of autonomy from the point of view of what I will refer to as the skillful self.

Notes 1. John Christman, Social and Political Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), 145.

46

CHAPTER 2

2. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” in Kwame Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 85. 3. Nancy Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation,” chapter 1 in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke (London: Verso, 2003), 54–56. 4. Fraser, “Social Justice,” 56. 5. Fraser, “Social Justice,” 55. 6. Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 60–65, 147–53; “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory 12, no. 1 (1984): 93–94; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985); Amitai Etzioni, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996). 7. Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 9–13. 8. Basil Mitchell, Law, Morality and Religion in a Secular Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 131–32. 9. H. L. A. Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963), 4–5. 10. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: John B. Alden, 1885), 118. 11. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 24, 36, 63, 64. Rawls distinguishes the “fact of pluralism” from the “fact of reasonable pluralism.” 12. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Dworkin rejects the political conception of complex equality. If we recognize the existence of different spheres of justice we must also recognize interaction between spheres, the possibility of disagreement among them, and the need to appeal to a more abstract principle of justice for resolving disagreements. See Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 214–20. 13. Samuel Walker, The Rights Revolution: Rights and Community in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 26–27. Walker notes that Etzioni has “a deep respect for the values of free speech and equality.” 14. Etzioni, The New Golden Rule, 176–78, 191–93. 15. Etzioni, The New Golden Rule, 85–118; The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993), 251–67. 16. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 31. 17. Rawls, Theory, 118–22. See also Thomas M. Scanlon, “Rawls on Justification,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 139, 153–54. 18. Rawls, Theory, 12, 19, 136–42. 19. On primary goods, see Rawls, Theory, 62, 90–95; Gerald A. Cohen, “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,” Ethics 99 (1989): 906–44; Margaret Moore, Foundations of

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

47

Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 51–59. On the “circumstances of justice,” see Rawls, Theory, 126–30; Samuel Freeman, “Congruence and the Good of Justice,” in Freeman, Cambridge Companion to Rawls, 304. 20. The secondary literature dealing with the original position is extensive. See, especially, Samuel Freeman, “John Rawls—An Overview,” introduction to Freeman, Cambridge Companion to Rawls, 10–20. For a survey of communitarian criticisms, see Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, “Rawls and Communitarianism,” in Freeman, Cambridge Companion to Rawls, 460–87, esp. 464. See also Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 150–83. 21. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 51, where Rawls connects the idea of the reasonable with reciprocity and fair social cooperation. “What rational agents lack is the particular form of moral sensibility that underlies the desire to engage in fair cooperation as such, and to do so on terms that others as equals might reasonably be expected to endorse.” See also Political Liberalism, 48 fn, where Rawls compares the distinction between the reasonable and the rational with Kant’s distinction between empirical and pure practical reason, also citing W. M. Sibley’s essay on “The Rational Versus the Reasonable,” Philosophical Review 62, no. 4 (1953): 554–60, esp. 560. Rawls uses the term “reasonable” in a restricted sense, appropriate to a political conception of justice. He associates it with the “willingness to propose and honor fair terms of cooperation,” and the readiness to recognize the burdens of judgment and to accept their consequences. 22. Rawls, Theory, 17, and Political Liberalism, 24. 23. Rawls, Theory, 46. 24. Rawls, Theory, 48; also Political Liberalism, 8 fn. The goal of reflective equilibrium is to introduce perspective and order at all levels of generality into our moral convictions and moral judgments. None of these levels (whether of principle or of judgment) is considered to be foundational. Rawls characterizes the attempt to achieve reflective equilibrium as a practical social and political task. See, in particular, his “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (1980): 515–72, 518. Rawls is not a contextualist or a cultural relativist. A moral perspective is not something that can be reappropriated. It is only possible to speak of having a moral perspective because we are already convinced of the seriousness of our moral convictions. 25. On reasonable pluralism, see Rawls, Political Liberalism, xix–xxi. A diversity of reasonable comprehensive views is a more or less permanent feature of social existence. The theoretical problem is to characterize fair political arrangements that are compatible with this state of affairs. 26. Christman, Social and Political Philosophy, 96. 27. Thomas W. Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” Philosophical Topics 30, no. 2 (2002): 176. Pogge characterizes Rawls as a sophisticated resourcist. It is necessary to distinguish primary social goods, which have meaning and value in the context of a rational plan of life, from what economists normally mean by “resources.” See also Serge-Christophe Kolm, “The Values of Freedom,” in Freedom in Economics, eds. Marc Fleurbaey, Nicolas Gravel, Jean-François Laslier, and Alain Trannoy (London: Routledge, 1998), 17–44. 28. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xlvi, 19, 74.

48

CHAPTER 2

29. Rawls argues for two further constraints on the choice of principles: a conception of justice must be public and stable. It is public when all citizens know what it is and know that others also know and acknowledge it. It is stable when public recognition of this conception tends to strengthen citizens’ sense of justice and so generate support for it. Rawls, Theory, 454. 30. James Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 57. 31. Griffin, Well-Being, 57. 32. Griffin, Well-Being, 56. See also Steven Lecce, Against Perfectionism: Defending Liberal Neutrality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 33. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations: 3, Schopenhauer as Educator, as quoted by Griffin, Well-Being, 60. 34. Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 309–10, 320. 35. This statement of the principles draws on Rawls, Political Liberalism, 5, 271; see also “The Basic Liberties and Their Priority,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, III, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982), 1–87. On lexical ordering, see Rawls, Theory, 42. On Rawls’s use of priority rules in preference to a commensurability-based approach that appeals to a single common standard or “supervalue,” see John O’Neill, The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics (London: Routledge, 1998), 123. 36. On fair and formal equality of opportunity, see Rawls, Theory, 73, 83–89. 37. Rawls, Theory, 515. 38. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xliii see footnote 8, 77–78. Rawls characterizes political autonomy as “full autonomy” from the perspective of citizens of a well-ordered society. 39. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 162. Gutmann argues that “democratic perfectionism” could justify state cultural subsidies if the subsidies are publicly approved and satisfy two further criteria of nonrepression and nondiscrimination. Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education, repr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 258–59. 40. Public goods theory assumes that citizens are rational and that their desires can be specified in terms of a single scheme of preferences that is both transitive and complete. But it is arguable that if people’s preferences are systematically distorted in some way, a public goods approach may identify the wrong kinds of policies. See, for example, Amartya Sen, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (1988): 317–44. Even if preferences can deliver an undistorted reflection of what people want, some scholars question whether they can be combined into a single consistent scheme. Preferences may be ambivalent or conflict, and people may have dual or multiple preference orderings that reflect their different roles in different situations. See Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 134–36; Daphna Lewinsohn-Zamir, “Consumer Preferences, Citizen Preferences and the Provision of Public Goods,” Yale Law Journal 108, no. 2 (1998): 377–406. 41. Rawls, Theory, 331. 42. Rawls, Theory, 101. 43. Rawls, Theory, 73.

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

49

44. On literature as equipment for living, see Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). On the connection between cultural participation and a person’s sense of his or her own worth, see Rawls, Theory, 101. 45. In addition to the public political culture and the background culture of a society (Political Liberalism, 14), Rawls also writes of a nonpublic political culture that mediates between them. The nonpublic political culture includes, but is not restricted to, the major communications media. See “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” The University of Chicago Law Review 64, no. 3 (1997): 765–807. 46. Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” Hastings Center Report 25, no. 2 (1995): 28. 47. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 31. 48. On the priority of the self over its ends, see Rawls, Theory, 560. 49. Sandel, “The Procedural Republic,” 81–96. 50. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 24–28, 381. 51. Rawls, Theory, 587. 52. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1976), 5: “A Constable painting of Marlborough Castle is more like any other picture than it is like the Castle, yet it represents the Castle and not another picture—not even the closest copy.” 53. Goodman, Languages of Art, 225–32. 54. Mulhall and Swift, “Rawls and Communitarianism,” 466. Mulhall and Swift also address other communitarian criticisms of Rawls—that he is committed to a psychological and asocial individualism, or that he overlooks the role of community attachments in the formation of human identity. They conclude that Rawls recognizes the “priority of the social matrix to the individual.” Indeed he characterizes as a truism, at Theory, 522, the view that “social life is a condition for our developing the ability to speak and think.” 55. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 146 fn. 56. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 146 fn. 57. See Rawls, Theory, 407–24, esp. 417–18. 58. Freeman, “John Rawls—An Overview,” 24: a person’s good is what it is “rational for that person to want, assuming that he or she has full and accurate information and has critically reflected on his or her ends, made them consistent, and decided on effective means for realizing them.” Note also the discussion of deliberative rationality at Theory, 417, where Rawls invokes Sidgwick to argue that the future must not only be “accurately foreseen” but also “adequately realized in imagination.” 59. Rawls, Theory, 418. 60. On counting principles and rational plans, see Rawls, Theory, 415–16. Rational planning consists in weighing desires and scheduling a plan of life that will lead to their maximum and most effective realization. This involves surveying alternative life plans and subplans, using principles of instrumental rationality to make the various plans consistent and as inclusive as possible. Once they have exhausted the principles for ordering plans of life, individuals engage in reflection to assess the intensity of their individual desires, and the likelihood of their being satisfied by any particular course of action.

50

CHAPTER 2

61. For Sandel’s criticisms of the preference-satisfaction model, see Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 159. Sandel argues that Rawls distinguishes too sharply between the self and its desires—unable to go all the way in, “it takes as its objects the contingent wants, desires and preferences of the self, but not the self itself .” Rawls does note that we may “investigate the circumstances under which we have acquired our desires,” though this does not imply “going all the way in” in Sandel’s sense. See Rawls, Theory, 419. 62. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 221. 63. Rawls, Theory, 526. 64. Christman, Social and Political Philosophy, 132. 65. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 27. 66. Rawls, Theory, 424–33. 67. On strong evaluation, see Taylor, Sources of the Self, 4, 14, 332–33, 336–37. 68. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 19. 69. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 176–77. 70. Rawls, Theory, 410; Political Liberalism, 177. 71. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 17. See also Rawls’s remarks on authenticity in Theory, 519. 72. See Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 3: “Neurath has likened science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it.” 73. Christman, Social and Political Philosophy, 134; Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 54–55. 74. Christman, Social and Political Philosophy, 134; “Liberalism, Autonomy, and SelfTransformation,” Social Theory and Practice 27, no. 2 (2001): 185–206. 75. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 124, 196. 76. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2: 321–22, 334, 356–73; Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 105. “Juridification” is the English translation of Verrechtlichung, Habermas’s term for the colonization of the lifeworld by systems of legal rules. 77. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2: 326–30. 78. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2: 355. 79. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Washington Bay Press, 1983), 8–9, 13; and Theory of Communicative Action, 2: 327. System rationalization has a legitimate role in modern societies in which problems of social coordination and integration are too complex to be resolved by communicative action alone. Systems become a threat when they functionalize aspects of everyday communication that are essential to social and cultural reproduction. Compare Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972). Adorno’s criticisms of the enlightenment project leave little room for a distinction between the positive and negative aspects of modernization, or between the progressive and regressive consequences of social rationalization. 80. Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung, 392.

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

51

81. Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 97; Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 89; The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), esp. 8–42, 75–101; “Wahrheitstheorien” in Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 127–83. See also Robert Alexy, Theorie der juristischen Argumentation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), and “Eine Theorie des praktischen Diskurses,” in Normenbegründung, Normendurchsetzung: Materialien zur Normendiskussion, ed. Willi Oelmüller (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1978), 2: 22–58. 82. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 89; Faktizität und Geltung, 138: the discourse principle, which is grounded in the formal attributes of rational communication, asserts that “just those action norms are valid to which all those possibly affected as participants in rational discourse could agree” [author’s translation]. 83. Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung, 394–95. I follow Rehg in translating Überlieferung with “transmission of culture,” although the word “culture” (Kultur) is not used in the German. See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 324; also Albrecht Wellmer, Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne. Vernunftkritik nach Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 28–30. 84. Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung, 18. 85. Kenneth Baynes, “Democracy and the Rechtsstaat: Habermas’s Faktizität und Geltung,” in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 204. On the transcendental status of pragmatic arguments, see John Stopford, “Transcendental Arguments and the Theory of Signs,” in Gedankenzeichen: Festschrift für Klaus Oehler zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Regina Claussen and Roland Daube-Schackat (Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1988), 316–17. 86. Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung, 37 [author’s translation]; for further interpretation of this passage, see also Baynes, “Democracy and the Rechtsstaat,” 204. Baynes is cited by Deborah Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society (New York: Routledge, 2004), 123. 87. Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung, 18–19, 140. Habermas distinguishes the discourse principle from two further principles (the democracy principle and the moral principle), which are to build a bridge between legitimate social and political institutions and the universalizable moral interests of individual social actors. 88. On the role of informal political forums in supranational communities, see Erik Oddvar Eriksen, “Deliberative Supranationalism in the EU,” in Democracy in the European Union: Integration through Deliberation? ed. Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum (London: Routledge, 2000), 42–64. Compare Rawls, Political Liberalism, 10, 227–28, 413. Rawls associates the public use of reason with a narrower conception of public advocacy in official and quasi-official forums, the focus of which is on “constitutional essentials and basic matters of justice.” The nonpublic sphere is identified with associations, nongovernmental organizations, churches, universities, and voluntary associations.

52

CHAPTER 2

89. John Stopford, “Peirce, Habermas, Rawls, and the Democracy of Signs,” in Pragmata: Festschrift für Klaus Oehler zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Kai-Michael Hingst and Maria Liatsi (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2008), 182; also Thomas McCarthy, “Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue,” Ethics 105 (1994): 61. McCarthy argues that Habermas “leaves the task of finding common ground to political participants themselves. . . . for to suppose that the stock of shared political ideas and convictions is in some way given . . . is to hypostatize or freeze ongoing processes of public political communication whose outcomes cannot be settled in advance by political theory.” See also Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 76. 90. Stopford, “Peirce, Habermas, Rawls, and the Democracy of Signs,”183; see also Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project,” 8–9. 91. Stopford, “Peirce, Habermas, Rawls, and the Democracy of Signs,” 183. 92. Jürgen Habermas, “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3 (1995): 128. See also John Rawls, “Reply to Habermas,” Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3 (1995): 132–80. Rawls’s reply to Habermas is included as Lecture IX in the 1996 paperback edition of Political Liberalism, 372–434. References below are to the latter source. 93. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 383 fn. 94. Stopford, “Peirce, Habermas, Rawls, and the Democracy of Signs,” 183–84. 95. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 427. 96. Stopford, “Peirce, Habermas, Rawls, and the Democracy of Signs,” 184. 97. Erin Kelly, “Habermas on Moral Justification,” Social Theory and Practice 26, no. 2 (2000): 223–49. 98. Axel Honneth, “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,” chap. 4 in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 238. 99. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,” 242. 100. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 206. 101. Stopford, “Peirce, Habermas, Rawls, and the Democracy of Signs,” 185–86. 102. Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 235. 103. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 206. 104. On the fact of pluralism, see Rawls, Political Liberalism, 24, 36, 63, 144. 105. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 303. 106. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, 199. 107. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 54–58. 108. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 133–34. 109. See Henry S. Richardson, Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 86. Richardson thinks Habermas’s view of communicative rationality may involve a “romantic idealization” of qualitative democratic equality that depends on unrealistic assumptions about the distribution of power and resources in real democracies. 110. See Rawls, Theory, 8, 245, and Political Liberalism, 285: the goal of ideal theory is to define a “perfectly just basic structure.” 111. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 55.

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

53

112. Dreben remarks that ideal theory is “not a theory about nonconflict, but an ideal theory of conflict.” Burton Dreben, “On Rawls and Political Liberalism,” in Freeman, Cambridge Companion to Rawls, 323. 113. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 285. 114. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 197. An overlapping consensus cannot accommodate all religious points of view, though history suggests that many comprehensive views can survive in a liberal regime. Isaiah Berlin, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 143–72. 115. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 193: “It is surely impossible for the basic structure of a just constitutional regime not to have important effects and influences as to which comprehensive doctrines endure and gain adherents over time; and it is futile to try to counteract these effects and influences, or even to ascertain for political purposes how deep and pervasive they are. We must accept the facts of commonsense political sociology.” 116. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 198. 117. On the relation between system and lifeworld, see Douglas Kellner, “Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention,” in Perspectives on Habermas, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 274. 118. Andrew Feenberg, “Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiques of Technology,” Inquiry 39 (1996): 45–70. 119. See Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 42–48, esp. 42. Kymlicka uses the term “liberal culturalism” in connection with rights and policies that are intended “to recognize and accommodate the distinctive identities and needs of ethnocultural groups.” The present discussion addresses the broader question of the cultural conditions of personhood in a modern democracy. 120. The important but different distinction between subjective and objective culture is elaborated by Harry C. Triandis in The Analysis of Subjective Culture (New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1972). 121. Compare Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 319. Kant defines culture as the production in a rational being of “an aptitude for purposes generally (hence [in a way that leaves] that being free).” Culture is the “aptitude for ends” (Tauglichkeit zu Zwecken) which produces the capacity for purposive activity, thereby establishing the context within which moral freedom and choice are possible. Skill is the subjective aspect of culture, and Kant characterizes a culture of skill as the “foremost subjective condition for an aptitude to promote [befördern] purposes generally.” Kant’s conception of a culture of skill is modeled on the unequal societies of the eighteenth century. He thinks of culture in terms of what we now regard as high culture, and blames the culture of skill for the “shining misery” of class society, rather than asking in critical terms how a democratic culture of skill is possible. See also Katerina Deligiorgi, Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 116. 122. Dworkin, A Matter of Principle, 229–33. 123. Dworkin, A Matter of Principle, 229.

54

CHAPTER 2

124. For a review of debates about multiculturalism and multicultural rights, see Will Kymlicka, “Liberal Theories of Multiculturalism,” in Rights, Culture, and The Law: Themes from the Legal and Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. Lukas H. Meyer, Stanley L. Paulson, and Thomas W. Pogge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 229–50; Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 75–106. 125. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 177. 126. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 76–80. 127. Kymlicka, “Liberal Theories of Multiculturalism,” 237. 128. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 78. 129. Dworkin, A Matter of Principle, 231. 130. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, “The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science,” in Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, ed. Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (New York: Routledge, 1999), 105–11. The authors distinguish five stages of skill development in adults, from novice to expert. 131. John Stopford, “Culture and Political Theory,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4: 19. 132. John Stopford, “Structuralism, Semiotics and Musicology,” British Journal of Aesthetics 24, no. 2 (1984): 129–37. 133. George A. Borden, Cultural Orientation: An Approach to Understanding Intercultural Communication (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), 183. On tacit knowledge, see Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), esp. part 2: “The Tacit Component”; Knowing and Being: essays by Michael Polanyi, ed. Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 132, 144; The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966). 134. Amy Gutmann, “The Disharmony of Democracy,” in Nomos XXV: The Democratic Community, ed. John W. Chapman and Ian Shapiro (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 126–60. 135. The reference to Dewey is borrowed from Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 10. 136. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 6. 137. Paul J. Weithman, Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 13–17. 138. On citizen competence, see Karol Edward Soltan, “Civic Competence, Democracy, and the Good Society,” introduction to Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, ed. Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 1–13. 139. Callan, Creating Citizens, 4–11. See also Peter Digeser, Our Politics, Our Selves? Liberalism, Identity, and Harm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3–11, 166–95; and Dwight D. Allman, “Citizenship and Soulcraft in Contemporary America,” introduction to Cultivating Citizens: Soulcraft and Citizenship in Contemporary America, ed. Dwight D. Allman and Michael D. Beaty (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), ix–xxv. 140. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, esp. part 2.

COMMUNIT Y, CULTURE, AUTONOMY

55

141. Callan, Creating Citizens, 3. 142. Weithman, Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship, 15. 143. Weithman, Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship, 13. 144. Weithman, Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship, 15. 145. Weithman, Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship, 30: “To have these goods realistically available––to have them, as it were, within one’s reach––is required if one is to be a full participant of one’s society.”

CHAPTER 3

Culture and Identity

When a government declares a forest uninhabited, overlooking the existence of the peoples who live there, it does not merely treat these people unjustly or deny them a fair hearing. It acts as though they do not exist at all. The same is true of crimes against humanity. A person who is not recognized because of his or her group membership is not merely the disadvantaged partner in an unfair bargaining situation. That person cannot bargain at all. Such considerations fuel the politics of recognition.

Politics of Recognition, Politics of Respect For the politics of recognition, culture is not merely something to consume or enjoy. Nor is it simply a context of choice. It is a matter of who we are, a question of identity. The politics of recognition has replaced universal class conflict with the claims of specific oppressed groups and their struggle for recognition as the leading ideology of emancipation. It embraces many movements, from those that take up the cause of indigenous peoples to those that demand the recognition of minorities.1 Centuries of nation building have worked against those whose culture was not standard, and who were therefore excluded from social discourse. “If a modern society has an ‘official’ language, in the fullest sense of the term––that is, a state-sponsored, -inculcated, and -defined language and culture, in which both economy and state function––then it is obviously an immense advantage to people if this language and culture are theirs. Speakers of other languages are at a distinct disadvantage.”2 Liberalism is inhospitable to the politics of identity because it does not grasp the importance of recognition as a condition of other political values.3 The self 57

58

CHAPTER 3

does not grow and develop alone but through interaction and identification with others. Recognition is a condition of democratic relationships, and denying it abolishes the basis on which respect and reciprocity can unfold and flourish. Recognition requires more from human relationships than does respect. It cannot be coerced, it must be granted. In the words of Taylor, “Inwardly derived . . . identity doesn’t enjoy this recognition a priori. It has to win it through exchange, and the attempt can fail.”4 Monological approaches to political theory ignore aspects of a person’s identity that develop in dialog with others. The genesis of the human mind is inherently dialogical, even if dialog itself is often internalized. We define ourselves through encounters with significant others, both when we agree with them and when we react against them.5 The social atomism that underwrites liberal individualism is based on a facile moral psychology. It suppresses aspects of personality that can develop only in dialog.6 To deny recognition to these aspects of the self is to rob human development of an obligatory dimension. Ultimately it may inflict psychological and moral damage.7 The struggle for recognition is political struggle. It is the struggle for a more inclusive society in which undistorted forms of recognition are realized. The moral quality of social relations is not reducible to a particular distribution of rights, opportunities, or goods. An understanding of the moral point of view must also take account of how and as what subjects recognize each other. Honneth has explored the concept of recognition and the role it plays in different discourses. He rejects efforts to establish an ad hoc basis for social criticism in the recognition claims of specific post-socialist identity movements.8 To ground social criticism in the goals and ambitions of such movements is to surrender theory to historical contingencies from which it is impossible to draw an authentic normative impulse. In order to define recognition as a social category, we must look past specific social struggles into the concept of moral injury itself and the ways in which people experience injustice through institutions over time.9 Honneth revives the Hegelian motif of a “struggle for recognition” in order to set Habermas’s appeal to the “normative surplus of validity” of linguistically mediated interaction “back on its feet.”10 Recognition is an experience within the social order (immanence) that can help us to pass beyond the social order (transcendence). Understanding the history and moral grammar of such experiences, and in particular the types of intersubjective misrecognition, can help characterize a standpoint of innerworldly transcendence from which social criticism can begin its work.11 Honneth views recognition as a condition of autonomy because it is a condition of an intact identity, and without an intact identity one cannot be autonomous. It is sometimes said that his view is teleological because it invokes the social conditions of self-realization. But Honneth thinks of the conditions of

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

59

self-realization as conditions of autonomy and his view is teleological only in a weaker sense. He is not a perfectionist, and he does not think the state should impose a particular conception of the good on its citizens. What he attempts is a part empirical, part phenomenological characterization of the enabling conditions of human self-realization.12 To understand the normative sources of social discontent we must begin by looking not at society itself, but at the ways in which people experience injustice. “If the adjective ‘social’ is to mean anything more than ‘typically found in society,’ social suffering and discontent possess a normative core.”13 The politics of recognition thus has a prepolitical aspect that thematizes the experience of disrespect as a social category. “For up to the present day, in the self-descriptions of those who see themselves as having been wrongly treated by others, the moral categories that play a dominant role are those—such as ‘insult’ or ‘humiliation’—that refer to forms of disrespect, that is, to the denial of recognition.”14 The distinctive feature of moral injury is missed if we think of it simply as thwarting someone’s preferences or violating their interests. Moral harm has an intersubjective component that arises from the awareness that one has been disregarded in a way that is somehow basic. Honneth argues that harms of this kind damage a person’s practical relation-to-self (Selbtsbeziehung). This practical relation-to-self is not theoretical or epistemic. It involves a certain sense of one’s value and competences as an autonomous individual. People are vulnerable to misrecognition because the way they view themselves is shaped by the way they are viewed by others. Three kinds of disrespect associated with the loss of selfconfidence, self-respect, or self-esteem correspond to three dimensions or aspects of the practical relation-to-self. A moral injury may destroy someone’s underlying confidence in the value of their own needs, disregard their capacity for responsible moral agency, or damage their feelings of social significance and uniqueness as participants in some common scheme.15 Modern capitalism has presided over the institutionalized differentiation of three spheres of recognition (love, law, and achievement), each of which is associated with a different self-relation, a different struggle, and a different principle of recognition. People’s experience of these recognition spheres is shaped by institutionally generated expectations that influence the three main dimensions of the practical relation-to-self. “In order to be able to actually make use of their autonomy, individual subjects are in a certain way entitled to be recognized in their neediness, their legal equality, or their social contributions.”16 Critical social theory must expose the way in which institutions form and frustrate the basic recognition claims through society’s recognition order, and in doing so lay the foundations of social pathology and conflict. Social criticism draws its normative force from the validity surplus that these spheres possess, both independently and in interaction. When society “institutionalises social relations of recognition

60

CHAPTER 3

that are one-sided or restrictive, inhabitants of this social order can rationally object on the grounds that these social relations lack justification.”17 It is sometimes argued that Honneth treats the question of recognition as a cultural question. But this is false. He rejects the reduction of recognition to its cultural aspects. “My account of the capitalist recognition order so far should have made it clear that I regard the restriction of social recognition to just one form––the ‘cultural’—as seriously misleading.”18 The recognition order of society is complex and embraces psychology, legal relations, and the specific values of different communities. Struggles for the recognition of neediness, or legal equality cannot be reduced to cultural struggles. Calls for cultural recognition can themselves be parsed in different ways: as demands for respect and equal treatment under a system of laws or as calls for esteem. “Where demands for the recognition of cultural identity aim at protecting the integrity of group life, they necessarily pass through the needle’s eye of the equality principle.”19 But sometimes the call for cultural recognition goes beyond the demand for equal rights, which is a call for the “nonconsideration of difference,” and demands the recognition of difference or uniqueness.20 Such calls for cultural recognition, on Honneth’s view, are not calls for equal treatment but for recognition of the unique value of a particular identity. Social esteem in this latter sense can never be claimed as a right or entitlement.21 Honneth rejects the reduction of recognition to cultural recognition or indeed to any of the three main types of recognition alone since it is only “due to the cumulative acquisition of basic self-confidence, of self-respect, and of selfesteem” that human subjects can come to view themselves as autonomous individuals.22 But the politics of recognition often moves in the opposite direction and focuses on cultural difference, which for Honneth can never be a source of legal claims or entitlements. The goal in such cases is not a general theory of recognition and misrecognition, but to identify the uniqueness of excluded groups and ascriptive identities and thus to “recognize and even foster particularity.”23 When the politics of recognition ceases to make a distinction between individuals and the groups they belong to, it becomes the politics of identity.24 The politics of identity seldom demands recognition for individuals in their own right, but for individuals as members of groups, and more frequently for the groups themselves.25 Identification may take many forms. Some feminists hold that recognition of a distinctively female identity also reveals a distinct moral capacity.26 While male ethical thinking converges on systems and abstract moral ideals, the ethic of care focuses on the “tie between relationship and responsibility” and on developing moral dispositions and capacities that apply to concrete situations.27 An understanding of this difference of perspective can add something to both voices. Elsewhere, the call for recognition may take the form of a struggle for life and

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

61

death. It is issued on behalf of those whom justice has ignored. The strident tones of many forms of identity politics reflect this situation. Feminists of this kind are more concerned to reject regimes of masculine power than with defining their own complementary voice.28 Often the assertion of group identity takes priority. Rather than prompting dialog, the demand for recognition encourages the demonization of the other and the struggle for identity becomes a struggle for superiority. Fixation on a group identity can draw attention away from the disadvantaged position of weaker groups or weaker members of groups, encouraging oversimplification and stereotyping. Ordinary women may see the feminist avant-garde as oblivious to their everyday concerns. Rigid definitions of womanhood mask complexities of conduct and conflicts of allegiance. To assume that “a single, ‘orthodox’ feminism can embody the aspirations of all women . . . mocks the multiplicity of female experiences, the range of female consciousness, and the varying strategies for coping with what remains overwhelmingly a man’s world. The attempt to define and impose a feminist orthodoxy implies a totalitarianism that negates the very point of the feminist revolt.”29 Inflexible conceptions of female identity that are critical of motherhood or relationships with children discourage women from balancing competing ways of life and rival conceptions of the self. Women constitute a significant proportion of the least advantaged individuals in most societies, whether their expectations are measured in terms of political emancipation, literacy, or educational opportunity.30 Yet in the United States of America it may be not just women, but black women who make up the poorest, least healthy, and least well-educated social group. When benefits and opportunities flow according to the logic of group membership they may never reach the least advantaged. The better-off members of a disadvantaged group may have higher expectations than the less advantaged of one that is better situated. Doctrinaire forms of identity politics pit one group against another when benefits are linked to group affiliation rather than equal entitlement. Progressive politics and the class-oriented thinking of traditional left-wing groups, for whom class has a universal historical significance, give way to the fragmentation and antagonism of single-issue identity groups. Emancipation movements calling for the elimination of sexism, racism, and homophobia prepare the way for the balkanization of social justice. Establishing an explicit identity where none was previously recognized may foster the formation of rigid boundaries between those who participate and those who do not. Political, academic, and social programs intended to protect and advance the interests of oppressed groups may promote ghettoization and separatism. Extreme forms of identity politics encourage sectarianism, causing insiders to confront outsiders with suspicion and hostility. Ethnic and religious

62

CHAPTER 3

identity movements may tolerate little or no diversity and ignore or suppress differences between their members. Often the emphasis on self-discovery within the limits fixed by the group has “the effect of replacing critical engagement with institutionalized structures of power with an individualist, introverted form of ‘cathartic’ or ‘confessional’ therapy.”31 Constructing a hierarchy of oppression is “destructive, divisive, and politically immobilizing. It has also ghettoized identity politics to the extent that some people have been unable to move beyond individual and personal experience.”32 In exceptional cases, identity politics spawns strategies of exclusion and an ideology of hatred, cultivated by aestheticizing politics, glorifying technology and deceit, and creating an ethnie.33 The assertion of a national identity and the demand for its recognition may be supported by contrived epistemological or historical claims—pseudohistory and pseudoscience.34 Sometimes such movements do not so much interpret as invent a past for political motives.35 The line between an ethnic nationalism based on shared memories and common ancestry and one based on concocted memories and fictionalized histories fades. Cultural mobilization politicizes the vernacular.36 What begins as liberation may turn into coercion, and pride in the ethnic into the lust to dominate.37 The struggle for recognition passes indiscernibly into the struggle for power and the victim becomes the oppressor.38 The politics of respect and the politics of identity pull in different directions. The politics of respect strives for a social system that is nondiscriminatory. A government should distinguish between people in ways consistent with the basic rights and duties that belong to individuals as political persons who are capable of giving and receiving justice, and of forming their own conceptions of the good. For the politics of identity, the fellow citizen is not merely free and equal but a “one” whose particularity the social system must recognize. The claim to uniqueness or difference is part of a person’s political status. Liberal egalitarianism sacrifices identity and difference to an abstract ideal of social equality. Liberal color- and gender-blindness is not egalitarian but hegemonic. Its effect is not to secure equality but to deny difference. The color-blind society does not liberate and emancipate people of color but repudiates the significance of the characteristics that define them. Committed to the view that the consciousness of color is racist, liberals forget their own color and the benefits, whether of culture, class, or status, that flow from it. Only by recognizing the existence of a white identity can whites break out of their racial scripts and move beyond a position of camouflaged superiority to enter the space of mutual recognition.39 There is a certain pathos in this for those who see the history of liberalism as a struggle to achieve equal treatment and fairness for all. Here too, the most controversial feature of Rawls’s view of justice is the design of the original position. It proposes a procedure for choosing political principles based on the rea-

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

63

soning of rational, self-interested, and mutually disinterested individuals who lack knowledge of the concrete particulars and circumstances of the world they inhabit, and of their place in that world. Critics object that these restrictions make “modern, western, liberal individualistic men” into the paradigm of political selfhood. Justice as fairness favors the status quo.40 It is as though the original position were a machine for the elimination of difference, submerging the entire concrete world behind a veil not of ignorance but of denial. Yet Rawls’s critics focus on one assumption—the rationality of the parties— while ignoring the role of the overall argument within which that assumption is embedded. As we have seen, this is a misreading.41 The constraints on the original position limit the political scope of the abstract and rationalistic conception of the self to which many object. Rawls is not the spokesperson for a social system dedicated to preserving and promoting the rational, self-interested individual. Rationality is always subject to the constraints of the reasonable. The principles of justice chosen in the original position are principles for a culturally diverse society. The limitations of knowledge imposed by the veil of ignorance, combined with the subjective circumstances of justice, lead the parties to opt for a social system that respects the interests of people from a wide variety of doctrinal and cultural backgrounds. The reasonableness of these limits reflects a more fundamental conception of political personality of which, as we have argued, the capacity for rational choice is only one aspect.42 Principles chosen in this way are unlikely to prescribe the mindless egalitarianism that can become a prejudice in its own right. They will require not the same treatment for all, but rather that society should treat all either as equals or at least with equal concern and respect.43 The society of justice as fairness honors diversity and supports institutions that will exclude the structural distortions associated with institutional racism and the systematic misrecognition of one group by another. Misrecognition and lack of recognition are facts about human society. But just as applying justice to the real world requires the recognition of difference, so the recognition of difference requires justice. No matter how much people resemble or differ from one another, certain kinds of difference have no weight in matters of justice. It is not the refusal to acknowledge difference, but how society deals with differences that decides the level and intensity of societal discrimination. If government is to treat people as equals, certain kinds of distinction must be possible and encouraged. Without judgment, differentiation, and the recognition of human diversity, the acts of government are little more than blind directives. Differentiation is different from discrimination, and what fairness needs is a political culture in which differentiation is possible without discrimination. To treat people as equals it is sometimes necessary to recognize that they are culturally different. This recognition is complex because any individual may

64

CHAPTER 3

belong to more than one cultural group. When the identity of groups becomes the purpose of policy, the intricacy of the relations between people and the groups to which they belong is quickly obliterated. Culture-blind egalitarian policies of redistribution that endeavor to compensate for economic injustice interact in complex ways with policies designed to strengthen the identities of misrecognized groups, especially what Fraser calls “bivalent collectivities,” such as racial and gender-based groups.44 Interactions of this kind, as Young notes, often face society with difficult choices: Ought feminists to affirm gender blindness in the policies of employers, for example, in the allocation of health benefits, leave, promotion criteria, and working hours? Or should they demand that employers explicitly take into account the position of many women as primary caretakers of children or elderly relatives in deliberations about just allocations? Opting for the latter strategy risks solidifying a sexual division of labor that most feminists agree is unjust and ought to be eliminated. Opting for the former, however, allows employers to continue privileging men under the banner of equality.45

Measures intended to promote economic inclusion may indirectly promote cultural exclusion. Policies that reallocate income without attending to the structural sources of misrecognition may stigmatize recipients of benefits. Public assistance programs “‘target’ the poor, not only for aid but for hostility.”46 On the other hand, policies that promote cultural inclusion may result in economic discrimination. Fraser argues that democratic political communities should adopt a dual perspective strategy that takes account of such cultural and economic interactions. Public discussion of these complex cases should be guided by what she calls the “principle of participatory parity.”47 Fraser rejects attempts to characterize misrecognition in terms of “a moral psychology of prepolitical suffering,” or of injury to a person’s practical relationto-self.48 Honneth’s recognition principles are too indeterminate to deal with hard cases in which different norms conflict.49 The principle of recognition as care will not suffice to assess the “relative merits of traditional full-time mothering, on the one hand, and feminist models of degendered parenting, on the other.”50 Likewise, Honneth cannot resolve cases in which recognition principles clash, as when “esteeming the labor contributions of some entails denying equal citizenship to others.”51 Claims to recognition must thus count as deontological claims to social status. Status subordination is an “institutionalized relation of subordination” that can be debated, contested, and remedied in public.52 Liberals sometimes object that calls for recognition and social inclusion solicit the special treatment of some at the expense of others. This threatens the impartiality of justice. Yet it is hardly illiberal to criticize practices and policies that

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

65

systematically deny some the chance to participate on an equal basis with others. Where injustice sees people through the groups to which they belong, justice consists in discovering policies that reflect the complexity of the identities and roles that are definitive for each. By adopting a deontological approach to questions of social justice, Fraser makes it possible to ask how the idea of participatory parity can figure in a discourse that has traditionally prioritized individual autonomy over social inclusiveness. This is a discourse that still lacks a language to address the problem of misrecognition.53 At the same time, the normative implications of Fraser’s deontological parity principle are unclear. Honneth objects that it addresses only cultural and economic injustices: “We do not learn precisely why the right to equal participation in public life presupposes only the elimination of economic inequality and cultural humiliation, but not also self-respect with reference to individual achievements or ego strength acquired through socialization. And, on the same level, it is also uncertain why the economy and culture, but not the spheres of socialization or law, appear as possible obstacles to participation in social interaction.”54 This objection reflects a deeper difficulty. The principle of participatory parity is said to be substantive rather than formal. Fraser claims that participatory parity offers a “radical democratic interpretation of equal autonomy” that is deontological yet substantive.55 “Construed as the principal idiom of public reason, the principle of participatory parity is sufficiently rich in moral substance to adjudicate conflicting claims––for both the recognition and distribution dimensions of justice.”56 This gives deliberations based on it more practical content and relevance than what Fraser refers to as the “procedural proceduralism” of Habermas or Rawls.57 Yet what is the radically democratic moral substance of participatory parity? Parity surely implies equality. But what sort of equality is Fraser proposing? Is it equality of opportunity or equality of result? What is the currency of participation?58 Is it to be measured in terms of rights, capabilities, resources, welfare, or some heterogeneous combination of these? There are many forms of social participation and many forms of social partnership. What makes participation in the society Fraser describes valuable to people apart from the fact that they are not excluded from it? Do they seek to participate so they can pursue their ideas of the good life? Is participation important because they want to belong to a certain kind of political community, or enjoy some measure of political autonomy or “realized citizenship”?59 To be excluded is to be denied not only recognition but also responsibility and opportunities to develop as a human being. Does participatory parity entail particular duties or obligations? Does it presuppose special skills, competences, or psychological resources of the kind needed to identify with the role of citizen? Such questions need not lead us to refute Fraser’s principle. But we will need answers to them if we are to understand its implications.

66

CHAPTER 3

Recognition and the Politics of Hate The denial of recognition breeds its own kind of hatred. Such hatred is not that of one individual for another but of the members of one group for the members of another. This group hatred is often called ressentiment.60 Ressentiment is sometimes thought to involve nothing more than the hatred of social superiors. That is false. Ressentiment may be felt toward members of a minority by members of a majority. The members of mutually opposed minorities may resent each other. It is not the fact of inferiority but feelings of inferiority that are decisive to the psychology of ressentiment. Hatred becomes blind when it sees others only through the groups to which they belong. Ressentiment, in the words of Sartre, precedes the facts that arouse it.61 It is an attitude that people choose. We must consent to ressentiment before it can manifest itself. Ressentiment is a type of structural hatred that differs from both normal resentment and ordinary hatred. Structural hatred is not merely a phenomenon of individual psychology but of the systems that constitute the background and context of human action. The establishment of a culture of ressentiment may play an important role in preparing and enabling specific acts of hatred or terror.62 The emotional quality of ressentiment is a “suppressed wrath, independent of the ego’s activity, which moves obscurely through the mind.” It involves feelings of powerlessness and inferiority and the “repeated experiencing and reliving of a particular emotional response reaction against someone else. The continual reliving of the emotion sinks it more deeply into the center of the personality, but concomitantly removes it from the person’s zone of action and expression.”63 In Nietzsche’s priestly morality, negativity turns creative. Lacking positive forms of expression, undischarged energy flows inward to form a new interior world of values based on negation. “Ressentiment persists and perseveres, it was stated, because of an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values. This, in turn, lets the venom of ressentiment permeate the person’s whole inner life and experience.”64 The destructive potential of ressentiment overshadows everyday social and political problems. Its cultivation is often linked to the unprecedented technological brutality that modern humanity has made its prerogative.65 A culture of hatred is a context of practices and negative attitudes that endows specific acts of ressentiment with significance. It provides in a systematic form the stock of meanings, stories, stereotypes, and prejudices—the language, vocabulary, and syntax, so to speak—without which such acts would lack a point.66 Such a culture is less the product of specific acts of hatred than of the community that gives these acts a meaning.67

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

67

The work of such a community lies not in open, individual expressions of hostility but in the anonymous cultivation of the linguistic conditions of antipathy. A slur implied in a single word may be enough to evoke repugnance and rancor along with implications of aggression and oppression. The emergence of a culture of hatred is often the forerunner of systematic violence. Governments intent on genocide use hate propaganda to prepare the way. Pressure groups and radicals use it to secure political power. Politicizing hatred would rarely succeed without the cultivation of the anterior language that gives ressentiment a voice. As group antipathies multiply, so also governments’ efforts to protect people from hatred and its effects. Since the end of World War II, most Western states have enacted measures to discourage group antagonisms.68 These measures include not only legislation to deter crimes of hate but also programs of moral reeducation and sensitivity training.69 Progressive educational curriculums attempt to discourage negative stereotyping, promote critical awareness of cultural difference, and encourage and direct positive contact between people from different cultures. Quasi-legal controls on speech in university campus codes, workplace codes of behavior, and various kinds of media restraints have come to dominate social life.70 Complaint-driven procedures encourage those targeted to protest acts of antagonism. Prompted by concerns about the proliferation of extremist ideologies and the role of hate propaganda in sowing the seeds for genocide, governments are sometimes prepared to curtail civil liberties. Hate crime and hate speech legislation forbids action or speech that is abusive, intimidating, harassing or such as to incite to violence. It enhances legal penalties, often significantly, whenever a defendant “intentionally selects the person against whom the crime . . . is committed . . . because of the race, religion, color, disability, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry of that person.”71 Policies of this kind are intended to discourage the victimization of those whom history, often, has already chosen to oppress. Yet legislation against hate crime harbors an inner contradiction when the acts to be proscribed are already illegal. Laws that would punish not only a crime but also the thoughts of the perpetrator are problematic. To hate someone is not yet to violate his or her rights. Penalty enhancement statutes can have a chilling effect on free speech and social relationships. Hate crime legislation may encourage groups to compete for protected status, cultivating a hierarchy of victimization that nourishes further social resentment and hostility. Laws and codes intended to discourage racial incitement are easily turned against those they should protect.72 Legislation against hate speech risks forcing the speech in question underground and denying people the opportunity to make their own judgments about it. The corollary of direct legal efforts to stem the rise of a culture of hatred is the culture of the

68

CHAPTER 3

victim, in which the mere perception of offense may be enough to unleash legal retaliation. Many believe the arguments proposed by Mill in the name of freedom of expression cannot be invoked to defend hate speech or the dissemination of hate propaganda.73 Mill’s goal was to protect thoughtful social debate about matters of significant metaphysical and moral importance. He held that public discussion of private views is a condition of the discovery of truth. Such discussion contributes not only to the content of people’s beliefs but also, more important, to the manner in which these beliefs are held. Worse than error is the numbing of intellectual capacities that follows when debate is suppressed and ideas languish as “dead beliefs” in the mind.74 When fundamental questions cannot be contested in public, people are deprived not only of the opportunity to discover the truth but also of the ability to value it. But Mill’s arguments for the liberty of thought and expression were formulated in another age. Critics point out that hate speech does not contribute to public discussion. It is not motivated by the desire for truth. The dissemination of hate does not vitalize moral debate or improve people’s grasp of their own ideas and beliefs. A racial slur is not an argument in disguise.75 It is not an argument at all. Its purpose is not to present a serious moral or metaphysical belief but to mob, antagonize, humiliate. Worse, hate speech and hate propaganda may deceive and manipulate. To protect them is to invite destructive abuses of liberty. It can be replied that if we value freedom of expression we can hardly deny protection to utterances that involve polemic and invective, or antagonize. Argument and invective are rarely far apart and often impossible to distinguish. The perniciousness of a view should not be a reason for outlawing it. It is almost a matter of definition that any thought or idea that society seeks to repress will seem to the majority to be not merely false, but evil. Many views we now accept or tolerate were once regarded as heretical or absurd.76 People cannot claim to know that a view, however abhorrent, is false or harmful without assuming infallibility and in doing so denying others the right to reach their own conclusions.77 One way of addressing this conflict without sacrificing the moral core of the doctrine of freedom of expression is to draw on the distinction between advocacy and incitement, assimilating hate speech to a legal category such as “fighting words,” which the law commonly regards as a form of incitement.78 Speech that incites tends to evoke an automatic and unreflective reaction. Advocacy is concerned with communicating ideas. Fighting words are denied protection because they neither advocate a view nor communicate ideas. The fighting words doctrine is one of a small class of exceptions to the First Amendment recognized by courts in the United States. Confronted with incidents involving hate speech, some universities rely on codes that follow the fighting words doctrine in separating such speech into in-

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

69

vective and ideational components. This makes it easier to distinguish between constraints on incitement, on the one hand, and suppressing controversial speech that may be objectionable but does not incite, on the other.79 By focusing on the invective aspects of hate speech, this strategy preserves a space of discussion and advocacy within which abstract ideas, however controversial, can be debated. Freedom of expression does not require the protection of speech that tends or intends to incite a swift, unreflective, and violent reaction. Controversial utterances that do not fall within the category of fighting words may continue to enjoy the freedom Mill saw the need to defend. Yet however elegant, this solution is unsatisfactory. Incitement is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for an utterance to constitute hate speech. Neither hate radio nor hate speech disseminated through the Internet can be readily assimilated to fighting words. To focus on inflammatory face-to-face speech and on the distinction between incitement and advocacy is to overlook the real character of the threat that hate speech poses. This has less to do with the immanence of a threat than with the devaluation and intimidation of individuals because of their group membership, and with the creation of a cultural context that is not just threatening and oppressive but a framework for future aggression. Hate speech plays a systematic role in nourishing ressentiment and creating such a culture. Far from being exclusively confrontational or invective, it is often disguised in subtle forms of intimidation, propaganda, and other varieties of systematic harassment. Even more insidious are those forms of hate speech that deliberately adopt the abstract, discursive guise of serious scholarship. Much propaganda, some extremist religious doctrines, and most of the Holocaust denial literature fall into this category. Denial of the National Socialist crimes and genocide dates from the end of World War II. Some so-called revisionists claim that what they call the “Auschwitz lie” is a Zionist invention and demand a “decriminalization” of German history. The abstract and ostensibly disinterested attitude of the extensive Holocaust denial literature is cultivated to present as scientific or scholarly views that are neither. Discussion of the Holocaust is conducted in the same objective, carefully researched tone as a research paper on superconductors, or a treatise on optics. Revisionists do not care whether they can be challenged on some particular point of scholarship. They want to cultivate the appearance of academic respectability, impugning the historicity of received views of the Holocaust by invoking uncertainty about details—such as the exact number of victims or the documentation of some particular event—as evidence that a crime did not take place.80 They gamble that public opinion, knowing that it is not in a position to make an informed judgment on such matters, will accept academic form as a

70

CHAPTER 3

guarantee of intellectual seriousness. In this way, people may be lured into suspending judgment on questions the main facts of which were never in doubt. The legal interpretation of this question differs from country to country. Although the First Amendment of the United States treats Holocaust denial as a form of protected speech, Austria has made it a crime to deny, trivialize, approve, or attempt to justify the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity.81 In Germany, Holocaust denial has been found to constitute both incitement to hatred (Volksverhetzung) and insult (Beleidigung) and is punishable by law. The German constitution has a strong antidefamation bias, which makes it possible to interpret such speech as an illegal attack on personal dignity.82 In 1979, Germany’s Supreme Court construed the character of such insults in broad terms, arguing that “anyone who denies the murder of Jews in the ‘Third Reich’ insults every one of them.”83 Revisionism is viewed as an incitement to racial hatred even though the symbolic action in question is discursive and abstract; because German law regards incitement to racial hatred as an “abstract endangerment offense,” a concrete disturbance of the peace need not occur.84 The same rationale has made it possible to criminalize the dissemination of Holocaust denial literature in the Internet because such acts have the potential to disturb the peace in Germany. Where there is evidence of incitement to remote lawless action, legal restraints on abstract forms of hate speech and hate propaganda may provide a way of addressing the systematic threat posed by abstract intolerance and aggression. Society’s response in such cases may depend, as with subversive advocacy, on the judiciary’s assessment of the remoteness of the threat in question. German law allows defendants to argue that the conduct claimed to constitute an abstract endangerment could not in practice have led to a concrete disturbance. What it means to speak of the remoteness or immanence of a threat is thus relevant to deciding whether the law can prohibit its advocacy. The crucial question is not merely how remote the danger of a specific event, but what is to count as remoteness. Remoteness may be a matter of proximity but also of probability. Often in assessing the character of a threat, its probability may become secondary and the scale of the threat may be considered fundamental. On some interpretations, the principle of abstract endangerment might be used to argue that no matter how low the probability that speech will occasion a specific harm, if that harm is sufficiently damaging, there are grounds to forbid its advocacy. At some point, though, the interpretation of endangerment crosses the line from common sense to public paranoia. When this happens, the law may become a vehicle for attacking any group or individual that might, under even improbable circumstances, constitute a threat to some other group or individuals, or to society at large. Such legal measures may cultivate a sense of emergency

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

71

among the general population, justifying ruthless restraints on freedom of expression. Discussion and even advocacy of the unthinkable may be an important aspect of public debate. It is thus important to secure the distinction between incitement, advocacy, and discussion of views that are sincerely held. The more the improbability of a harm is discounted, the more these distinctions will disappear. Yet to prohibit discussion of a view that is sincerely and conscientiously held is not so much to discourage those who hold it as diminish those who repress it. In a culture of hatred, the real threat emanates less from the possible perpetrators than from a community of sympathizers ready to endorse their acts. Such a community often constitutes itself through indefinable and elusive attitudes that law cannot address. The more a view is judged to be evil, the more reasonable it would seem that, in all but the most exceptional circumstances, the public must have the opportunity to reject it for themselves. This defense of the role of freedom of expression in liberal democracy cannot be persuasive, however, if it is linked to a conception of social participation that tolerates significant forms of social exclusion and misrecognition. To protect the freedom of a forum from which many or even most are excluded is not to uphold the kind of liberty on which a liberal democracy can build. The problem is to discover a theoretical framework within which it is possible to balance the claims of freedom of expression and social inclusion. It is here that liberal theory falters. Consequentialists often have little or nothing to say about political participation and problems of social exclusion. Many deontological views are well suited to defend freedom of expression, but are as a rule insensitive to problems of participation and the worth of participation. As we have seen, Fraser proposes a deontological theory that would ground social justice in the principle of participatory parity. Fraser distinguishes two ways of applying this principle to hard cases. “Affirmative strategies,” exemplified by many forms of multiculturalism, use direct intervention and “surface adjustments” as a way of revaluing devalued identities.85 Such an approach might simply recommend prohibiting hate speech as a way of discouraging misrecognition. At the same time, as Fraser notes, affirmative policies fail to address the structural sources of resentment, social antagonism, and a culture of hatred. They do not promote interaction across differences, and may nurture separatism, social polarization, and repressive communitarianism.86 What Fraser calls “transformative strategies” might make a stronger case for freedom of expression.87 Such strategies oppose misrecognition by trying to deconstruct the underlying structures on which it rests. Upholding freedom of expression, though not shielding victims of misrecognition from verbal attack, might have a transformative influence over time by leaving room for people to challenge tendentious status distinctions, engage in interaction across differences, and eventually achieve what Fraser calls “deconstructive recognition.”88

72

CHAPTER 3

The distinction between invective and advocacy might well be incorporated within such a line of reasoning. It is not clear which of these approaches, and in what combination, the principle of participatory parity itself would lead us to favor. As we have already suggested, Fraser does not tell us enough about the point of social participation. She thinks public deliberation must determine not merely whether someone is a victim of misrecognition, but what impact misrecognition has on their ability to function and participate on equal terms with other members of society. Yet with transformative strategies, in particular, it is difficult or impossible to give such questions a determinate answer. More important, the categorical distinction between oppressor and victim rarely corresponds to the complexity of social reality. An oppressor from one perspective may be a victim from another. The problem public deliberation often faces is not to secure participatory parity for all, but to balance competing cases of social exclusion, different claims to recognition, different kinds of claim to participatory parity. As it stands, the principle of participatory parity may not be rich enough to deal with such questions. The reflective image of public dialog working pragmatically toward a more inclusive society will need to be supplemented with a more structured conception of the person, and of the point of social participation, if it is to throw light on hard cases.

The Claims of the Indigenous Though often distinguished from other minority groups, indigenous peoples share related concerns about recognition and freedom from discrimination.89 Frequently the victims of colonization, they are threatened not only by industrial development and the destruction of their homelands but also by colonialist efforts to impose a new identity on them.90 The term “indigenous” applies to isolated forest-dwelling tribes as well as to the sophisticated, globally integrated indigenous peoples of advanced industrial countries.91 Formulas for ascribing indigenousness often reflect considerations of political expedience. Criteria such as aboriginal character, first or earlier habitation, possessing a distinct cultural tradition, self-identification, a separate language, and subsistence-oriented production systems have all figured in definitions.92 Typically, the close, earlier relationship to traditional lands plays a central role.93 This special relationship often connects with the management of natural resources and tribal belief systems. Where modern Western societies treat land as an alienable resource, the occupation of indigenous territories is associated with traditional kinship and consanguinity systems. The terms “holism” and “cultural integrity” also characterize an important feature of indigenous life.94 The “cul-

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

73

tural integrity norm” covers “all aspects of an indigenous group’s survival as a distinct culture, understanding culture to include economic or political institutions, land use patterns, as well as language and religious practices.”95 Indigenous rights are invoked to repel the impact of modernization and global commerce on the integrity of indigenous culture. Social mobility and the development of industry and communications may threaten indigenous culture to the point of destroying it. Development projects displace populations, destroying landmarks and historical artifacts.96 The claims of a people to its traditional hunting lands may have to compete with the need of city dwellers for drinking water. Confronted with a dominant language, indigenous peoples may assert the right to an equitable presence of their own language in national communications media, or claim as a right that government communicate with them and offer services in their own language.97 Formal recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples does not always guarantee effective enforcement of claims. Although the Native Title Act passed in Australia in 1993 recognized Aboriginal land rights in principle, difficulties in harmonizing national and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) customary law have impeded its implementation.98 Many states fear that recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples, and in particular a right to political selfdetermination, could subvert their own political and territorial integrity. They are prepared to acknowledge only a right to internal self-determination. Indigenous groups should enjoy autonomy in governing their affairs, in determining their membership, culture, and language, but not the right to independence or permanent sovereignty over natural resources.99 Nor may indigenous rights be invoked to challenge national supremacy or justify secession. These tensions are aggravated by definitional confusions about the logic and scope of indigenous rights. This is a practical problem when it comes to determining how violations of such rights—once recognized—should be monitored and in what sense they are justiciable. Often indigenous rights are viewed as collective or group rights to the survival of a culture or to the protection of its integrity.100 The right to a certain kind of culture—for example to a national culture or a common language—cannot be justified by appealing to the interests of any particular individual or individuals. It is a communal good, the value of which transcends the interests of the individual members of the group taken in isolation. Though Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) speaks of “rights of persons belonging to” cultural groups, it is evident “that in its practical application Article 27 protects group as well as individual interests in cultural integrity.”101 Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization allows for indigenous peoples to manage natural resources, including those they use on lands of others, and emphasizes the collective aspect

74

CHAPTER 3

of the right to land: “the enjoyment of rights connected with culture [is] mostly meaningful in a group context. It would be impossible or lacking in meaning . . . for an indigenous individual to alone partake of a traditional indigenous system of dispute resolution, or to alone speak an indigenous language or engage in a communal religious ceremony. This understanding is implicit in article 27 itself, which upholds rights of persons to enjoy their culture ‘in community with other members of their group.’”102 Should cultural rights be thought of as inhering in individuals as members of groups, or in the groups themselves? ICCPR acknowledges both group and individual interests in cultural integrity.103 But many liberals consider endorsing group rights to be a potent source of individual rights violations that can “easily be used to strengthen dominant sub-groups, privilege conservative interpretations of culture over reforms, and disadvantage all those who wish to diverge from accepted social norms and question the traditional role of social institutions.”104 Claims to group rights should be reformulated, wherever possible, as claims to individual rights. It is individuals—not groups—who are oppressed and subjected to injustice, and it is the rights of individuals that should be protected. That individual human beings have linguistic rights does not imply that language itself or the linguistic community also has rights. That some goods can be enjoyed only in community with others can make the protection of such community goods a right of persons without also making it a right of the community. Others hold an intermediate view, according to which the interests of a group are not directly reducible to the interests of its members, at the same time claiming that only individual interests are relevant to justifying group rights.105 A large part of the justification for many so-called liberal rights arises from the contribution they make to the common culture and public good rather than to the defense of individuals against interference.106 Freedom of expression contributes to the good of all, not merely of those who participate directly in public debate. Encompassing groups are needed for people to acquire values and shared patterns of expectations, and then to make choices.107 Membership and belonging are needed to develop and maintain a sense of identity and selfrespect, and to exercise autonomy.108 Though group interests are conceptually connected to the interests of their members, such connections are nonreductive and indirect. According to Margalit and Raz, “this relative independence of group interest is compatible with the view . . . that the moral importance of the group’s interest depends on its value to individuals.”109 Encompassing groups create background conditions that affect people’s well-being indirectly and in practically indeterminate ways. The influence is, however, large enough for it to make practical sense to speak of group rights as though they are sui generis and not reducible to individual rights.

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

75

Yet it is difficult to reconcile the intermediate view with an underlying allegiance to individual and minority rights. The right of an encompassing group to self-determination derives “from the value of a collective good.” The recognition that this good may be a source of rights is inconsistent with “contractarian-individualistic approaches to politics or to individual wellbeing.”110 If it is an empirical fact that a group’s self-respect and prosperity is promoted by sovereignty over its own affairs, then that group may under certain circumstances have a right to self-determination and decide, for example, that the territory it occupies “shall form an independent state in order to protect the culture and self-respect of the group.”111 This in turn can justify disenfranchising other minorities in the territory.112 The collective good may trump the claims of the unaffiliated occupants of a territory. A head-on collision between the intermediate view and the legitimate interests of individuals and minorities is hard to avert. It is not enough to argue that a newly created state must be “likely to respect the fundamental interests of its inhabitants.”113 The disenfranchised minorities in such territories would still feel unfairly treated. If an encompassing group were the overwhelming majority, it might be argued that a democratic plebiscite in which all could vote would have the same outcome as leaving the decision to the encompassing group. “Yet this is no defense against the objection that the scheme is unjust. We do not think that the justice of depriving a person of the vote is settled by showing that, in the circumstances, the person could not have changed the result of an election.”114 The willingness to sacrifice fairness to collective goals thrives on a more general skepticism about theories that make conflicts of individual interest central to political philosophy. Suspicion of such views is understandable.115 It is true that some kinds of social and political conflict concern not the division of the burdens and benefits of cooperation or the protection of individuals, but common goods, the enjoyment of which is shared by all “in a non-competitive way.”116 But political liberalism begins not from the idea that conflict is fundamental, but from the idea of a society as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage marked by an identity as well as a conflict of interests. The subjective and objective circumstances of justice confront human beings with a situation that is motivationally complex. As we saw earlier, the liberal case for group rights has been made by Kymlicka, who claims that access to what he calls, following Dworkin, an “intact” cultural structure is a condition of meaningful choice.117 Dworkin distinguishes “two consequences our culture has for us. It provides the particular paintings, performances, and novels, designs, sports, and thrillers that we value and take delight in; but it also provides the structural frame that makes aesthetic values of that sort possible, that makes them values for us.”118 The cultural structure of a society is not a vehicle for the state to shape and influence people’s preferences,

76

CHAPTER 3

but a framework that helps them to make meaningful choices. Just as language furnishes the structure on which individual acts of communication depend, so a certain kind of cultural framework may constitute a structural condition for citizens of a liberal democracy to pursue their individual conceptions of the good. The core of the cultural structure of a community, according to Dworkin, is its language, a shared vocabulary of tradition and convention, and “the conceptual equipment to find aesthetic value in historical and cultural continuity.”119 A rich and diverse cultural structure is needed for citizens to be able to draw on different models of life. Since the existence of a complex cultural structure is a condition for citizens to make meaningful choices about how to live, and since in supporting such a structure it would not be permissible to promote or oppose specific individual choices, government can influence the cultural structure of society without engaging in paternalism or encouraging perfectionism.120 But what would it mean to protect the cultural structure of a society? If such a structure resembles a language, can it be subjected to political influence? How can government promote a context of choice without also shaping the choices people make? And how many cultural structures can a liberal democracy support? Kymlicka thinks that Dworkin assumes political communities to be culturally homogeneous so, for example, “the United States contains a single ‘cultural structure’ based on a ‘shared language.’”121 This would imply that cultural participation depends on access to “a kind of public good . . . [which is] . . . equally available to all,” and hence “not the source of differential rightsclaims.”122 But, as Kymlicka argues, modern political communities are not culturally homogeneous, and access to an intact cultural structure may be a right to which citizens can lay claim if they belong to minority cultures that face assimilation or destruction. “The primary good of cultural membership has to be explicitly recognized as a possible source of unjust inequalities.”123 Culture provides the context that makes different forms of life meaningful.124 People learn about values by adopting roles and situating themselves in narratives that are already part of the langue or repertoire of the culture to which they belong. “The decision about how to lead our lives must ultimately be ours alone, but this decision is always a matter of selecting what we believe to be the most valuable from the options available, selecting from a context of choice, which provides us with different ways of life.”125 When a cultural structure languishes, citizens lack an indispensable condition of meaningful choice. Those who face the threat of isolation from their culture and its language are robbed of the cultural context on which an autonomous life depends for meaning and substance. Kymlicka argues that this may justify institutionalizing external protections such as language rights or residency requirements to limit the impact of exoge-

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

77

nous influences on minority cultures.126 But the members of such groups must still have the right to interpret the protected practices in their own way.127 Such a strategy is feasible because cultural structures can survive certain kinds of gradual change. People can modify the character of their culture from within “without jeopardizing its existence.”128 Liberal institutions may have to limit some liberties when they threaten to destroy the contexts within which meaningful choice is possible. But the goal of liberalization from within can still be pursued. “Finding a way to liberalize a cultural community without destroying it is a task that liberals face in every country.”129 Whether or not we accept Kymlicka’s thesis that it is possible to protect minority cultures even as they liberalize over time in this way, the prior claim that access to a cultural structure is necessary for people to pursue a meaningful plan of life requires careful examination. One concern is that Kymlicka’s argument depends on assumptions about the discreteness and independence of cultural structures that do not reflect the cultural complexity of the real world. “Is a Hasidic sect among the ultra-orthodox considered a minority with a right to culture or not? Do lawyers or yuppies or Celtic fans constitute a cultural group?”130 Cultural groups display internal diversity as a function of factors such as class, geographic location, and generational status. This diversity is sometimes concealed by the coarseness of public systems of classification: the use of the term “Asian” to refer to Koreans as well as Indians could mislead us into assuming that Koreans and Indians share a common culture. Indeed Kymlicka himself notes that the term “cultural structure” is potentially misleading, “since it suggests an overly formal and rigid picture of what . . . is a very diffuse and open-ended phenomenon.”131 Even in the case of culturally integrated groups, it may be an oversimplification to think of the conditions of cultural significance as dependent on a single cultural structure. If they exist in a liberal democracy such structures will surely be in a constant state of interaction, not only with other cultural structures but also with the political culture, an understanding of which is a condition of democratic political participation. To this may be added the broader cultural context brought close by communications media, technological exchange, global organizations, and the influence of neighboring states. The ease and rapidity with which political, religious, and cultural ideas and practices are disseminated and exchanged makes it difficult to think of a culture as something self-contained. Cultures do not have fixed centers or precise boundaries. Cultural structures are not without context. They do not form a world apart and it makes little sense to claim that some particular cultural structure is an indispensable condition of meaningful choice. If a political community encompasses a plurality of cultural structures, then any specific cultural group, and a fortiori any member of that group, also belongs to the broader context formed by these further cultures. The

78

CHAPTER 3

choices people can make are a function of cultural possibilities whose sources are neither purely internal nor external to any single specific cultural structure. Each member of each cultural group, however distinct, confronts the phenomenon of cultural diversity. Cultural contexts are complex and they interact. The degree to which we are embedded in them is variable. Griffin thinks it “puzzling in our current cosmopolitan conditions, in which most of us would be hard put to name the culture of which we are ourselves members” that the dichotomy between being inside or outside a culture figures so strongly in Kymlicka’s arguments.132 There are many forms and degrees of attachment to communities. Overvaluing cultural uniqueness or singularity encourages an unnecessarily passive view of human agency. “We examine life; we criticize our inheritance. Of course, we do it in our own language. But this does not mean that we are condemned to a life either so deeply embedded in our culture that we have no access to views originating outside it, or so detached from any particular culture that we have critical resources too feebly abstract to settle much.”133 Loss of access to a particular culture need not annul a person’s ability to make meaningful choices. All people need is access to some culture: “If . . . a minority culture is in decline because it is being supplanted by a majority culture, one can, depending upon how much dislocation is involved in the process, still have a culture available to one.”134 Unsentimental though it may be, this view is hard to contradict. “Some cultures are authoritarian, intolerant, sexist, distorted by false belief, dominated by unjust caste or class systems.”135 Many who move from one culture to another may experience a small sense of loss and a great sense of gain, and vice versa. Furthermore, it is easy to exaggerate the extent to which deliberation about a plan of life depends on attachment to a particular culture. “What that deliberation most needs is a sense of what things in general make a human life good . . . accomplishing something in the course of one’s life, deep personal relations, certain kinds of understanding, enjoyment, and so on.”136 On the other hand—at least in the case of indigenous peoples—it may be unrealistic to regard primary cultural attachments as bonds that can be dissolved with moderate ease the better to adopt new languages and ways of looking at the world, and integrate in new cultural contexts. This view may appeal to cosmopolitan Western liberals who like to think of themselves as members of a cultural “community of communities.”137 But there is also a sense in which the culture into which a person is born is an encumbrance that cannot be abandoned at will.138 Cultural attachments are profound, not just a frame of reference but existential roots. “Leaving one’s country is a grave step: it involves leaving the society and culture in which we have been raised, the society and culture whose language we use in speech and thought to express and understand ourselves, our aims, goals, and values; the society and culture whose history, customs, and conventions we depend on to find our place in the social world.”139

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

79

Such attachments differ from other kinds of relationship and forms of membership in many ways. A distinct cultural group is likely to have its own literary and artistic traditions, language, holidays, customs, and dress. For some, the membership of a group is an important clue about who they are. The movement from one culture to another is slowed by the close connection between cultural membership and personal identity. National identities offer a high degree of security because they are based on belonging rather than accomplishment. “At the most fundamental level our sense of our own identity depends on criteria of belonging rather than on those of accomplishment. Secure identification at that level is particularly important to one’s well-being.”140 But though cultural identification and self-identification may be important conditions of human well-being, and a person’s embeddedness in their home culture profound, people do not belong to communities in the way that bricks belong to a building or a handle to a door. A community is a human context. Belonging to a community is not just a passive relation between the self and its surroundings but a competence that resides in the one who belongs. The depth of cultural attachments and our difficulty in abandoning them depends in part on their being our attachments. If belonging to a community is a condition of meaningful choice, then so also is the cultural competence by virtue of which people are able to belong. It is not enough that this or that culture identifies this or that way of life as having meaning and significance. People must possess the tacit knowledge that is involved in producing and understanding culturally significant behaviors.141 To possess such knowledge, a person must have grasped not only the spoken language of a culture but also the tacit know-how and sense of appropriateness that is involved in grasping significance in any cultural context. A cultural competence is exhibited in the ability to understand and make oneself understood in the signifying systems that constitute the life of a culture: to grasp not only its written and spoken language but also culturally significant behaviors, stories and myths, cultural symbols, rituals and rules of significance and feeling; to know how to move one’s body and use the artifacts and utensils of everyday life; to be able to recognize and take part in the culturally sanctioned behaviors involved in cooking and eating, dressing, parenting, interacting and cooperating with others, planning and playing, enjoying, fearing, caring and owning. Such abilities call for complex discriminations and skills, many of which develop imperceptibly as a person grows up. Once acquired, they may be exercised with ease by those who possess them but present an obstacle to those who do not. The existence of such competences is evident when a person moves between cultures, or when members of different cultures communicate. The normal case in intercultural experience is often not understanding but misunderstanding, and it is in such situations that cultural skills and limits begin to show up.

80

CHAPTER 3

Gradually we become aware of the structuring values and schemata that constitute our own cultural knowledge and of the need to grasp the structuring values and culturally expected behaviors of those whom we do not yet understand.142 By invoking the concept of a cultural competence, we draw attention away from the role of cultural structures and toward the abilities implicit in our understanding of these structures. While cultural structures are collective and impersonal, cultural competences comprise abilities, skills, and forms of know-how that also have an individual aspect. It is a matter of some importance whether discussions of cultural diversity focus on structure or on the competences and capabilities that are exhibited by those who grasp such structures. To assign cultural competence a place among the conditions of meaningful choice is to recognize that belonging to a culture is also a human achievement. The challenge of cultural change derives not only from the strength of existing identifications but also from the difficulty of acquiring new competences or adapting old ones to new circumstances. At the heart of the indigenous is the human. Our cultures make profound claims on us. But being human is also a matter of responding to a situation. One-sided appeals to the significance of cultural identity and encompassing or group-specific structures can obscure the sense in which such contexts are also our own work, grasped sometimes with effort but nonetheless open to transformation. This shift of perspective is not voluntaristic or individualistic. It does not evoke a self that exists outside basic human relationships, conscious of its cultural situation only from afar. Cultural understanding has both a subjective and an objective side. If the options and choices available to people are influenced by their understanding of the structural aspects of culture, then only because they also possesses the competences, skills, and know-how that are implicit in such an understanding.

Notes 1. Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,” in Feminism and Politics, ed. Anne Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 430–60; “Distorted Beyond All Recognition: A Rejoinder to Axel Honneth,” chapter 3 in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke (London: Verso, 2003), 212. Fraser writes of a post-socialist “cultural turn” that involves a new salience of culture and culturalist paradigms. Both Fraser and Honneth “theorize these matters in terms of recognition,” though they do so in different ways. 2. Charles Taylor, “Nationalism and Modernity,” in The Morality of Nationalism, ed. Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 34.

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

81

3. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 51–53; Jürgen Habermas, “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 109. 4. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 34–35. 5. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 32. 6. Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 197. 7. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 25. 8. Axel Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser,” chapter 2 in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 121. Fraser’s declaration of the “new social-movements” as paradigms for the politics of recognition leads her to ignore “a not inconsiderable portion of the ‘identity politics’ enterprise.” See also Axel Honneth, “Recognition and Moral Obligation,” trans. John Farrell, Social Research 64, no. 1 (1997): 16–35. 9. Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” 123–25. Honneth criticizes the chronology of Taylor’s distinction between interest-based legal politics on the one hand, and identity politics on the other. Elements of both are found in many political movements. 10. Axel Honneth, “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,” chap. 4 in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 242. 11. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 238–39. The search for an innerworldy instance of transcendence is a “legacy of Critical Theory’s left-Hegelian tradition.” 12. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 173. 13. Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” 129. 14. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 131. 15. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 129. 16. Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” 181. 17. Maeve Cooke, “Between ‘Objectivism’ and ‘Contextualism’: The Normative Foundations of Social Philosophy,” in Critical Theory after Habermas: Encounters and Departures, eds. Dieter Freundlieb, Wayne Hudson, and John Rundell (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 54. 18. Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” 151. 19. Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” 164. 20. Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” 165. 21. Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” 168. 22. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 169. 23. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 43. 24. Fraser rejects the identification of the politics of recognition with identity politics since this reduces “a plurality of different kinds of recognition claims to a single type, namely, claims for the affirmation of group specificity.” See Nancy Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation,” chapter 1 in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 12.

82

CHAPTER 3

25. Valerie L. Scatamburlo, Soldiers of Misfortune: The New Right’s Culture War and the Politics of Political Correctness (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 184. 26. Carol Gilligan, “Moral Orientation and Moral Development,” in Women and Moral Theory, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987), 19–33, 22. 27. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 173. 28. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 226. 29. Fox-Genovese, Feminism without Illusions, 229. 30. Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capability Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1. 31. Scatamburlo, Soldiers of Misfortune, 185. Scatamburlo cites L. A. Kauffman, “The Anti-Politics of Identity,” Socialist Review 20, no. 1 (1990): 67–80. 32. Scatamburlo, Soldiers of Misfortune, 185. 33. Anthony D. Smith, “The Ethnic Sources of Nationalism,” in Ethnic Conflict and International Security, ed. Michael E. Brown (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 27–42. 34. Stefan Berger, The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany Since 1800 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997), 38. 35. Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995), 234. Woodward cites the use of propaganda and television commercials in the early 1990s “to revive Serbian national myths of heroism and to persuade Bosnian Serbs that it was impossible for them and Muslims to live together.” 36. Constantine P. Danopoulos and Kostas G. Messas, “Ethnonationalism, Security, and Conflict in the Balkans,” in Crises in the Balkans: Views from the Participants, ed. Constantine P. Danopoulos and Kostas G. Messas (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 1–18. 37. Orlando Patterson, “Taking Culture Seriously: A Framework and an AfroAmerican Illustration,” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, ed. Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 204. 38. Steven M. Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism: The Political Economy and Cultural Construction of Social Activism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 134; John Anner, introduction to Beyond Identity Politics: Emerging Social Justice Movements in Communities of Color ed. John Anner (Boston: South End Press, 1996), 9–10. 39. Becky Thompson, “Subverting Racism from Within: Linking White Identity to Activism,” in Becoming and Unbecoming White: Owning and Disowning a Racial Identity, ed. Christine Clark and James O’Donnell (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999), 71; also Susan S. Friedman, “Beyond White and Other: Relationality and Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse,” Signs 21, no. 1 (1995): 1–49. 40. Maureen Ramsey, What’s Wrong with Liberalism? A Radical Critique of Liberal Political Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 1994), 114; Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Rawls: A Reconstruction and Critique of a Theory of Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

83

41. See chapter 2 above. 42. On the role of the reasonable in the design of the original position, see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 25 fn, 28, 48. 43. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 180–83, 272–78. 44. See Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition?” 436–39, 451–53. “Bivalent collectivities” are groups that suffer the effects of both socioeconomic maldistribution and cultural misrecognition. 45. Iris Marion Young, “Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory,” New Left Review 222 (1997): 158–59. 46. Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition?” 445. 47. Fraser, “Social Justice,” 36. 48. Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition,” 203. 49. Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition,” 224. 50. Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition,” 226. 51. Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition,” 228. 52. Fraser, “Social Justice,” 29. 53. Anthony Simon Laden, Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1–22. 54. Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” 179. 55. Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition,” 229. 56. Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition,” 230. 57. Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition,” 230. Rawls, however, rejects Habermas’s distinction between the “thin” procedural role of the theorist and the performative role of citizens who engage in normative deliberation. See chapter 2 above, and John Stopford, “Peirce, Habermas, Rawls, and the Democracy of Signs,” in Pragmata : Festschrift für Klaus Oehler zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Kai-Michael Hingst and Maria Liatsi (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2008), 184. 58. Gerald A. Cohen, “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,” Ethics 99 (1989): 906–44. 59. Paul J. Weithman, Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 13–17. 60. Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim with an introduction by Manfred S. Frings (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1994), 25. Scheler adopts the term “ressentiment” from Nietzsche who, according to Scheler, had already given it a technical meaning. The French ressentiment is used because of the difficulty of discovering a German translation. Scheler thinks the German Groll (rancor) sometimes comes close in meaning. The figure of Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy already exemplifies some of the features of ressentiment later ascribed by Nietzsche to the priestly morality. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), esp. sections 13–15. In the case of Socrates, the decisive reversal occurs when consciousness becomes creative and instinct takes on the role of the critic. The career of Socrates (according to Nietzsche’s reconstruction) marks the end of tragic culture and the beginning of a culture of consciousness and criticism. At this stage, Nietzsche does not yet identify consciousness with

84

CHAPTER 3

negativity. But by the time of his critique of the priestly morality it is “negativity turned creative” that forms the core of ressentiment. Ressentiment is much more than affect or ordinary frustration. It represents a qualitative change in the character of will. See also Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), 47. Sartre focuses on the systematic negativity of ressentiment when he characterizes Scheler’s “man of resentment” ontologically as someone who “establishes their human personality as a perpetual negation.” “There are even men (e.g. caretakers, overseers, gaolers,) whose social reality is uniquely that of the Not, who will live and die, having forever been only a Not upon the earth.” 61. Sartre discusses the case of a young woman involved in a dispute with furriers. She terminates her account of the event with the remark: “Well, they were all Jews.” Why, Sartre asks, did she choose to hate “Jews or furriers rather than such and such a Jew or such and such a furrier?” Jean-Paul Sartre, “Portrait of the Antisemite,” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Meridian, 1975), 331. 62. We need not look far to discover a connection between the politics of identity and many forms of terrorism. Terror is indiscriminate with regard to persons but not to groups. It attacks people not as individuals but as members of a hated class, dispensing with the moral categories of guilt and innocence insofar as these apply to individuals. The structural character of ressentiment is evident in ideological thinking that takes starkly abstract ontological categories as patterns for voluntaristic group action. It is this kind of ressentiment that underlies what Camus calls la terreur rationnelle (rational terror) and the ideologies of modern totalitarianism. See Albert Camus, L’Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). 63. Scheler, Ressentiment, 25. 64. See Manfred S. Frings, introduction to Scheler, Ressentiment, 9. 65. Neil J. Kressel, Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror (New York: Plenum, 1996), 1. 66. On the “language” of National Socialism, for example, see Victor Klemperer, LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen (Leipzig: Reclam, 1996). 67. Frings, introduction, 7: “One must, reading Scheler’s text, come to the conclusion that throughout terrorism resentment is prone to be found among those who do not place bombs to kill, etc., but among those who stay behind such acts . . . among sympathizers of violence rather than among the criminals themselves doing violence.” 68. The 1948 Human Rights Convention was the first major step in this direction. Richards holds that the “right against unjust discrimination . . . is now as constitutionally fundamental as the right of free speech.” David A. J. Richards, Free Speech and the Politics of Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 36. 69. The European Union’s Council of Ministers formally condemned racism and xenophobia at the Maastricht Summit in December 1991. Legal scholars began to use the terms “hate crime” and “bias crime” with increasing frequency in the early 1990s. Hate crime legislation sometimes increases penalties for acts motivated by a victim’s affiliation with a specific social or cultural group. Estimates of the incidence of hate crime vary considerably over even short periods, and the criteria invoked to identify crimes as crimes of hate are often unclear. See James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter, Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 97–98.

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

85

70. Hate speech is often taken to embrace words, whether written or spoken, and symbolic acts that convey a negative assessment of particular people or groups based on factors such as race, gender, or sexual preference. On the history of the term, see Samuel Walker, Hate Speech: The History of an American Controversy (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 8–9. 71. As quoted in Jacobs and Potter, Hate Crimes, 3, this wording is from the Wisconsin hate crime statute §939.645 upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Wisconsin v. Mitchell [(92–515), 508 U.S. 476 (1993)]. In the late 1980s, Canada introduced a hate speech bill broadening existing hate crime laws to embrace hate speech connected with age, gender, or mental disability. The US Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act of 1994 was extended in 1998 to encompass crimes motivated by prejudice based on race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, origin or ancestry 72. Critics point out that the British Race Relations Act of 1965, which outlawed racist defamation, was sometimes misused to persecute activists of color, trade unions, and antinuclear protesters. South African laws against racial hatred, enacted during the apartheid regime, were likewise turned against victims of state apartheid policies. 73. See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: John B. Alden, 1885), 29–93. 74. Mill, On Liberty, 70. 75. The orthodox interpretation of the U.S. First Amendment is that it is impermissible to posit regulation of protected expression on its content. Justice John Paul Stevens has argued, however, that there is a “hierarchy of speech.” Speech may be regulated on grounds of content when the expression plays little or no role in the exposition of ideas. According to Lasson, the greatest protection within this hierarchy is to be “given to speech near the pinnacle: political discussion and debate.” See Kenneth Lasson, “To Stimulate, Provoke, or Incite: Hate Speech and the First Amendment,” in Group Defamation and Freedom of Speech: The Relationship between Language and Violence, ed. Monroe H. Freedman and Eric M. Freedman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 271. 76. Mill, On Liberty, 34–47. 77. Mill, On Liberty, 32–35. 78. On the distinction between advocacy and incitement, see Alan M. Dershowitz, The Best Defense (New York: Random House, 1982), 221–22. To pass the “fighting words” test, speech must be addressed to individuals, personally abusive, and by its very utterance inflict injury or tend to “incite an immediate breach of the peace.” See Jacobs and Potter, Hate Crimes, 113–14. 79. According to the Stanford Code, speech must fulfill three conditions to be classified as hate speech. It must (a) be intended to stigmatize or harm another individual based on specific characteristics; (b) be directly addressed to the individual; and (c) convey hatred or contempt for the individual to whom it is addressed. See Andrew Altman, “Liberalism and Campus Hate Speech: A Philosophical Examination,” Ethics 103, no. 2 (1993): 302–17. Stanford targeted only direct person-to-person speech that is intended to harm a particular individual. Other codes aimed at hate speech and discriminatory harassment were judged to be too broad and vague, and challenged on First Amendment grounds. 80. See, for example, Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 248–89; Bradley R. Smith,

86

CHAPTER 3

“The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate,” in Documents of American Prejudice: An Anthology of Writings on Race from Thomas Jefferson to David Duke, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 415–22. The strategy of revisionists may be to exploit a desire for normalization, or as Librett puts it, “‘emancipation’ from the memory of the Holocaust in Germany.” See Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 277. 81. Similar restrictions apply in many European countries, such as Poland and France. In France it is illegal to dispute the occurrence of the crimes against humanity identified by the military tribunals at Nuremberg. In Canada, hate and antipornography laws, and laws against spreading false news have been applied to Holocaust denial cases. 82. See Federal Republic of Germany Strafgesetzbuch (Penal Code), Sections 130 (Volksverhetzung), 185 (Beleidigung), 189 (Verunglimpfung des Andenkens Verstorbener), Bundesministerium der Justiz: www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/BJNR001270871.html (accessed January 8, 2008). Richards is skeptical about arguments that would restrict speech on the grounds that it constitutes an affront to the honor or dignity of some individual or groups. See Richards, Free Speech and the Politics of Identity, 31, 157. 83. This quotation is from a decision cited in Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 107. On the Auschwitzlüge, see also Eric Stein, “History Against Free Speech: The New German Law Against the ‘Auschwitz’—and Other—‘Lies,’” Michigan Law Review 85, no. 2 (1986): 277–324. 84. Abstract endangerment (ein abstraktes Gefährdungsdelikt) is a form of remote harm involving actions that increase the risk that someone will commit a particular kind of crime. Such actions may be prohibited even though it is not known whether a harm would materialize in any particular case. 85. Fraser, “Social Justice,” 74. 86. Fraser, “Social Justice,” 76–77. 87. Fraser, “Social Justice,” 74. 88. Fraser “Social Justice,” 75. 89. S. James Anaya, Indigenous Peoples in International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 99–100. 90. Guntram F. A. Werther, Self-Determination in Western Democracies: Aboriginal Politics in a Comparative Perspective (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 10. 91. Werther, Self-Determination, 1–11. 92. Werther, Self-Determination, 8–16. On the definition of indigenousness, and the international instruments that use the term, see Patrick Thornberry, Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), esp. 55. 93. Anaya, Indigenous Peoples, 3–4. 94. Thornberry, Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights, 7, 229, 401, 404. The role of cultural integrity in the self-determination of indigenous peoples is one of the main topics of the International Labor Organization’s Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, ILO Convention no. 169, 72 ILO Official Bull. 59. June 27, 1989, entered into force September 5, 1991 (Geneva: International Labour Organization). www.ohchr.org/english/law/indigenous.htm (accessed January 15, 2008). Convention no. 169 rejects the assimilationist tendency of earlier agreements, recognizing the

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

87

claims of indigenous peoples to control their own institutions to the extent that this is compatible with self-government. The convention also recognizes other rights connected with self-definition, self-government, and the possession of land, territory, and cultural integrity. 95. Anaya, Indigenous Peoples, 100. 96. Nguyen Thi Dieu, “The State versus Indigenous Peoples: The Impact of Hydraulic Projects on Indigenous Peoples of Asia,” Journal of World History 7, no. 1 (1996): 126. 97. Y. N. Kly, ed., A Popular Guide to Minority Rights (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 1995), 201. See also Sven E. Olsson and Dave Lewis, “Welfare Rules and Indigenous Rights: The Sami People and the Nordic Welfare States,” in Social Welfare with Indigenous Peoples, ed. John Dixon and Robert P. Scheurell (New York: Routledge, 1995), 141–85. 98. Native Title Act (Commonwealth of Australia), No. 110 of 1993. http:// www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/num_act/nta1993147/ (accessed January 8, 2008); also Frank Brennan, The Wik Debate: Its Impact on Aborigines, Pastoralists and Miners (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998), esp. chapter 3. 99. The domestic law of the United States recognizes Native American tribes as political entities with internal self-determination, but distinguishes this from selfdetermination in international law, which includes sovereignty over land resources. 100. Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights is sometimes taken to provide the normative framework for a catalogue of cultural rights, and researchers have identified as many as fifty cultural rights in eleven categories. United Nations, International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), December 16, 1966, U.N.G.A. Res. 2200A (XXI), entered into force January 3, 1976 (Geneva: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights). http://www.unhchr .ch/html/menu3/b/a_cescr.htm (accessed January 8, 2008). On classifying cultural rights, see Jacob T. Levy, “Classifying Cultural Rights,” in NOMOS XXXIX: Ethnicity and Group Rights, ed. Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 22–66. 101. Anaya, Indigenous Peoples, 100–1. See International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, December 16, 1966, U.N.G.A. Res. 2200A (XXI), art. 27, 999 U.N.T.S. 171, entered into force March 23, 1976 (Geneva: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights). http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm (accessed January 15, 2008); cited in Anaya, Indigenous Peoples, 114. 102. Anaya, Indigenous Peoples, 101. See also Brennan, The Wik Debate, 9: “Until the Mabo case, it was presumed that Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders had no rights to land other than those granted by the colonising power. The presumption was that the land was terra nullius, being ‘practically unoccupied’ at the time of British ‘settlement,’ when the sovereignty of the Crown was asserted over the territory in which indigenous Australians happened to be living.” 103. Anaya, Indigenous Peoples, 101. See United Nations, ICCPR, Article 27. 104. Yael (Yuli) Tamir, “Against Collective Rights,” in Rights, Culture, and the Law: Themes from the Legal and Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. Lukas H. Meyer, Stanley L. Paulson, and Thomas W. Pogge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 185.

88

CHAPTER 3

105. See Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz, “National Self-Determination,” Journal of Philosophy 87, no. 9 (1990): 439–61, cited here as reprinted in Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 125–45. See also Thomas Hurka, “The Justification of National Partiality,” in McKim and McMahan, Morality of Nationalism, 139–57. Margalit and Raz use the term “group rights.” 106. Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, 52. 107. Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 137–41. 108. Margalit, The Decent Society, 139. 109. Margalit and Raz, “National Self-Determination,” 135. 110. Margalit and Raz, “National Self-Determination,” 141. 111. Margalit and Raz, “National Self-Determination,” 141. 112. David Copp, “Democracy and Communal Self-Determination,” in McKim and McMahan, Morality of Nationalism, 285–90. 113. Margalit and Raz, “National Self-Determination,” 141. 114. Copp, “Democracy and Communal Self-Determination,” 285. 115. See Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, 58, where Raz refers to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 116. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, 34. 117. Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 221–33; Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 165–71. See also chapter 2 above. Kymlicka holds that a cultural structure is not something “abstract or ethereal,” as Dworkin’s view might suggest. Culture is involved in most aspects of social activity and “provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres.” Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 76. 118. Dworkin, A Matter of Principle, 229. 119. Dworkin, A Matter of Principle, 231. 120. Dworkin, A Matter of Principle, 230. 121. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 77. 122. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 177–78. 123. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 178. 124. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 165. 125. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 164. See also Will Kymlicka, “Modernity and National Identity,” in Ethnic Challenges to the Modern Nation State, ed. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Yoav Peled, Alberto Spektorowski (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000), 22: “To understand the meaning of a social practice, therefore, requires understanding this ‘shared vocabulary’—that is, understanding the language and history which constitute that vocabulary. Whether or not a course of action has any significance for us depends on whether, and how, our language renders vivid to us the point of that activity; and the way in which language renders vivid these activities is shaped by our history, our

CULTURE AND IDENTIT Y

89

traditions and conventions. Understanding these cultural narratives is a precondition for making intelligent judgments about how to lead our lives.” 126. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 36. 127. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 37. 128. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 169. 129. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 170. 130. Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal, “A Response to Amélie Oksenberg Rorty,” Social Research 62, no. 1 (1995): 172. 131. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 83. 132. James Griffin, “Group Rights,” in Meyer, Paulson, and Pogge, Rights, Culture, and The Law, 174. 133. Griffin, “Group Rights,” 174. 134. Griffin, “Group Rights,” 173. 135. Griffin, “Group Rights,” 173. 136. Griffin, “Group Rights,” 174. 137. Thus Waldron suggests that “a freewheeling cosmopolitan life, lived in a kaleidoscope of cultures” may well be both possible and fulfilling. See Jeremy Waldron, “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25, no. 3 (1992): 762, quoted in Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 85. See also Waldron’s “Teaching Cosmopolitan Right,” in Citizenship and Education in LiberalDemocratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities, ed. Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 39. 138. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 85; Kymlicka thinks that Waldron confuses genuine movement between societal cultures with enjoyment of “the opportunities provided by the diverse societal culture which characterizes the anglophone society of the United States.” 139. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 222. 140. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, 132. 141. George A. Borden, Cultural Orientation: An Approach to Understanding Intercultural Communication (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), 179–81. 142. Borden, Cultural Orientation, 186.

CHAPTER 4

Education

The degeneration of public culture is a favorite theme of cultural critics.1 Many blame what they see as a general malaise on an exaggerated respect for diversity, and on the demise of obligatory forms of knowledge. Students in schools, colleges, and universities are no longer required to gain familiarity with a common core of knowledge consisting of the “best that has been thought and known.”2 Prerequisite courses have almost disappeared from the curriculum at universities. General education courses, when offered, sacrifice depth to diversification.

Education, Diversity, Cultural Competence Some hold that an education based on the Western canon can supply students with the intellectual framework, sentiments, and dispositions they need to become reflective and conscientious members of the community.3 Such an education may be based in part on knowledge of great books that have a universal validity and transcend accidental local differences: “Essential to such a course is a common core of readings, modifiable from time to time, in the absence of which a coherent, unified program of studies in Western culture, yet allowing for diversified approaches, cannot be achieved.”4 Great books are often deemed to constitute a source of privileged experiences. They have a “strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.”5 The belief in the uniqueness of such works, and of the culture they represent, reflects a perfectionism that has left its mark on most social and political institutions, but on schools in particular. It is the view that education should lead children and students toward an understanding and appreciation of the highest personal, moral, 91

92

CHAPTER 4

and aesthetic values. There may be disagreement about what these highest values are, just as there may be disagreement about which books belong to the canon. But the idea that such values exist, and that they should shape and direct learning, is common to most forms of educational perfectionism. One person’s privileged experience may be another’s anathema. Radicals argue the role of the canon is ideological. It embodies the ruling ideas of the ruling classes. Traditional critics mistake literary preference for the whole of literature. The “great tradition” oversimplifies and distorts cultural history. The task of educational ideology critique is to unmask the interests disguised by such intellectual edifices and to politicize curriculums. Foucault fashioned a philosophical discipline out of the rehabilitation of the “subjugated knowledges” marginalized by the Western canon.6 It is “through the re-appearance of this knowledge, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work.”7 Poststructuralists dismantled traditional conceptions of writing and of the author as a quasi-theological origin of significance.8 But one need not be a political radical to query the universality of a perfectionist general education or a canon of great books. Familiarity with the literary perspective of more than one culture suggests that each country has its own representations of various literatures, both its own and others. The perception of English literature in France, Egypt, or Russia is different from the perception of English literature in England or the United States. The French Byron is as different from the English Byron as the German Shakespeare or the English Racine. Some have argued that literary and aesthetic canons should be seen as useful, perhaps indispensable, aids in the organization of perception; schemata rather than organons of cultural truth. This is one way of understanding the role of the Western art historical canon: “Those who had grasped this simple system knew on entering a museum where to glance, where to look, where to stand in admiration and where to turn away with disgust.” The schema adopted by Vasari from Pliny “would not have survived so long if it had not brought the advantage of an ordered hierarchy into the teeming world of art.”9 There is a difference between prizing the canon as a model of cultural perfection and referring to it as a guide for the perplexed. Abandoning the canon may confront the student with the difficulty of organizing a mass of information, impressions, and sources without the benefits of ordered hierarchy. But it may also present the opportunity for a more discriminating appreciation of cultural context. The canon can be viewed as a record of what others thought or think excellent for whatever reasons, omitting much more than it includes. It is a starting point. The key, in the words of Gombrich, is to lift the burden of fear without killing respect.10 To seek independent reasons for valuing a work that is no longer assured automatic approval does not make that work any the less important or interesting.

EDUCATION

93

Critics of the Western canon would perhaps reject this heuristic reappropriation of a paradigm they regard as tendentious. In societies characterized by extreme inequalities of power and wealth, the hierarchy of texts mirrors the hierarchy of privilege. Modern education still bears many of the marks of Platonist perfectionism, reserving the highest knowledge for a few and dismissing the many as incapable of rational insight.11 Those who do not advance to superior scholarship will never acquire the exalted forms of knowledge. The demands of work lead most people to abandon the higher “moral” part of education at an early age. Traditional humanistic education is associated with distinctions of race, class, and merit, and the elaborate apparatuses of testing and assessment used to stream children can hardly be separated from presuppositions and prejudices about what constitutes intelligence or the aptitudes on which it rests. Children fail when they are forced to participate in models of schooling that are incompatible with their cultural backgrounds. Their poor performance may be attributable not to inferior intelligence but to the one-sidedness of an education that does not allow for cultural difference. Multiculturalists argue that humanistic liberal arts curriculums do not reflect the demographic diversity of pluralistic political communities. “Culture, Ideas, and Values”—the Stanford University multicultural requirement—was intended to integrate new social and cultural perspectives into the university by replacing required courses in Western civilization with a more diverse selection of optional courses. But this and similar programs were themselves charged with biases of representation and reverse discrimination against excluded traditional perspectives. While coquetting with nontraditional philosophies and religions, works by women, minority authors and non-Europeans, they failed to do justice to major religions and cultural forces such as Islam or Confucianism, and trivialized other areas of inquiry.12 Defenders of the ousted Stanford Western civilization requirement argued the traditional courses in Western culture, far from being racist or glorifying the status quo, were “essential to understanding the world of our own experience, regardless of whether one seeks to alter or preserve it. Indeed, the ideals of tolerance, the limitations of ethno-centrism, the Utopian visions invoked by critics of Western society and its institutions are all expressed in the literature studied in the course in Western culture. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that of all cultures of which we have knowledge, Western culture has been the most critical of itself.”13 Such courses of study provided basic conceptual tools that enriched “the internal landscape of the student’s mind, regardless of the individual’s specialized vocational choice.”14 The Western civilization requirement represented not a single cultural perspective but a common legacy embracing “conflicting traditions including those of dissent.”15 Its aim was not to indoctrinate or use required texts

94

CHAPTER 4

to impose definitive meanings or morals on students. The point was to encourage them to cultivate a broader perspective on life—to make religious dogmatists aware of the power of skepticism and skeptics see “the force of the logic of beliefs in transcendence in its strongest and most sophisticated form.”16 But a tradition of conflicting traditions is still a tradition. That the Western tradition itself encompasses conflicting traditions does not imply the range of those traditions reflects the cultural diversity of a modern pluralist society. Nor does it follow from the fact that Western culture comprises a complex of conflicting traditions that this complex does not itself form a tradition with a particular character—universal, perhaps, from the perspective of those who belong to it, but contingent for others. Even if a course is designed to encourage the development of critical abilities, the ways in which those abilities are taught may be an important, perhaps the most important, part of the educational process. Religious skepticism and dogmatic religious belief form a distinctively Western opposition, and the capacity for critical judgment acquired against this background may be different from the capacity for judgment gained in a different cultural context. There is no guarantee that studying skepticism will teach students to be skeptical, or religion to be religious. Even less can we expect them to become critical thinkers because the literary, religious, philosophical, and metaphysical works that they study have been cataloged as “Western.” What counts is not the catalog but the works themselves, and what we can find in them. A single teacher with insight may find more in a page or a paragraph of a marginal work than a column of professors armed with great books. Appeals to the intrinsic pluralism of the Western tradition do little to allay concerns that mainstream education may compel the children of minorities to see themselves through the eyes of a dominant culture. Cultural difference is often more a matter of competence than of content. The role of cultural competences and enculturation in education is often overlooked, and no amount of curricular adjustment may be enough to correct it. Fair equality of opportunity calls for equalization of access to training and skills. But a lack of proficiency in the cultural abilities that enable someone to negotiate a dominant culture may be decisive in blocking children’s prospects, regardless of their other skills and qualifications. Standard cultural abilities may be gained with ease by those whose background has prepared them to do so, but acquiring these abilities may prove difficult for those whose cultural background has left them unprepared.17 To live and communicate within a culture, it is not enough to understand its language. Cultural understanding presupposes competence in a structured body of background skills, abilities, and other forms of know-how. To have a cultural competence or to be “culturally literate” is to possess the codes and the contextual knowledge necessary to communicate and function in a given social and cultural environment.18 Such codes may be both verbal and nonverbal.19 Early students of in-

EDUCATION

95

tercultural competence stressed the importance of nonverbal communication between members of different cultures by means of dress, body movement, facial expression, eye contact, gaze, and touch. Most of these forms of communication are culturally specific and may constitute fully fledged semiotic systems.20 The contextual knowledge contained in a cultural competence may include an understanding not only of symbols, myths, rituals, and customs but also of schemata, scripts, and other prototypes of culturally expected behaviors that prescribe appropriateness in different social situations—knowledge of what to say to whom when, communicative style, how to open and close conversations, and suitable topics of conversation.21 The forms of know-how that compose such a competence usually involve skillful attention rather than detached reflection. They are based not on intellectual acts but on understanding how to do things. The person who knows how to shake hands, how to respond in a suitable way to common cultural symbols, how to accept an invitation, or how to take part in a meal, does not rely on reflection to do so, even if reflection makes them want to perform these actions in the first place. Although they rely on subtle discriminations and behaviors, such skills recede into the background once mastered. They become transparent for those who have acquired them and opaque for those who have not. Those who possess them may no longer be aware that they do so. The transparency of skill is one of the main obstacles to communication between members of different cultures. Abilities that are complex and challenging to learn acquire a specious simplicity that makes them easy to overlook and awkward to evaluate. An outsider may not only be unable to recognize, understand, or produce the skilled behaviors that are needed to participate in another culture: they may not realize that they are unable to do so. As we saw above, the normal case in intercultural experience is frequently not understanding but misunderstanding. Miscues and breakdowns are frequent. Two businesspeople may fail to close a deal because they lack the cultural competences needed to understand each other. Children who lack the standard competences of the culture in which they are being educated may seem disorganized or unintelligent. When their first language is not that of the classroom, students may appear to be less able. Subtle but significant cultural differences may be interpreted as signs of intellectual inferiority. A student’s cultural competence is likely to have a decisive impact on the way he or she is perceived and evaluated, and on the course of future learning. A lack of cultural understanding may be mistaken for clumsiness, ineptness, or unintelligence. Educators may be imperfectly aware of such disparities in competence and may make correspondingly inaccurate judgments about the capacities and potential of schoolchildren and students. Cultural bias may be subtle, manifested in the exclusion not only of minorityrelated content, but also of nonstandard language patterns and narrative styles.

96

CHAPTER 4

Many schoolteachers prefer linear, single-topic storytelling to topic-associating narrative styles. Topic-centered stories are characterized by tightly structured sentences, thematic coherence, and a clear thematic progression. They reflect on a limited set of closely related topics and are explicit and rich in detail, emphasizing telling rather than showing.22 Topic-associating stories consist of a series of associated segments that seem anecdotal and imply connections among a broad range of topics that need not be presented in temporal sequences but must be inferred by the reader or listener.23 Children who tell topic-associating stories may be called on less and interrupted more than those who tell topic-centered stories. They may be considered chaotic or intellectually inferior. Although their work is logical, the logic is “embedded in different discourse strategies, strategies that conformed to the students’ own discourse communities.” “The inability of teachers to comprehend and negotiate meaning with students whose discourse structures fall outside of mainstream ways with words often leads to what Michaels refers to as a ‘differential treatment of the student.’”24 These difficulties may lead teachers to lower their expectations of such students, thus limiting their access to school-based literacy. The discursive structure of teaching materials such as textbooks and children’s literature and its impact on students with nonstandard cultural competences may be largely invisible to teachers. The textbook is not only a vehicle for communicating information but also a piece of educational technology that emphasizes specific ways of constructing and organizing information.25 Such influences may be subtle, conveyed not through the explicit exclusion of minorityrelated content and perspectives but through biases of language pattern and narrative strategy. The barriers such factors place in the path of participation derive from a selectivity of competence rather than of content. Curricular design may not even acknowledge, far less address these sources of misunderstanding and unfairness. Educators are often encouraged to show sensitivity to differences in cultural beliefs and practices, to question their assumptions and stereotypes about other cultures, and examine the ways in which these may affect their professional judgment. Recognition of the depth and pervasiveness of cultural difference has spawned an industry of cultural reeducation and sensitivity training, the aim of which is to increase understanding of the differences that impede communication and mutual understanding. It is rightly observed that cultural sensitivity is a condition of the effectiveness, not only of teachers, but also of social workers, doctors, psychologists, and government. Such sensitivity is hard to develop, and the seemingly simple requirement that the educator should take account of the culture of the learner difficult to satisfy. It presupposes not merely awareness of cultural difference but of the differ-

EDUCATION

97

ent cultural competences, both one’s own and the other’s, that make such diversity possible. But it is just this self-awareness that the transparency of skillful activity obscures. It is only when we face a cultural situation in which our competences do not work that we begin to notice them and realize that they matter. Even then, an awareness of cultural difference may show up only gradually.26 Incongruities in our dealings with others may be blamed on the oddness and eccentricity of a culture that is not our own. We are slow to grasp that our ways of doing things may appear equally strange to others. A considerable path of reflection may be necessary before a person comes to understand that many of the skills they have acquired during their lives would have been different had they grown up in a different culture, class, or age.

Multicultural Reason Some educationalists argue the virtues of reasonableness should form the core of a multicultural education. The classroom supplies the context in which future citizens can learn tolerance and mutual respect. These virtues are necessary to combat racism, cultural denial, and the subtle forms of discrimination that can poison the life of a democracy. Democratic self-government requires active citizenship; an appreciation of the causes of structural inequality; of what it means to belong to a certain race, class, gender, religion, or ethnicity; and the capacity to think critically about controversial social and political issues. “To foster a democracy that is reflective and deliberative, rather than simply a marketplace of competing interest groups . . . we must produce citizens who have the Socratic capacity to reason about their beliefs.”27 Reasonableness involves the ability to think critically. But what is criticism? Who is to teach it, and how is it to be taught? Passmore observes that although many teachers have critical abilities, most also have beliefs they are reluctant to submit to criticism.28 “Even if the teacher is himself critical, there may be social pressure upon him not to admit that certain beliefs, certain practices, certain authorities, can properly be examined in a critical spirit.”29 Though the ability to think critically may be valued, educators often consider it less important than proper socialization, or training people to play a productive role in the workforce. Critical discussion is postponed as curricular content expands.30 Critical thinking cannot be equated with competence in the theory of criticism.31 Students do not learn to think critically by increasing their objective knowledge of a particular subject matter, though such knowledge may do no harm. Critical capacities cannot be inculcated as though all they depend on is right habits of thought. A person does not become reasonable by learning to recite arguments.32 Passmore suggests critical thinking can only flourish in an

98

CHAPTER 4

educational context that is neither authoritarian nor paternalistic. It requires that students gain “a body of knowledge, a set of habits, from which criticism can take its departure,” and learn to debate problems and questions for which there is no obvious solution or right answer.33 Teachers must confront students with such problems, “challenging the mind to take charge of its own thought,” as Nussbaum puts it.34 Critical confrontation does not seek to impose new beliefs. It encourages students to reflect on the beliefs they already have. Are ideals of reasonableness and critical openness themselves vehicles of cultural prejudice? Does an education that fosters them compel students, under the guise of neutrality, to adopt a cognitive style that is peculiarly Western? Liberalism has been criticized for promoting individualistic and competitive values. Individualism is contrasted, often unfavorably, with a collectivism that underlines the value of shared beliefs and mutual attachments. What the classical humanist regards as a stoic confrontation with the passivity of the student may be viewed by others as a combative posturing that is more likely to intimidate than challenge. The spirit of criticism, viewed from this perspective, is infected by its association with Western values and an agonistic discourse of independence and self-sufficiency. Reason and ideals of individual autonomy play only a marginal role in many cultures. Minority students often come from backgrounds that emphasize social interdependence, collectivism, collaboration, and group learning. Western conceptions of rationality are at best unfamiliar and at worst alienating. Where individualistic cultures stress self-reliance and freedom, collectivist cultures attach significance to the family and encompassing social groups. They approach moral problems with a sensibility that is responsive to the ethical features of particular situations rather than engaging in dialog and criticism guided by universalistic norms.35 Dissatisfaction with ideals of autonomy has led to the suggestion that teacher training should prioritize positive social interdependence over selfactualization. Social interdependence is positive “when one perceives that one is linked with others in a way so that one cannot succeed unless they do (and vice versa).”36 It is negative in competitive situations when students perceive that the success of others reduces their own chances of success. A liberal education might be expected to equip children from collectivist cultures to develop the political virtues and reasonableness in ways that are consistent with the positive interdependence that their backgrounds have taught them to value. Can educators embrace these apparently conflicting demands? If we think of reason as a fundamental kind of competence, then we might view the capacities for positive interdependence and critical independence as component competences, capable of coexisting in a single individual. Critical capacities can be exercised in the spirit of positive interdependence when a person believes that in

EDUCATION

99

doing so they are furthering some common goal. Education can be conceived as a balancing act between independence and interdependence—subcompetences that make distinct but compatible demands on the learner. Students can be taught to be aware of the meanings that define their local cultural situation, with its dependencies and responsibilities.37 But they can also, as Nussbaum suggests, be encouraged to develop a critical consciousness of diversity through contact with other cultures and perspectives, and through criticism of dominant traditions (such as the European Enlightenment).38 A curriculum that cultivates world citizenship, for example, might make the local knowledge of the home culture central, but present it in such a way as to remind students of the broader context to which it belongs.39 Rawls’s account of a liberal cosmopolitan education is painted with a broad brush. He mentions only that citizens should be taught that apostasy is not a legal crime, along with knowledge of their constitutional rights and the liberties, especially liberty of conscience. Their “education should also prepare them to be fully cooperating members of society and enable them to be self-supporting; it should also encourage the political virtues so that they want to honor the fair terms of social cooperation in their relations with the rest of society.”40 This is less demanding than liberal views that require the state to foster a comprehensive ideal of autonomy. In Political Liberalism, Rawls characterizes justice as fairness as a purely political conception that does not propose a metaphysical doctrine or comprehensive view of the good—it is “political not metaphysical.”41 Democratic politics cannot be founded on a common conception of the good, not even one that is liberal. This caveat applies not only to traditional teleological views already rejected in the original position, but also to the comprehensive liberalism of philosophers such as Kant or Mill. Nussbaum cites Mill’s criticisms of Calvinism in On Liberty to illustrate the way in which a comprehensive liberal view can fuse ideas about social tolerance with an exclusive view of the good.42 It is this mixture of the liberal and the exclusive that political liberalism wants to avoid. In a pluralistic democracy, we must settle for an overlapping consensus that each citizen can affirm as a “module” from the perspective of their own comprehensive doctrine.43 Rawls uses the term “reasonable pluralism” to express the idea that a plurality of conflicting, irreconcilable, yet reasonable doctrines is a permanent feature of free societies.44 Disagreement in good faith is “not only possible but predictable,” as Waldron puts it.45 Recognizing this, we will not be quick to question the reasonableness of those with whom we disagree. To acknowledge the existence of reasonable disagreement is to accept what Rawls calls the “burdens of judgment.”46 Judgment is a burden because when disagreement occurs we cannot simply dismiss those with whom we disagree as irrational or unreasonable.

100

CHAPTER 4

We must first consider whether disagreement and controversy derive not from differences of doctrine or belief, but from the difficulty of evaluating and weighting evidence, the indeterminacy of moral concepts, or the differences in life experience that people bring to bear on judgments about complex issues in modern society.47 Callan suggests the idea of an overlapping consensus may rest on a problematic compartmentalization of public and private selves. “To retain a lively understanding of the burdens of judgement in political contexts while suppressing it everywhere else would require a spectacular feat of self-deception that cannot be squared with personal integrity.”48 Assuming the burdens of judgment will not only shape the way children approach their public roles as citizens but also refashion their views as private individuals. Personal and political values cannot be held apart. A political liberal education is as likely as any other education to inhibit the values of the home and its culture. To send children to public schools in which they learn the art of reasonable disagreement is to expose them to the challenges of skepticism: “the dialogical task of common education is always a risky undertaking that many of us will regard with ambivalence at best. The unavoidable risk is that our children might be shaken in their commitment to values we cherish and have good reason to cherish, and the depth of our expressive interest in child-rearing makes us recoil from that possible outcome.”49 Must public and private competences compete? Or does justice merely require that children develop the capacity to understand themselves in different roles at different times and perhaps in different respects, without duplicity? Rawls holds that reasonableness itself can be understood in different ways and from different points of view. The art of the educator consists in helping children to discover ways of being reasonable from a perspective that does not jar with their backgrounds. An overlapping consensus is more an overlapping way of looking at things than a system of thought. To help children discover such perspectives is not necessarily to teach public skepticism about any particular way of life, or to impose public forms of thought on private lives. On the contrary, a public system of education that encouraged a sense of justice by systematically undermining people’s seriously held convictions about the good life, or the competences on which they depend, would be self-defeating and unjust.50 It may also be misleading to assume that the competences on which the liberal virtues depend can be cultivated only in dialog. Skills and competences, including the skills on which reasonableness depends, may be acquired in activities and situations that involve neither dialog nor reflection. There are other ways of negotiating the difficult relationship between public and private morality. Toleration and other political virtues may be cultivated not merely by the teacher in the classroom but also by the design of schools as institutions at the intersection of the public and private worlds. The public sphere is not a physical place but a

EDUCATION

101

framework within which relationships between people from different backgrounds and cultures are defined. Different educational models can balance private and public values in different ways, reflecting a diversity of social, cultural, and historical factors. What Levinson calls the “English model” provides for the right of minorities and others who have common educational values to set up voluntary aided schools. “In theory . . . this model (and English law) permit the public school essentially to accommodate itself to private commitments, functioning almost as an extension of the child’s private upbringing as opposed to establishing a rigidly differentiated public space or institution.”51 Because it does not provide for a rigidly differentiated public space, the English model may not do enough to promote toleration or cultivate civic openness. A school designed to reflect the good of a particular community will hardly equip schoolchildren and students to grasp the contingency of their attachments. Principles of toleration and mutual respect cannot be learned through abstract discussion alone. The only forum in which civic virtue can flourish is a practical one in which pupils experience different ways of life rather than simply discussing them “within the safety of mutually reinforcing, homogenous groups.”52 Levinson thinks that identification with a shared public space, a “national public square” in miniature, may be an important factor in generating allegiance to public values. Direct interaction with children from different backgrounds in such a space may nourish tolerance and civic virtue. Schools that cultivate exclusionary neutrality respect the integrity of individuals’ private values by excluding controversial subject matter from the curriculum. Thus French “students . . . are expected to shed their commitments at the school door in order to enter as equals the ‘public square’ represented by the school.” Obtrusive religious symbols and ethnic clothing are not allowed, and students may not miss school or omit parts of the curriculum for religious reasons. French history is taught through “universally apprehensible ideas and movements.”53 The strategy of exclusionary neutrality recognizes and encourages respect for difference only to the extent that doing so does not threaten the national public identity. While exclusionary neutrality errs toward asssimilationism, what Levinson calls “inclusionary neutrality” (represented by the “American” school model) strives for educational neutrality through policies of equal inclusion rather than equal exclusion. The school is a public identity “in which all private individuals and identities find inclusion.” The public sphere within the school must adapt to the needs and commitments of students “somehow accommodating all conceptions of the good.”54 Inclusionary neutrality creates a forum in which toleration, respect, and civic identification can be learned. But Levinson also sees the risk of a balkanization of schools through exaggerated inclusiveness: if “the public school fails to establish clearly enough its shared, public character, then private identifications and commitments may continue to hold sway.”55

102

CHAPTER 4

Each of these approaches has its limitations. Exclusionary neutrality is predestined to become a vehicle of state perfectionism, nurturing a public sphere that substitutes the values of the state for those of the individual. It may sacrifice the competences associated with positive interdependence by enforcing a public realm the boundaries of which are rigidly prescribed by the state. Inclusionary neutrality may fail to establish a framework in which public standards of reasonableness can be cultivated. It may encourage values of positive interdependence by emphasizing inclusion. In doing so, however, it may neglect the competences associated with autonomy and personal independence. Patterns of inclusion and exclusion are not value free. Exclusionary institutions are often instruments of state perfectionism. Public arrangements that stress inclusiveness may favor competences associated with positive interdependence. But in the ideal case, public education would foster the competences associated with public autonomy as well as those associated with positive interdependence. This would require that students learn to detach themselves from their home cultures just enough to grasp the reasonableness of the demands made by the overall social and political framework, while sustaining the cooperative social competences needed to participate in that framework and maintain their allegiances to particular value systems.

Dialog as Reasonableness It is sometimes argued that the goal of public schooling should be to provide a minimalist common education and that this can “include no more than the lowest common denominator in a society’s understanding of what its children should learn.”56 Such an education may seem deficient by traditional standards. The more diverse society becomes, the more modest its expectations about what children must know. The search for educational consensus leads to a progressive dilution of content and value. Many liberals think that it is a mistake to make a common educational content into the essential feature of public education. They favor, instead, a critical basic education which, rather than imparting a particular subject matter or tradition, teaches ways of thinking—problem-solving, critical thought, and communication—and the capacity to have value. An educational philosophy that focuses on forms and attitudes of thought rather than on obligation and community involvement is not without risk. It may cultivate the critical attitude at the expense of a relationship to any tradition, except perhaps the tradition of criticism itself. Reasonableness requires citizens to grasp the existence of a multiplicity of different perspectives, because, as Callan puts it, “without a broad sensitivity to the many reasonable perspectives that acceptance of the burdens of judgement entails, the virtue of reasonableness

EDUCATION

103

simply does not exist.”57 To what extent does reasonableness need us to distance ourselves from our own situations and points of view? At what point does the capacity to make distinctions and the encouragement of disagreement and doubt as a means to the discovery of truth become mere cleverness without a relation to tradition? There is a sense in which schoolchildren must learn detachment if they are to become reasonable. “We can accept other peoples’ conceptions of the good as reasonable . . . only if we are able to see our own commitments as in some way contingent. This sense of contingency demands in turn a level of intellectual, if not emotional, detachment from our own conceptions of the good; i.e., we must accept some version of the burdens of judgement.”58 But the rhetoric of detachment is misleading if it suggests that reason and criticism are opposed to loyalty and commitment. What they may do is change a person’s understanding of their commitments and, more important, of what it means to have a commitment. The development of reasonableness is prefigured in what Rawls calls the “morality of association.”59 This is the stage of moral development during which people acquire the abilities associated with membership in a particular group. The moralities of association and principles are the most important steps in a series of increasingly complex competences that people must develop on the way to citizenship. Human relationships are not simply given. We grow into them, and in doing so acquire the competences they call for. Rawls thinks of a human individual and indeed of society itself as a series of structures, one embedded inside the other. Although political values, and in particular the virtue of justice, might be said to form the last or outer layer, community values and the virtues of association form indispensable inner layers that develop at an earlier psychological stage in the lives of individuals and the groups and associations of which they are members. As they grow up, people learn how to play a part in the associations to which they belong and to accept the responsibilities connected with specific social positions. The child learns the art of perceiving persons: to interpret “speech, conduct, and countenance,” to recognize the wants, needs, and motives of others. It must identify the “definitive features of these perspectives, what it is that others largely want and desire, what are their controlling beliefs and opinions.”60 Even in a community that is governed by a single dominant end, different people may occupy different yet complementary roles and view their association from different standpoints.61 Life in a community requires them to command different perspectives, and to recognize that others have their own perspectives too. Children have to learn to work out “a conception of the whole system of cooperation that defines the association and the ends which it serves.”62 To understand others we must learn to read their intentions and feelings. With maturity comes the ability to master

104

CHAPTER 4

more complex perspectives and to assume more sophisticated roles. The capacity for a relation to others encompasses affective development and the capacity for feeling guilt—not ontological or neurotic guilt, but guilt as a normal feature of associations and social relationships that involve attachment, sympathy, and the capacity to play one’s role. These abilities are not lost when, eventually, the child acquires a sense of justice. There is no simple dichotomy between the morality of association and reasonableness, nor does the morality of principles repudiate the morality of association. The competence developed in associations, as Callan notes, already foreshadows the growth and development of reasonableness “through a series of roles that require increasing intellectual demands and finer moral discriminations.”63 Children begin to grasp the burdens of judgment as they come to recognize that those who think differently may also be reasonable.64 The sense of justice adds to the morality of association a feeling for the contingency of particular social situations, and effects the transition from a morality that depends on the approval of others to one based on moral independence. Justice accommodates the social nature of human life, neither surrendering to it on the one hand, nor excluding it on the other. In grasping the morality of principles, citizens acquire the capacity to act independently—when necessary—as justice demands. This does not invalidate the commitment to communities or abrogate social solidarity. Yet the ability of the self to emancipate itself from the moral approval of a larger group is, under certain circumstances, a mark of moral maturity. The point of view of justice is not a heroic stance that leaps out of the human condition. But it does presuppose the readiness to take a stand when necessary.65 A liberal education must integrate the morality of association into the growth of reasonableness. Far from encouraging detachment, education should nourish a “widening web of relations of trust, reciprocal goodwill, and associative loyalty.”66 The impact of the growth of reasonableness on students’ particular conceptions of the good need be neither abrupt nor destructive. Public education can help them develop an appreciation of the diversity of human perspectives by encouraging dialog between those who represent different social points of view, situations, and conceptions of the good, particularly in the later stages of education.67 This “dialogical task of common education” can be pursued most effectively in common schools where the members of different communities and cultures rub shoulders, rather than in separate schools which exclude a representative diversity of voices. “Imaginary interlocutors,” as Callan remarks, “are a pallid substitute for the real thing.”68 To grasp the burdens of judgment it is necessary not merely to confront questions the correct answer to which is unknown, but to do so with other human beings whom we also do not know. Only in exchanges with real inter-

EDUCATION

105

locutors can these burdens become apparent since “religious and moral doctrines or cherished cultural practices do not enter the world with fixed labels enabling us to classify them as reasonable or not. The reasonableness of such things can only be established on the basis of a searching examination that is open to the possibility that they are worthless. But that possibility is sometimes hard to keep alive when we keep company only with those who agree with us.”69 Dialog, however, is not only about disagreement or sensitivity to difference. It is about not understanding and misunderstanding. Schools are places in which people can confront not merely those who think otherwise, or who seem somehow different from themselves, but whom they do not understand at all. To engage in dialog is to become open not only to others but to one’s own cultural situation. Only the encounter with a real interlocutor can interrupt the specious transparency of communication, letting the unspoken presuppositions of everyday cultural understanding become visible. When openness to dialog is lacking, such differences are glossed over. The difficulty of comprehending and negotiating the meanings and cultural orientation of the other becomes an excuse for not understanding them. Perhaps it is for such encounters that the term “multicultural dialog” should be reserved. Reasonableness presupposes openness to forms of life and ways of being that are neither ours nor our culture’s. Yet the character of this openness remains mysterious. Talk of a “consciousness of diversity,” “global perspective,” or “sympathetic openness” to other cultures does not say enough. Why is a consciousness of diversity not equally a cause of racism or xenophobia? The challenges of being reasonable are often misjudged. It is easier to disguise cultural prejudice behind the appearance of reasonableness than to be reasonable. Bigotry rarely presents itself in the form of arguments that can be comfortably refuted or habits of thought that lively discussion can neatly correct. The Socratic model, as it is usually understood, is only of limited relevance to the reasoned negotiation of situations of cultural difference, not least because it is firmly associated with an ideology of enlightenment, individualism, and Western cultural values. To what extent is a competence associated with a dominant culture qualified to expose cultural difference or the structural deformations associated with institutional racism? Can the Socratic method enable “whites to recognize their own whiteness”? Institutionalized Socratism is well suited to skate over the differences in schemata, expectations, and structuring values that separate cultures. It lends itself to standardization and mass educational systems that depend on large classes in which there is little opportunity for real Socratic encounter. Educational institutions are surrounded with vestiges of power and authority that reinforce the association between intellectual development and social superiority. Such forces discourage children who are not schooled for the academy from moving

106

CHAPTER 4

to intellectual maturity. It is obvious enough that authoritarian teachers may have beliefs that they are not prepared to subject to discussion.70 But even liberal teachers in a tolerant society may fear to broach many topics in their classrooms. Yet it may be discussion of just these questions that would most nourish the capacity for critical thinking and the growth of reasonableness.71 Reasonableness is sometimes confused with intellectual agility, cleverness, and culturally relative proficiencies. Successful students may not only shine but seem more reasonable when their abilities are well matched to a particular type of education. Pedagogies that promote performance often reinforce onedimensional, context-bound ways of thinking about the world. The Pestalozzian method, though progressive in its day, led people to fixate on context-free learning at the expense of an understanding of the way in which a person’s situation, previous experience, and skills shape what they see.72 Unless they are taught otherwise, even well-educated children may come to believe that geometry is about wooden blocks and geography about maps.73 Conventional devices of representation form most people’s ideas about the world.74 The emphasis on factual, objective learning sustains in students the impression of an edifice of knowledge independent of the knower and his or her basic concerns. Teachers encourage a reverence for information that retards critical development: “the most conspicuous connotation of the word knowledge for most persons to-day is just the body of facts and truths ascertained by others.”75 A culture of examination and testing reinforces respect for uninterpreted factual knowledge while discouraging intellectual independence and the development of a critical spirit.76 A further difficulty lies in the association of dialog with antagonism. In a society marked by deep social differences, the openness of dialog may be mistaken for confrontation. The social and cultural hostilities students bring into the classroom, and the widespread expectation that schools should not offend or promote conflict, limit what can be said.77 Dialog against a background of social rifts and rancor is more likely to promote offense than mutual recognition. Some doubt whether children or even university students should be confronted with deep moral disagreement. Yet dialog that will not risk conflict can hardly cultivate openness. Openness to others requires, in the words of Gadamer, that “I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to do so.”78 Dialog should not seek conflict as an end in itself. But neither can it be used to disguise preexistent antipathies and tensions. To require dialog to avoid conflict may be to accept prejudice. To seek an understanding of the other is to risk the collision of perspectives. Yet only in the search for understanding can misunderstanding manifest itself. Foreignness is not only an obstacle. It may, as Gadamer suggests, play a positive role in understanding. Prejudices are never at

EDUCATION

107

our productive disposal, but through dialog we can become aware of them and of their role in our thinking. The extent to which morally productive dialog presupposes a readiness to engage in verbal conflict or risk moral distress is uncertain. Educational theories that stress the role of conflict in understanding may risk promoting intellectual combat and the struggle for prestige at the expense of understanding, ordinary conversation, and reciprocity.79 For some, the distinction between verbal disagreement and hate speech may be impossible to sustain. Even Mill’s view of free discussion can be taken to legitimize “a kind of verbal warfare.”80 But the value of dialog depends as much on the resistances it confronts as on the truths it lays bare. The vitriolic potential of such opposition can hardly be overestimated. In the search for consensus, dialog may confront resistances rooted in a history of violence, involuntary relations, and pseudo-consensus. This confrontation may be indispensable in working out conflicts and exposing the structural sources of misunderstanding between communicators.81 The burdens of judgment are proportional to the depth of these differences. To engage in dialog is to accept both the differences and similarities that characterize a human relationship. Dialog is a basic way in which we learn to recognize others. Recognition may take many forms. Often it may involve a struggle, but it may also take on the character of what Heidegger calls vorspringende Fürsorge—a care for others that plays a proactive role in helping them to discover their potential.82 Dialog involves an exchange of perspectives that may be slow and painstaking and require participants to both confront their resentments and recognize their possibilities. If such exchanges are to be productive, they must also be critical. But what does this mean? A judgment that arises through dialog is not just another prejudice, and the goal of discourse is not merely understanding but critical consensus.83 As we saw in chapter 2, rational discourse is sometimes said to rest on ideal presuppositions, or illocutionary validity claims that interlocutors must be prepared to redeem, if challenged.84 Educational discourse theorists, following Habermas, think the ethical core of a liberal education should be a type of communicative action in which children and students from different cultures learn to engage each other as equally situated partners with the goal of arriving at an unforced critical consensus based on understanding, ideal role-taking, and the exchange of reasons.85 But how important is it that they learn to seek consensus, and when must they seek it? Why, given the increasing cultural diversity of political communities, is it not sometimes more reasonable to accept difference than to seek agreement? Radical pluralists regard consensus-oriented politics as a vestige of metaphysical commitments and de facto power relationships: “the burden that consensus is asked to bear is more than justifiably can be placed upon it. . . . The

108

CHAPTER 4

currently widespread penchant for consensus can be seen as the last stand in an ethos of democracy of a pre-democratic dirigisme—an insistence on social coordination that is unwilling to let people go their own way into a social diversification that affiliates each not to all but to such kindred spirits as circumstances may offer.”86 Poststructuralist pluralism is rooted in a rejection of metaphysics that is part argued and part stylistic. The attempt to escape traditional ontology follows an agenda set by Nietzsche and Heidegger. The delegitimation of consensus as a social goal attacks the forced unity that is said to be inherent in Western ideals of rationality. “Political unity does not require that there be one public reason.”87 But Rawlsian liberals are also skeptical about the goal of achieving a comprehensive moral consensus: “the obstacles to convergent judgement in morality are far too recalcitrant for a shared and comprehensive vision of good and the right to be more than a utopian aspiration. . . . Pluralism seems an ineradicable aspect of the human condition, not a useful but temporary station on the road to a place where it will disappear.”88 Moral debate under pluralistic conditions is not only “a difficult and delicate endeavour.”89 The idea that it must issue in a comprehensive consensus is misleading. When it is discovered that to think differently is not merely to hold a different view but to think in a different way, the first step of a reasonable person is not to seek unconditional agreement with the other but to determine what it is necessary to agree about. This implies less a rejection than a modification of the goals of consensus. Multicultural dialog seeks consensus about consensus. Its goal is not just agreement, but agreement about what we can agree about, because pluralism and cultural diversity are facts of social life. It seeks the grounds of consensus in convictions and judgments we can share with those whose difference from ourselves we have already accepted. The broader the community drawn into such a consensus, the harder it may be to identify such a core of shared convictions. The search may be hindered by a lack of common traditions and cultural competences. Indeed, there is no guarantee that it will ever succeed. On the other hand, cultural difference is rarely laid out along a single, sharply defined frontier. Dialog quickly reveals similarities where none might have been expected as well as equally unsuspected differences. An understanding of the codes, values, and schemata of foreign cultures can make the behavior of others comprehensible.90 Once we have begun to understand these codes, we realize that in similar circumstances we too might act and think as they do. Dialog that seeks consensus through reason and argument must confront others who are different and demand our recognition. But without the subsequent search for the grounds of a possible consensus, the simple recognition of difference would be politically incomplete. Dialog in this sense is driven not

EDUCATION

109

merely by the need for consensus, but by the fact of difference. People must learn to let their cultural situations become an issue enough for them to explore the presuppositions to which such questioning gives rise. The challenge of education to the burdens of judgment is to develop these two capacities as aspects of a single capacity for political dialog. We can no more overcome all our prejudices than we can achieve complete perspicacity in our judgments. To accept the burdens of judgment is to recognize the pull between these conflicting claims and to work toward their reconciliation.

Notes 1. See Mark S. Jendrysik, “The Modern Jeremiad: Bloom, Bennett, and Bork on American Decline,” Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 2 (2002): 361–83. Jendrysik cites works by several well-known critics of “declinists,” including: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); William J. Bennett, Our Country and Our Children: Improving America’s Schools and Affirming the Common Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988); Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). 2. Matthew Arnold,“Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism,” in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 79. 3. Sidney Hook, Convictions (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990), 135–36. 4. Hook, Convictions, 135–36. 5. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 3. 6. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 81. 7. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 82. 8. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism, ed. Josué Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 73–81. 9. E. H. Gombrich, “The Museum: Past, Present and Future,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977): 463. 10. Gombrich, “The Museum,” 464. 11. Robert S. Brumbaugh, “Plato: The Fundamental Principles of Education.” Chapter 2 in Robert S. Brumbaugh and Nathaniel M. Lawrence, eds., Philosophers on Education: Six Essays on the Foundations of Western Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 39–43. 12. On the debate surrounding the Stanford Western Culture program in the late 1980s, see James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 215–16.

110

CHAPTER 4

13. Hook, Convictions, 135. 14. Hook, Convictions, 135. 15. Hook, Convictions, 136. 16. Hook, Convictions, 136. 17. On standard culture and the cultural deprivation hypothesis, see Howard L. Smith, “Literacy and Instruction in African American Communities: Shall We Overcome?” in Sociocultural Contexts of Language and Literacy, ed. Bertha Pérez (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998), 205. See also Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” in Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change, ed. Richard K. Brown (London: Tavistock, 1973), 82. 18. Jianglong Wang, “Knowing the True Face of a Mountain: Understanding Communication and Cultural Competence,” in Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, unit 16, chapter 3, ed. Walter J. Lonner and others (Bellingham, WA: Western Washington University, 2002), http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~culture/Wang.htm (accessed December 13, 2007). Wang cites George A. Borden, Cultural Orientation: An Approach to Understanding Intercultural Communication (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991). On cultural literacy, see E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 137. 19. Mark L. Knapp, Essentials of Nonverbal Communication (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), cited by Wang, “Knowing the True Face of a Mountain,” para. 9. 20. On semiotics and semiotic systems, see Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2002). 21. Wang, “Knowing the True Face of a Mountain,” para. 14. 22. James Paul Gee, “The Narrativization of Experience in the Oral Style,” in Rewriting Literacy: Culture and the Discourse of the Other, ed. Candace Mitchell and Kathleen Weiler (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1991), 80. See also Candace Mitchell, preface to Mitchell and Weiler, Rewriting Literacy, xxi: “school-based literacy requires, among other things, that the narrator or writer order events linearly, emphasize one main point, rely primarily on syntactic devices to make the text cohere, and so forth.” 23. Gee, “The Narrativization of Experience,” 80: the “topic-associating” narrative style “may give the impression to those who have no control over the style of having no beginning, no middle, no end—thus no point.” 24. Mitchell, preface, xxii. The embedded reference is to Sarah Michaels, “Hearing the Connections in Children’s Oral and Written Discourse,” in Mitchell and Weiler, Rewriting Literacy, 118. 25. Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., “Educational Technology,” in Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: Politics and the Rhetoric of School Reform, ed. David A. Gabbard (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000), 297. 26. On culture shock and second culture learning, see Borden, Cultural Orientation, 186–87. 27. Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 19. 28. John Passmore, The Philosophy of Teaching (London: Duckworth, 1980), 171. 29. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 171.

EDUCATION

111

30. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 175. 31. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 166. 32. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 167. 33. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 177; on the distinction between exercises and problems, see esp. 178. 34. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 28. 35. See Harry C. Triandis, “Cross-Cultural Studies of Individualism and Collectivism,” in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1989, ed. J. Berman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 41–133; and “The Psychological Measurement of Cultural Syndromes,” American Psychologist 51, no. 4 (1996): 409. An early study of crosscultural values by Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck focused on how people view humanity, how they see nature, how they approach interpersonal relationships, how they view time and space, and other dimensions. See Florence Rockwood Kluckhohn and Fred L. Strodtbeck, Variations in Value Orientations (Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1961); also Geert H. Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980). Hofstede identifies four dimensions relevant to work-related attitudes: individualism–collectivism, power-distance, uncertaintyavoidance and masculinity-femininity. Subsequently, in “Cultural Constraints in Management Theories,” Hofstede adds a further dimension: long-term versus short-term orientation. See Academy of Management Executive 7, no. 1 (1993): 81–94. 36. David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson, “Cooperative Learning and Achievement,” in Cooperative Learning: Theory and Research, ed. Shlomo Sharan (New York: Praeger, 1990), 27. 37. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 68, 73. Nussbaum cites John Meacham, who played an important role in designing the State University of New York at Buffalo’s 1992 course “American Pluralism and the Search for Equality.” See also Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Liberal Education: The United States Example,” in Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities, ed. Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 65: “To have dignity and autonomy as values is not, therefore, to refuse to acknowledge the dependence of the good for each of us on relationships with others.” 38. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 73–76. 39. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 68, 72. 40. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 199. 41. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xvi, 10 fn. 42. Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 176. 43. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 12, 144–45, 387. 44. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 36. 45. Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 151. 46. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 55–56. Rawls also writes of the “burdens of reason.” 47. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56–57. 48. Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 31.

112

CHAPTER 4

49. Callan, Creating Citizens, 222. 50. Compare Anthony Simon Laden, Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 5, where the author argues for a deliberative liberalism, one condition of which is that “full and active participation in political deliberation . . . does not unduly burden the occupation of nonpolitical identities.” 51. Meira Levinson, The Demands of Liberal Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 111. 52. Levinson, Demands of Liberal Education, 114. 53. Levinson, Demands of Liberal Education, 123. 54. Levinson, Demands of Liberal Education, 117. 55. Levinson, Demands of Liberal Education, 121. 56. Callan, Creating Citizens, 170. 57. Callan, Creating Citizens, 177. 58. Levinson, Demands of Liberal Education, 113–14. 59. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 467–72. 60. Rawls, Theory, 469. 61. Rawls, Theory, 468. 62. Rawls, Theory, 468. 63. Callan, Creating Citizens, 176. 64. Callan, Creating Citizens, 177. 65. Rawls, Theory, 472–79. 66. Callan, Creating Citizens, 176. 67. Callan, Creating Citizens, 177. 68. Callan, Creating Citizens, 177. 69. Callan, Creating Citizens, 177. 70. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 169. 71. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 177. 72. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 62. 73. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 70–72. 74. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 71. The Mercator projection, for example, shows true compass directions, but may distort a person’s understanding of political geography. Children need to learn to recognize such projections, the reasons they are used, and the ways in which they influence our view of the world. 75. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 220. 76. On the culture of the test, hierarchal observation, normalizing judgment, and examination, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 170–94. 77. Callan, Creating Citizens, 201. 78. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, second, revised edition, trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1996), 355. 79. Callan, Creating Citizens, 202–3. 80. Callan, Creating Citizens, 211.

EDUCATION

113

81. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 256. 82. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 157. Macquarrie and Robinson translate Fürsorge as “solicitude” because they think “caring for” connotes “being fond of.” But the essential feature of positive solicitude is the capacity to “leap ahead” (vorspringen) of others and, in doing so, see their possibilities. 83. Habermas, “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” in Understanding and Social Inquiry, ed. and trans. Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas McCarthy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 335–63. 84. See Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 1–68; The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 8–42, 75–101. 85. Nigel Blake, “Modernity and the Problem of Cultural Pluralism,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 26, no. 1 (1992): 46. All cultures are entitled to a voice in a school curriculum, but must also be open to criticism: “any propositions may be entertained or questioned, and the needs and wishes of individuals are relevant to critique—including the critique of a culture by those who live within it.” 86. Nicholas Rescher, Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 3. 87. James Bohman, “Public Reason and Cultural Pluralism: Political Liberalism and the Problem of Moral Conflict,” Political Theory 23, no. 2 (1995): 263. 88. Callan, Creating Citizens, 214. Callan is contrasting the views of contemporary pluralists with the ethical monism of Mill. 89. Callan, Creating Citizens, 220. 90. Borden, Cultural Orientation, 189.

CHAPTER 5

Skill, Technology, Capability

The phenomenon of skill is easily overlooked. A child who cannot tie a knot in a shoelace may experience frustration and rage. Yet the adult has long ago forgotten that they even had to learn this simple action. We refer to this characteristic of skillful behavior as its “transparency.” Skills are transparent for those who possess them and opaque for those who do not. The transparency of skills may mean that they are rarely noticed, little understood, and often undervalued. To someone who fails to recognize them, the performances of a skilled person might as well not exist.1

Skill, the Skillful Self, Deskilling Once acquired, skills recede into the background of everyday life and may disappear completely. We no longer focus attention on what we are doing but on what we want to do. Skill is often apparent to others only when it is exercised in exceptional ways, when it is absent, when things go wrong, or when skillful activity breaks down altogether. The transparency of skill is an obstacle to communication with those who are different. We may hear their words and observe their actions without understanding their meaning. This transparency is not only an obstacle to understanding others. It also interferes with our ability to understand ourselves. “Skill” belongs to a family of words that also includes “competences,” “capacities,” “habits,” and “routines.” It has been defined as “a learned power of doing something competently: an aptitude or ability.”2 Often skill is evident in the dexterity and coordination with which physical tasks are performed, and in abilities gained through experience and training. Skill is evident in crafts and 115

116

CHAPTER 5

activities involving the hands and the body. But many forms of skillful activity are not manual. We write, think, play, and relate to others skillfully. Human movement is not merely the contraction of muscles by which a person changes their bodily position. It is a way of existing meaningfully in space and has a character that must be acquired skillfully.3 Demeanor, facial expression, and even breathing have a skillful dimension. To touch and to be touched by another human being involves more than the contact of skin on skin. It is a skill that must be learned. Such actions need not be productive, nor need they have a spiritual dimension. But they are as essential to what a person is as anything else he or she might do or say.4 To be skillful is to experience oneself as purposive, as the focus of meaningful activity.5 Unlike habits and routines, skillful activity is characterized by an attitude of concerned attentiveness that involves more than mere aptitude or proficiency. It is not just doing or acting on things in the sense of Dewey. It is doing things in a certain way and with a certain quality of attention. Skillful activity is structured, significant, and projective in the sense that there is always something at which it is intentionally directed. It is not exemplified by sequences of discrete, mechanically separable movements directed toward a physical object, but by a certain way of dealing with things and persons involving know-how in what we can refer to as contexts of purposes in use. Contexts of purposes in use include both human and instrumental complexes. The latter form organized ensembles and structured families of related tools and equipment that define the scope and character of an activity, the meaning of that activity becoming evident through the skill of the performance. The most basic instrumental complexes are composed of everyday things—clothing, eating utensils, furniture, streets, tools, and vehicles––in which the various elements refer to each other, and belong together, whether they are constructed or co-opted.6 It is skillful activity in instrumental complexes that distinguishes the act of dining from the ingestion of nutrients, or a room that is lived in from a mere container. In everyday situations people deal with things without thematizing them or themselves.7 They are skillful selves. The person who knows how to open a door is not guided by reflection when they do so, even if reflection leads them to want to go through the door in the first place. We do not stare at a cup in an effort to understand it when we are drinking from it. Things may be more or less available for the skillful self to use. When work and communication are going well and things are functioning properly, we do not make our environment into the object of intellectual scrutiny or discussion. We simply use things as our culture has taught us. For the most part, the skillful self is absorbed in its situation. With the skill exercised in instrumental complexes comes a certain understanding of how to relate to other persons. Just as the self first encounters itself

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

117

through skillful activity in unthematized contexts of purposes of use, so it encounters others skillfully and transparently in human complexes. Basic human complexes include everyday relationships with parents and children, friends, coworkers, colleagues, and neighbors. Groups of people—the family, the firm, the clan—form human complexes that have their focus in the many instrumental complexes and ways of doing things that make up the life of a culture. Cooperating, cohabiting, and communicating with others are ways in which these others are skillfully encountered. Relationships to others cannot be described as interactions of unencumbered selves, agents, or mechanical entities. Other people are not mere things we have contact with but persons we recognize and know how to relate to skillfully. The skillful relationship to others includes a grasp of different forms of human closeness and distance, and of basic forms of human significance such as gestures, facial expression, and tone of voice. It is through a skillful apprehension of others that we understand emotions and demonstrations of happiness and sadness, anger or fear. Skill makes it possible to recognize and understand a smile or a frown; to know when to speak, when to listen, and when to say nothing. We forget that we are skillful selves. Only when things go wrong and our ability to act skillfully is interrupted does the extent to which everyday existence relies on skillful behaviors become apparent. When the capacity for skillful activity breaks down in ways that are not occasional but systematic we speak of “deskilling.” Cultural impoverishment results from the systematic breakdown of skills, intensified by modern forms of social organization, work, and technology. Before techniques of scientific management were introduced, factory work was often carried out by autonomous craftsworkers and artisans. The “Taylorization” of work and everyday life fragments tasks and dismantles human activity into disjoint and unmotivated sequences of movements and behaviors. Modern scientific management techniques were intended to increase productivity by scientifically managing time and motion.8 Their goal was to subject the workforce to the same “pattern of standardization and routinization that was applied to instruments.”9 Taylor’s aim was to develop systems of production and manufacturing that would increase the marginal efficiency of labor by combining the motion of human beings and machines into a single operational continuum. The worker was a “multiple purpose machine tool whose motions in any given sequence could be studied and simplified—and recombined with the motions of collaborators—in a way which would permit a simultaneous achievement of lower costs, lower selling prices, and higher wages.”10 Scientific management made the laborer and the artisan into extensions of the machine. Gradually the idea of mechanization expanded into the social sphere: “The notion of the ‘human element’ was thus instrumentally appropriated by the engineers. The systematizers might have

118

CHAPTER 5

phrased their intentions as ‘individualizing’ the job and ‘rationalizing’ the firm, but the more important implication of that rhetoric was the fragmenting, serializing, and deskilling of jobs to the greatest extent technically possible.”11 Techniques of modern management now began to penetrate other areas of society, eventually engulfing much of day-to-day life.12 “Consumerism and the New Deal led to an intensification of the Taylorization of labor, which increasingly homogenized American life according to the dictates of bureaucratic instrumental rationality. By the 1950s, Americanization had been institutionalized.”13 Many aspects of everyday skillful activity in homes were restructured by introducing time and energy saving products. With the end of the craft era, the automation of transport and of domestic labor began to affect people’s everyday behavior. Soon, the more efficient forms of behavior required by technology replaced ordinary skillful activity, fragmenting it and replacing it with carefully defined routines. Scientific management also influenced the design and construction of public and private space. Modernist architects embraced Taylor’s methods. Their motives were part aesthetic, part economic. Time and motion were beginning to gain social and political significance. “The machine became an ideological, technical, and aesthetic frame of reference.”14 These modern architects adopted strategies of simplification and standardization, dividing tasks into distinct phases of conception, design, and execution. At the same time, the traditional artisan was replaced by independent subcontractors and suppliers on the model of automobile manufacturing.15 The “architect [would] no longer think of himself as the decorator of life but as its organizer.”16 It was understood that architecture had the power to shape human behavior for the good, restructuring habit, and reinforcing rational behaviors. There was nothing objectionable in modeling the human on the mechanical. Standardization and the machine aesthetic were steps on the road to civilization. But fusing the aesthetic with the efficient also bypasses the skillful self. When Le Corbusier describes the house as a “machine for living” or the armchair as a “machine for sitting in,” the standpoint of the skillful self has been largely abandoned. Marx thinks of deskilling as a desubstantialization of the human soul linked to the division of labor, social fragmentation, and a one-sided development.17 Manufacturing separates production into component processes, each performed by a detail laborer. The division of labor limits the horizon of skillful activity associated with each job. It not only transforms the know-how of craftsworkers and artisans into a form that capital can make use of, but also limits and eventually cripples—through fractional work—the person, body, skills, and competences of the detail laborer. The systematic breakdown of the capacity for skillful activity continues with the introduction of machine industry, transforming de-

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

119

tail laborers into minders of machines and establishing a new industrial regime in which the capitalist organization of the labor process becomes a “palpable reality.”18 The solution to the problem of deskilling lies in restoring the truly human character of productive activity. For Marx, this implies the removal of coercion from work and the abolition of involuntary relations of production, wage labor, and private property. Socializing the means of production will eliminate the sources of deskilling, restoring the human connection between the producer and production, and guaranteeing an organization of labor consistent with the need for meaningful work. Yet why should the socialization of ownership have this as a consequence? What guarantee is there that in a community of producers political, economic, and administrative control will respect the character and needs of the skillful self? This was a problem that socialism faced wherever it flourished. Feenberg points out that socialist relations of production were expected to result in the abolition of the state—a process in which major capitalist institutions were to play the role of crutches.19 It was assumed that the revolutionary class of workers would bring its collective will to bear on the political control and administration of society, even as transitional socialism continued to make use of the administrative and technical forms of capitalist governments. Communist reality, however, did not conform to this plan. Soviet socialism broke down because of the failure to find ways of institutionalizing and giving expression to the power of the workers. In trying to create a socialist state, Lenin was forced to rely on administrative superstructures and forms of organization derived more or less directly from the capitalist state.20 Marxism-Leninism classified technology as a force of production without problematizing the human experience at its heart. Technological development transforms human beings into prosthetic gods as more and more functions are shared with, or ceded to, machinery.21 Mass production surrounds people with commodities that become less meaningful as they become more numerous. The car and the airplane allow us to move farther and faster, but cut us off from the environment through which they convey us. Electronic media and telecommunications bring the world closer, but the world they discover is one to which it is hard to relate. Technological modernization disconnects the skillful self from the conditions of skillful activity, transforming its relation not only to things, but also to itself and to other people. The worker in the factory is not confronted with a situation that has gone temporarily wrong and can be righted through reflection. For the worker in the factory, things have gone wrong from the start. Following Feenberg’s analysis a step further, we can say that the systematic decoupling of the skillful self from its situation is exemplified in the “decontextualization” of objects and the “autonomization” of skillful activity.22

120

CHAPTER 5

Decontextualization is the isolation of objects from the contexts of skillful activity in which they normally have a use. It may be occasional or systematic. Occasional decontextualization corresponds to the kinds of breakdown in skillful activity that are a normal part of everyday life. Systematic decontextualization may have many causes. Complex machines and technical objects are decontextualized to the extent the skillful self can operate them but is unable to deal with them skillfully. Decontextualized objects can still be seen, manipulated, and felt. They still occupy a position in the world and have a measurable relationship to other objects. But they no longer belong to a context of purposes in use. Industrialization and the technical practices it supports produce objects in a way that is essentially contextless, forcing the relation to skillful activity into the background, and lifting ordinary things out of their everyday frameworks.23 In ordinary skillful activity, the significance of things is not imposed but has to be worked out, often as the skillful self is going along. This does not mean the skillful self proceeds without a plan, but the plan itself is something that has to be produced skillfully. A style is not imposed retrospectively on something that has already been made or performed. It is a direct consequence of the way in which the skillful self is able to deal with the particular instrumental complex at hand, and with the opportunities and obstacles it presents. Skillful activity does not make a distinction between production and ornamentation. Feenberg notes that “modern industrial societies alone distinguish production from aesthetics through indifference to the social insertion of their objects” substituting “packaging for an inherent aesthetic elaboration.”24 The skillful relationship to things is now replaced by a value added to the manufactured product. In the words of Ingold, a “thoroughgoing distinction is thus introduced between the design of things and their construction.”25 The kind of ornamentation that comes naturally to the skillful self gives way to the aesthetic of production and presentation as work falls apart into what Borgmann calls “unloved labor and distracting leisure.”26 No longer shaped directly by skill and use, things become products on which aesthetic properties are superimposed. Culture becomes industry, and artifacts commodities.27 Autonomization dissolves contexts of purposes in use into systems of actions and effects, replacing meaningful activity with operation at a distance and dissociating the skillful self through technical action from the consequences of agency.28 When it is engaged in skillful activity, the skillful self not only shapes and gives form to the things that it deals with. It is also shaped and formed by them. This being shaped and formed by things is not a mechanical matter. To be shaped by things, the skillful self must itself be active in a certain way and with a certain quality of attention. When technical action replaces skillful activity, however, the skillful self is no longer responsive to the things it is dealing with.

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

121

Autonomization is distinguished, according to Feenberg, by the “absolute disproportion between the ‘reaction’ experienced by the actors and the effect of their action.”29 It restructures the way in which the skillful self experiences space, remoteness, closeness, and relevance. As skillful activity is replaced by systems of action and control, “technical action autonomizes the subject through dissipating or deferring feedback from the object of action to the actor.”30 The sniper experiences the pressure of the trigger and the recoil of the weapon, but not the bullet as it strikes its target. Even as a car accelerates to high speeds, the driver registers only the minor and intermediate resistances offered by steering wheel, gearshift, and foot pedal. The automobile eliminates the immediate connection between driver, passenger, and world, inserting them into a complex of mediated relationships exemplified by the recurring structures of roads, motorways, traffic signs, and the cities they connect. In such cases, the motive power of the car, bus, or truck is separated from the sources of skillful constraint, and the hands and feet are reduced to somatic tools for the operation of the machine.31 Autonomization also disrupts the coherence of the ordinary skillful activity by which the skillful self understands not only the impact of its own actions but also the way it is acted on by other human beings. A human complex is a context of personal relationships in which each has a skillful understanding of how to deal with others. There is a difference between knowing how to deal with things and knowing how to deal with other people skillfully. This difference can be described in many ways. In a moral context, it may be associated with the capacities for freedom and responsibility, care, and concern, or with the capacity for recognition. Honneth is surely right when he argues that the experience of disrespect is invariably bound up with the experience of moral harm.32 But even before we can grant or withhold recognition, or experience misrecognition or disrespect at the hands of others, we must already know how to deal with them, both how to touch and how to be touched by them. Dehumanization has become systematic when the skillful self no longer understands either the impact of its own actions on other human beings or the way it is acted on by them. Used in this sense, “dehumanization” does not refer to a mechanism of defense of the kind invoked by psychologists to explain the reaction to powerful emotions, overwhelming stress, or trauma. Nor, again, is it simply the tendency to categorize others negatively as nonhuman or subhuman. The decoupling of the skillful self from contexts of purposes in use involves the systematic breakdown of human complexes and a loss of understanding of the different kinds of human closeness and distance that make meaningful human relationships possible. For the skillful self, cooperation and an understanding of others go hand in hand. Temporary breakdowns in the relationship with others are a constitutive

122

CHAPTER 5

part of the way we learn to recognize that they may have different aims, plans, and motives.33 As we grow up, such transitory disturbances make it possible to recognize that these others have their own points of view. The art of perceiving the person develops as we become skillful in inferring the character of human motivation from such situations.34 With time, we gradually learn to read people’s actions and intentions, and begin to understand how their desires and motives are rooted in their everyday ways of doing things. Industrialization and technological innovation, however, are usually indifferent to the skillful character of human complexes. The relationship to others is detached from the machine environment, the workplace, the prison, the hospital, the urban landscape, the corporate milieu. The other is now merely a component of an organization in which recognition and the cooperative activity characteristic of a human relationship are prized apart, and the understanding of others replaced by a not-being-able-to-understand that may turn into a notwanting-to-understand.35 Dehumanization has also become systematic when the skillful self can no longer understand itself as a purposive being, able to grasp its own life as a project and to sustain a meaningful relationship to the future. To have a plan of life is to be able to understand oneself as the center and organizer of one’s existence.36 The skillful relation to the future is not a matter of identifying a set of objectives and scheduling them as efficiently as possible. When people relate skillfully to the future, they do not simply reflect on what might or might not happen someday. The relation to the future is constantly anticipated in ongoing skillful activity. But deskilling forces the capacities for planning and giving an artistic shape to one’s life apart. The future is no longer a project to be realized but a product to be assembled in a way that is rational and efficient. Rather than forming the projective aspect of a meaningful context that reflects human attitudes of care and concern, the future becomes a goal, decoupled from the present in such a way that it can no longer play a role in regulating ongoing activity. Recognition of the problems posed by deskilling has led some governments to develop policies of upskilling. Such policies are usually economically and socially motivated, and often associated with the values of enterprise culture.37 Upskilling is to accelerate skill restructuring in response to the requirements of technologically more advanced economies, the demand for greater labor mobility, and short-term investment strategies. It may promote many different kinds of expertise and ability, ranging from technological competences to intellectual and interpersonal skills.38 Key skill development is to reduce the divisions between academic and vocational training, promote social cohesion and inclusiveness, and encourage workers to ensure their own employability. New technologies are to be operationalized in such a way as to increase worker involvement and par-

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

123

ticipation. The long-term goal of such policies is a more flexible labor force, with improved competences in a wide range of tasks and functions.39 By the standards of Taylorian management, such measures may seem progressive. “Key,” “core,” or “basic” skills are intended to cut across the traditional distinctions between higher and lower, mental and manual, skill and knowledge. Promoting them is a way of breaking with the class biases of the labor market, transcending the opposition between organized labor and capital, between skilled and unskilled or semi-skilled labor, and between labor and management. The distinction between skill and pure knowledge is likewise to be abandoned and the boundaries between academic and professional, skilled and unskilled redrawn. Policies to increase the skill content of jobs do not, however, address the problems posed by the decontextualization, autonomization, and dehumanization of human life. Upskilling is often no more than task extension. Workers are integrated in new ways into systems they operate but to which they do not have a skillful relationship. The goal is a flexible, technologically competent, coordinated workforce—not citizens whose capacity for productive activity is married to the attributes of skillful know-how and moral independence.

Liberalism, Technology, Technological Democracy Technology is a cultural force, a creator and a destroyer. It fights wars and heals patients, powers cars and tanks, magnifies and miniaturizes, communicates and kills. It destroys traditional communities, replacing them with urban wastelands and asphalt jungles that harbor no cultural possibilities. It eases and increases the reach of human experience, bringing the world closer, multiplying images, sounds, and words. Yet technology not only multiplies or subtracts from the things in which we find meaning. It also affects our ability to find meaning in them. Borgmann argues that modern technology promotes a radical split between production and consumption, means and ends. In the “device paradigm” of technological society, everyday things are replaced by devices that increase the supply of instantaneously available commodities; “ends which can be enjoyed without the encumbrance of means.”40 People still have to work. But work is no longer directly connected to the things that are consumed. It is mere labor. Even as technology fills the world with commodities, labor loses the attributes of skillful activity and falls apart into a heap of disaggregated skills that are to be directed and applied here or there as the market dictates.

124

CHAPTER 5

In earlier days, fuel had to be found, a fire made, the hearth cleaned. Food was grown, harvested, prepared, and cooked. Technological society turns everyday things into objects of consumption that can be enjoyed without effort. Yet effortless enjoyment has cultural consequences. “The availability of a technological commodity disburdens us from the work of preparing a meal; but for that reason, it also disengages us from the culture of the table. When a meal has become a commodity, it can no longer engage us; it can only be consumed.”41 The self whose skills have been disaggregated in this way has access to a wide range of goods and lifestyles. But Borgmann argues that this expansion of choices involves a loss of depth and significance. The technological way of life sacrifices culture to affluence. Confidence in the superiority of the technological way of life is encouraged by what is sometimes called the “instrumental” theory of technology. Feenberg argues that the “instrumental theory offers the most widely accepted view of technology. It is based on the common sense idea that technologies are ‘tools’ standing ready to serve the purposes of their users.”42 On the instrumental view, human beings set goals for the attainment of which technology provides the means. Technology can be used well or badly. To control it, it is merely necessary to anticipate its consequences in theory and control them in practice. Technological systems and processes are rational, indifferent to the ends for which they are used, and subject to the same universal norms of efficiency in any context.43 Technology assessment combines the instrumental theory of technology with the methods and goals of welfare economics. Though “technologies based on market economics [are] responsive to short-term consumer demands,” their more remote implications are often ignored by market mechanisms.44 Forecasters and strategists compete to predict the long-term effects of new technologies on health, the environment, and other aspects of human life.45 The adverse effects of technological development are externalities that policy endeavors to modify or erase.46 The aims of policy are remedial, maximizing utility or balancing the benefits of specific technologies against independent moral criteria. Such policies are often crisis-driven, reacting to problems rather than anticipating them, and seeking trade-offs between moral values, on the one hand, and technical values such as efficiency, on the other.47 The instrumental view of technology is sometimes linked with modernization theory and the idea that technological development is a constant, impervious to local cultural practices and traditions. The logic of technology is everywhere the same. The transformer, the piston, the electronic relay can be put to use anywhere, in any demographic or cultural setting. The path of technological development is unaffected by social and cultural diversity. We can accept or reject it, but we cannot affect its character. Once embraced, technological development is “an invariant element that . . . bends the recipient social system to its imperatives.”48 Societies that

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

125

resist technological development to preserve local cultural values necessarily forgo the benefits of progress and economic development. However, this thesis of the contextual invariance of technology is controversial. It can be argued that technology assessment and risk and impact analysis are neither neutral nor value-free. Value judgments enter research as projects are identified and selected.49 Quantifying risk always presupposes some nonmathematical assumptions. “Risk and safety research that presents itself as purely empirical excludes normative discussion about how much safety is enough and what risks we want to take for what reasons.”50 Technology assessment overlooks the way in which normative, social, and cultural presuppositions and biases flow into technological choices.51 The instrumental theory treats technology as a value-neutral extension of the scope and efficacy of human action. What Feenberg calls the “substantive” theory of technology rejects the assumption that technology is indifferent to the ends for which it can be used. Its chief exponents express this claim in different ways. Most share the idea that technology, far from being neutral, structures our cultural experience and in doing so shapes the goals we can pursue and the choices we can make. Thus, Heidegger characterizes modern technology as a challenge to nature to deliver energy and exploitable resources.52 This challenge issues in a “new type of cultural system that restructures the entire social world as an object of control.”53 The wooden bridge that has stood in a river for hundreds of years belongs to a context of purposes in use. It is built into the river and refers to the riverbank, to the riverbed, to the houses on either side of the river, to the roads that lead up to it, and to the persons and vehicles that cross it. Modern technology, on the other hand, turns the world into a system for the extraction of resources. It is not the hydroelectric power station that is built into the river but the river that is built into the power station. The machine is no longer part of an organized ensemble of tools and ways of doing things. The river has become part of a device designed to deliver water pressure. Technology throws up a new class of beings that fit only awkwardly into the everyday world. This awkwardness can be disguised cosmetically but it cannot be hidden. An accomplished postmodern architect might design a hydroelectric power station to look like a traditional bridge.54 To do so, however, would be to miss the point. To make a power station that resembles or cleverly alludes to a traditional bridge is not to address the changed relationship between human beings and the world that the power station represents. Feenberg argues that Marcuse also holds a version of the substantive theory of technology.55 Here too, the decisive feature of modern technology is that it restructures the world as an object of control.56 Natural science and technology are aspects of a more fundamental historical development that critical theorists call “techno-science.” In techno-science, class domination and technical rationaliza-

126

CHAPTER 5

tion are fused into a single grand historical process. “The industrial society which makes technology and science its own is organized for the ever-more-effective domination of man and nature, for the ever-more-effective utilization of its resources.”57 Social choices stem not from the conscious intentions of historical agents, but from “the very design of rational procedures and machines even before these are assigned a goal.”58 Techno-science dethrones practical reason and undermines the capacity for autonomous choice by nurturing a culture in which value is only instrumental. “When technics becomes the universal form of material production, it circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality––a ‘world.’”59 “The ‘universe of discourse,’ public and eventually even private speech and thought, is limited to posing and resolving technical problems.”60 The feature of industrial civilization that most strikes and most vexes Marcuse is the “rational character of its irrationality.” Technology claims rationality as its own, as though it were the “very embodiment of Reason for the benefit of all social groups and interests––to such an extent that all contradiction seems irrational and all counteraction impossible.”61 And yet, far from embodying reason, techno-science is systematically irrational. Though it generates an excess of commodities and opportunities, the liberation of scientific, technological, and productive forces leads not to emancipation but to subjugation. Consumer society and corporate capitalism harness men and women to the system imperatives of global capitalism, fixating them on the commodity form, and reaching into the human mind through advertising and its idealized images to fashion the edifice of false needs on which the productivity of technological civilization depends.62 In capitalism, the reality principle takes on the form of the performance principle. Competitive economic performance assumes the guise of social necessity, underwritten by surplus repression, socially unnecessary labor, and the proscription of pleasure in the name of profitability and domination. A radical break with the performance principle, the system of technoscience, and the capitalist organization of life to which it is wed is necessary if civilization is to move beyond domination and surplus repression. In such a civilization, technology would be transformed from a vehicle of control into a means of creative interaction with the world. This technology of liberation presupposes both the development of the forces of production beyond their capitalist form, and the libidinization of work as the paradigm of nonalienated labor.63 Work as a sensuous act will be assimilated to the free play of the imagination, which, in Kant’s view, underlies the judgment of taste. The “purposiveness without purpose” of the aesthetic function is to free subject and object from repressive reason, disclosing an attitude in which objects are no longer valued for their utility or perfection, but encountered in their “free” being.64

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

127

Marcuse follows Schiller rather than Kant in reinterpreting the play impulse that undergirds the aesthetic function as a vehicle of political liberation, and as a new reality principle that explodes the traditional distinction between the aesthetic and the real.65 Yet, however compelling this view may seem from the perspective of drive theory, Marcuse can only issue a promissory note when it comes to showing how aesthetic desublimation can reshape the cultural conditions of technological civilization: “non-repressive sublimation creates its own cultural order.”66 Rather than following Kant’s suggestion that the transition from instinct to freedom presupposes a culture of skill, as the primary subjective condition of the “aptitude to promote purposes generally,” Marcuse takes his lead from Fourier’s efforts to forge a mechanistic link between work and pleasure based on an attraction passionnée.67 As Honneth remarks, “with Marcuse it is not easy to see how an internal connection can be made between his drive theory and normative questions concerning the social order.”68 The substantive theory of technology usually leads to some form of irrationalism. In the case of Heidegger, that irrationalism takes the form of poetic resignation or fatalism combined with a lack of judgment apparent in Heidegger’s inaugural address as Rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933 (the Rektoratsrede).69 For Marcuse, it is aesthetic rebellion that will create a nonrepressive social order and a new constellation of productive forces that eliminates objective scarcity and alienated labor.70 Where Heidegger confronts the planetary threat with the poetry of Hölderlin, Marcuse falls back on the aesthetic conceit of an imaginative radicalization and eroticization of the entire human personality and its relationship to the world.71 Neither Heidegger nor Marcuse is in a position to reach inside the logic of technological development to examine the structural relationship between the skillful self and the technologies that surround it. Dealing with a new technology is not only a matter of learning to adapt to the technology but also of learning to adapt the technology to the character of the skillful self. But this is not possible as long as we think of technology as a fact or a fate.72 Technology should not be confused with particular tools or instruments. It is not neutral, because the technologies we use shape the people we are. But neither is it the expression of a unified technical or instrumental rationality, a generic form of purposive rational action, or a destiny over which we have no control. When the skillful self involves itself with a new technology, both it and the technology become different. A hybridity of the skillful self and machine arises.73 Following Feenberg, we can compare a new technology with a language whose basic vocabulary is composed of neutral technical elements “such as the spring, the lever, or the electric circuit.” Like the vocabulary of a language, these elements may be combined in diverse ways to produce different “utterances” with different intentions and meanings.74 While technical elements are in a sense

128

CHAPTER 5

neutral, a technology is not. Technical elements become individual technologies when they are combined into specific configurations and meaningful ensembles through incorporation into contexts of purposes in use, that is to say, when they acquire a practical meaning and use in the context of skillful activity. The car enters the world not as a collection of components put together according to a rational plan but as that peculiar relation of technological possibilities and existing ways of moving around that was originally known as the “horseless carriage.” At first, the horse is removed from the carriage and an engine bolted on to replace it. The driver sits outside where the coach driver sat. The body of the carriage is still made of wood that cannot sustain the vibrations of a powerful engine. “Some early American car bodies, indeed, followed the carriage pattern so closely that they came equipped with whip sockets.”75 Only gradually does a configuration of technical elements associated with the new technology begin to establish itself as the modern automobile. Such elements will often be drawn from various sources. Many of the technical elements that go into automobile construction are borrowed not from the horse carriage but from the bicycle—pneumatic tires, wire wheels, ball and roller bearings, the differential axle, variable speed transmissions, and steel tube frames.76 Technical elements may be assimilated to existing patterns of skillful activity in contexts of purposes in use, and these contexts may shift to accommodate new technical elements.77 This process, if allowed to regulate itself, would tend to approach a state of equilibrium.78 We can refer to such contexts of purposes in use as technological complexes. A particular accommodation of technical elements to contexts of purposes in use is organic when it results in equilibrium between the skillful self and a technological device, and dysfunctional when its tendency is to produce a structural breakdown of the capacity for skillful activity. Technological change, at this level, is a process of mutual adjustment between human skill and technological possibilities by which the skillful self gradually gets a grip on its situation. But the assimilation and accommodation of technical elements to contexts of purposes in use rarely regulates itself in this way. The assembly of technical elements into individual technologies is influenced by social relationships, by the organization and division of labor between managers, workers, and designers, and by extraneous “imperatives” such as efficiency and productivity.79 Different configurations of technical elements are shaped by two distinct processes of instrumentalization, which interact in complex ways. Primary instrumentalization, according to Feenberg, reifies technological objects by decontextualizing and manipulating them. Secondary instrumentalization reinserts the decontextualized objects of a technical practice into human action systems. The various ways in which these kinds of instrumentalization interact produce different technological rationalities with specific characters.80

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

129

“What it is to be an automobile or a television is settled by social processes that establish definitions of these objects and grant them specific social roles.”81 Which technological realizations of particular technical elements are able to establish themselves reflects the influence and interest of different social actors in efficiency, the control of workers and workplaces, and of consumers and consumption. Feenberg argues that of two configurations that arise out of any set of technical elements, the one that best supports these extraneous objectives is most likely to be adopted. In capitalism, the primary instrumentalization of the objects of technical practice predominates, suppressing reintegrative processes of secondary instrumentalization that tend to reincorporate technical objects into contexts of purposes of use. The construction of the assembly line is neither a contingency that simply crops up at a certain point in history, nor a necessary stage in the development of the forces and relations of production. It is a composition—a particular possible arrangement of technical elements, whose structure, design, and purpose is influenced by economic and cultural factors, many of which are not connected directly with the “pure functioning” of the technology. The fact that one technology works better than another is never the sole reason it is adopted.82 Particular technological configurations may be marginalized not because they are inefficient or suboptimal but because they pose a threat to a status quo. The delegation of norms through design leads to what Feenberg calls “implementation biases.” Corporations obstruct paths of technological development that would compromise managerial control and autonomization of the workplace.83 “The integration of skill and intelligence into production is often arrested by the fear that the firm will become dependent on its workers.”84 Equally or more efficient technological configurations compatible with a higher degree of skillful activity are rejected, impeding the democratization and humanization of work. Because debate about such issues usually takes place in situations of unequal political influence, the reasons for adopting or rejecting a technology are often shrouded in obscurity or lost in polemic. Discussion of alternative organizations of work, of the efficiency of skillful activity, and the ways it can be restructured, is pushed into the background, concealing the character of the technological situation and the choices it affords.85 Once it is recognized that the configuration of technical elements into particular technologies is not the deterministic expression of a particular stage of technological development but the result of a social process by which technical objects are defined and granted roles, such processes can be criticized and challenged. Such criticisms can address both technologies and the systems of social action within which they are embedded. Feenberg cites the conflict that took place in the first half of the nineteenth century between social progressives and British factory owners who maintained it would be inefficient to pay adults to do work

130

CHAPTER 5

that children could do. It was not enough for critics to attack the inhumanity of child labor. They had to convince its advocates that it was no more efficient than alternative ways of organizing work within the dominant technical culture. As Feenberg observes, the Victorian economy was eventually able to adjust to the exclusion of children from the labor force without difficulty.86 Feenberg argues for a politics of technological transformation the goal of which is to raise public consciousness about progressive possibilities that are inherent but unrealized in specific technologies. Civilizational change presupposes cultural changes that have both economic and ethical aspects. The attempt to place metaphysical, moral, or pragmatic boundaries around technology without looking at the inner structure of technological development is liable to fail because values and choices are already built into the design of technologies. Since the role and definition of technical objects and the criteria of technological progress are social and cultural as well as technical, it is possible to seek alternative paths of technological development, incorporating recontextualizing strategies that support the integration of skill into work. Inclusive democratic debate will eventually take major decisions about potential paths of technological development out of the hands of specialists and make them matters of public concern. The gadget or gizmo that fascinates purely by virtue of its functionality often has no other use or purpose. It is the limiting case of a technological rationality that has emancipated itself from skillful activity. Technologies that are purely functional illustrate the reduction of technology to its primary instrumentalizations, depriving it of the contextual properties that support its integration into skillful activity. But technology also has a reintegrative potential that design can facilitate. For this to be possible, it is necessary to make the reintegration of skill into technology a constitutive goal of design. Feenberg describes a set of recontextualizing strategies the goal of which is to guide the discovery of “coherent configurations of human and technical resources that would support a different type of modern civilization.”87 These strategies––“concretization,” “vocation,” “aesthetic investment,” and “collegiality”––are to form the basis of a technical code that will reincorporate skill into technological interactions.88 We can think of such recontextualizing strategies as attempts to restore the organic equilibrium of technological complexes. What distinguishes technologies that can be reintegrated into skillful activity from gadgets, contraptions, and other devices is that they are usable. Usability is not a property of things or of the self that uses things, but of the relationship between the skillful self and specific resources, tools, artifacts, and technologies. Usable technologies tend to sustain the organic equilibrium of technological complexes, whereas technologies that are not usable lead to dysfunction and deskilling, first occasional and then sys-

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

131

tematic. Technologies that are not usable block redefinitions of the technological situation in ways that are skillful. Not all technologies can be made usable, nor need they be. Many are only utilizable in the sense that they invite operation and manipulation but leave little scope for skill. What is important is that those that are merely utilizable do not preponderate. The shift from the skill-based system to the determining system often involves a loss of usability because “in the determining system . . . all possible motions are fixed in advance by the structure of the machine.”89 But other technologies, and indeed entire technological complexes, can be examined with a view to maintaining what we can refer to as the balance of usability. Many different paths of technological development are consistent with the capacity for skillful activity. What is important is to exclude those that are not. The discovery of recontextualizing strategies is a complex task because usability is not a physical or generic property of objects that can be discovered by simply inspecting their outward appearance or analyzing their intellectual definitions. The technical code is only one aspect of the usability relation. The other is human. For the greater part of history, and no doubt prehistory, the investigation of usability was itself a kind of skillful activity. Usability was a by-product of the way things were made. But the disintegration of skillful activity into distinct phases of conception, design, execution, production, and consumption, and the distribution of these functions among different individuals, undermines the awareness and understanding of usability, replacing it with an approach in which the observer and the spectator, rather than the skillful self, have the upper hand. Feenberg distances himself from Habermas, whose account of the relation between system and lifeworld is “too indiscriminate to detect the differences between various types of technical codes and practices.”90 Habermas errs “in assuming the unity of scientific-technical reason.”91 He thus overlooks the social and cultural aspect of specific technologies, and their interaction with economic and administrative media in the social coordination of rational action. For Habermas, it is not technical rationality per se, but its universalization in a form that embraces not just science and technology but the entire human world that is at fault. Communicative rationality is to correct the dysfunctional relationship between system and lifeworld by setting a limit to the proliferation of economic and administrative subsystems and the strategic interests they embody. But for Feenberg, “the dominant form of technological rationality is neither an ideology . . . nor is it a neutral requirement determined by the ‘nature’ of technique. Rather, it stands at the intersection between ideology and technique where the two come together to control human beings and resources in conformity with . . . ‘technical codes.’”92 The problem is not merely that technology is applied inappropriately. Technology is a medium of action-coordination that substitutes interest-biased designs for communicative understanding. Technological rationality

132

CHAPTER 5

forms the horizon within which discourse itself operates, fashioning a form of life that the procedural rationality of discourse ethics cannot reach or criticize.93 The long-term goal of public deliberations must be not merely to limit technology and the excesses of system rationalization, but to penetrate it by raising public consciousness about the implementation biases and civilizational possibilities that are sedimented within the design of particular technologies. These possibilities democracy must attempt to elicit, shape, steer, and control. At the same time, even as he moves beyond the framework of communicative rationality, Feenberg can tell us little about the normative conditions of such a critique. He rejects simplistic appeals to a view of human potentiality rooted in utopian, even perfectionist, socialist ideals.94 The inspiration for “transcending demands” and “unrealized potentialities” is to be sought in the democratic potential of the technological enterprise itself, a potential that can be unleashed by “opening technical development to the influence of a wider range of values.”95 Yet there is a danger of circularity in the claim that the normative basis for the critique of technology is to be sought in a democratic potential that is somehow inherent to technology in itself. How are we to determine the wider range of values that is to unleash this potential without some prior consensus about what that democratic potential is? At this point, Feenberg’s argument faces all the difficulties that also confront more doctrinaire forms of ideology critique. Can reasonable democratic debate about pressing questions of technological design be grounded in a metaphysical view of what it is to be a human being, or in an ideology-critical conception of human history or progress that many do not accept? The public critique of technology in a democracy must avoid the problems raised by allegiance to an ideology-critical framework, linking the critique of technology to a conception of the person that is anchored in public political rather than comprehensive values. We approach technology in this way when we interpret technological complexes as functions of the skillful self. In a culture of skill, the role and limits of technology are established neither from the point of view of communicative rationality, nor from the perspective of some vaguely defined conception of the democratic potential of the technological enterprise, but through an understanding of the skillful self and what it can do.

Capabilities, Resources, Capability-Constrained Resourcism Any political community influences the way in which its members develop skills, capabilities, and competencies. Children begin to acquire skills soon after birth, and continue to do so throughout their lives. The family plays a crucial role in

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

133

determining the character and quality of a child’s skills, and in shaping the path of future learning. Skill developing and skill promoting institutions include preschools and kindergartens, the systems of primary, secondary, and higher education, employing organizations, vocational schools, societies, clubs, and religious associations. But there is a broader sense in which the state shapes the capabilities of its citizens. Political institutions have an educational role because laws and policies fashion people’s self-conceptions and their understanding of what, in the words of Sen, they are able to do and be. Government is not merely about distributing resources or protecting rights, liberties, and opportunities. It is a force that can empower or disempower. Capability theorists argue the state should use its influence to make sure citizens develop the capabilities basic to a decent human life. It should not aim to shape and perfect citizens in accordance with some social ideal, but to equip them for freedom with the abilities they need to make meaningful choices about how to live.96 Because it reflects an ideal of the person, this “capability approach” provides moral arguments for institutional reform. But capability theorists do not want to impose a comprehensive conception of the good on society or decide what kinds of lives people should lead.97 Their goal is individual empowerment. Nussbaum’s list of central capabilities furnishes a nonperfectionist criterion to guide policy on specific issues ranging from development projects to constitutional reform. Single-criterion approaches based on cost-benefit analysis or income statistics fail to capture not only individual differences in income but also non-income factors such as self-respect, the meaningfulness of work, real health and independence, and material control of one’s situation.98 Institutions and policies appear in a different light when their role is to promote human functioning rather than maximize aggregate or average utility.99 “Commodity command is a means to the end of well-being, but can scarcely be the end itself.”100 Welfare economics neglects the complexity of human psychology, in particular the ways in which a person’s preferences may be shaped by their social and cultural environment. It encourages measures of well-being that can be linked to income and consumption, but ignores other equally important determinants of the quality of life.101 Nussbaum thus argues that ten central capabilities are owed to each citizen of a constitutional democracy.102 These central capabilities reflect the importance of being able to live a healthy life of a normal length, of possessing basic physical, intellectual, emotional, imaginative, and mental abilities, and of being capable of certain fundamental kinds of relationships, both to other human beings and to animals and the nonhuman world. Several of the capabilities—the capacity for reflection on a plan of life, for a sense of justice and practical reason—are prefigured in Rawls’s political conception of the person and its powers.103

134

CHAPTER 5

But Nussbaum follows Aristotle and Marx in emphasizing the breadth of human capability and the material support required for its development.104 The quality of a human life depends on the substantial possibilities to which people have access. These possibilities originate not only outside the individual but also in the ways in which they themselves are able to do and be.105 The central capabilities provide a criterion of truly human functioning, inspired by the ideal of the human being that shapes his or her life, rather than being pushed round by the world.106 The designation of some of the capabilities on Nussbaum’s list as “central” may be controversial, but Nussbaum claims there are counterparts for each capability in every culture. Play, imagination, emotion, and sexuality are indispensable to truly human functioning. To deny children the opportunity for play is to deprive them of something essential to human development. Overwhelming fear and anxiety––even when not clinically classified as neuroses––have a debilitating effect on human existence. Justification of such a list must be sought in cross-cultural dialog and the “exchange of reasons and arguments by human beings within history, in which, for reasons that are historical and human but not the worse for that, we hold some things to be good and others bad, some arguments to be sound and others not sound.”107 The capabilities are owed to persons as individuals. The capability principle is an interpretation of Kant’s claim that morality consists in treating persons as ends in themselves.108 Law and policy should be formulated with the aim of promoting the capabilities of persons rather than the interests of families, states, or other corporate bodies.109 Yet the capability approach is not individualistic. The central capabilities reflect the structural importance of relationships to human being and doing. Truly human functioning is relational and interactive—it is embedded in what we have called instrumental and human complexes. Though they are of individuals, central capabilities are inherent to the contexts of purposes in use that form the framework of human life—the capacity to relate to other persons, groups and things, value systems, the environment, other species. Only by developing the other-related capabilities can people feel the force of attachment to a group or an idea, and experience the motivational power that arises from belonging. Membership can never be reduced to mere inclusion in a group. It is also grounded in the human relationships of which people are capable as individuals. The normative appeal to a standard of human functioning addresses perennial doubts about the bad faith of the liberal state. In practice, many citizens are unable to use the resources liberals say they are entitled to.110 The right to vote is useless if the level of education is so low that people do not make use of it. Rights that are guaranteed on paper are not enough. People must be able to make use of them.111 Rawls anticipates such criticisms insofar as they apply to the po-

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

135

litical liberties, the worth of which, he argues, must be guaranteed.112 But he does not endorse similar guarantees for nonpolitical liberties such as freedom of conscience. The capability approach goes beyond resourcism in arguing that political arrangements should focus on the level and quality of individual human functioning and not merely on the distribution of goods. To assess people’s prospects solely on the basis of the resources to which they have access is to ignore the impact of what Sen calls “personal heterogeneities” on their capacity to function. Some may need more educational resources than others to achieve literacy. Others may need more food if they are to be adequately nourished. Sen argues that human functioning is also affected by other types of contingency: environmental diversities such as the quality of public education or the incidence of crime or illness, differences in relational perspectives (the impact of income relative to other participants in a social scheme on the value of income), and the distribution of resources within the family.113 Nussbaum endorses Sen’s claim that economic development and social welfare policies should take account of the relationship between resources and capabilities, focusing not on abstract levels of well-being but on the way in which such personal and social contingencies affect the conversion of resources into functioning.114 This applies not only to core areas of human functioning such as life or bodily health and integrity, but also to rights, which Nussbaum interprets as “combined capabilities”—“not merely language on paper”—in the sense that to possess a right is to be able to exercise the right and to enjoy the external conditions that make that kind of human functioning possible.115 “The state that is going to guarantee people rights effectively is going to have to take a stand about more than the importance of these basic rights themselves. It will have to take a stand on the distribution of wealth and income, the distribution of property rights, access to the legal system, in short, on the use of resources to guarantee to citizens . . . the ‘fair value’ of the various liberties.”116 It can be objected that making a conception of human functioning into the goal of policy in this way might authorize governments to pass judgment on the quality of citizens’ lives, and intervene in perhaps drastic ways should the capability principle not be satisfied.117 Promoting the capabilities of those with the lesser capability will not only incur high social costs that have to be met by other participants in the social scheme. It will grant legitimacy to a form of soft governmental despotism, the goal of which is to compensate for the fact that the less advantaged are not equipped to represent their own social and political interests, or to initiate claims against government for themselves.118 These criticisms might be addressed by arguing that the capability approach champions only a partial ideal of the person. The point is not to impose functioning on people, but to empower them to make their own choices. The capability

136

CHAPTER 5

approach is less vulnerable to the charge of perfectionism than leading alternative views because it makes a firm distinction between policies intended to empower people to make their own choices and policies intended to shape those choices directly. Promoting the central capabilities must not undermine respect for diversity or coerce people into “a desired total mode of functioning.”119 What is to be balanced is not the capability set that a person will ultimately develop but the central capabilities viewed as core conditions of a truly human development. Worries about liberal perfectionism can also be answered by pointing to what Nussbaum calls the “multiple-realizability” of the central capabilities. The capabilities can be realized in different ways in different contexts, so that they accord with local beliefs, circumstances, and traditions. The capabilities form the core of a specifically political conception (a form of political liberalism) and can thus be the object of a political consensus among people who may hold different comprehensive views.120 They are not moral schemata. They do not constitute or define a comprehensive conception of the good. States that adopt them can do so in a way that leaves space for a wide range of moral options and ways of life. The constitutional, legal, and political decisions that flow from their adoption of them are a matter of internal politics. We return to the question of perfectionism below. But an equally serious criticism is that Nussbaum abandons important resourcist insights about the feasibility and workability of social arrangements. The capability approach revives many of the difficulties that making primary goods into the basis of interpersonal comparison avoids. If conversion inequality—the fact that some people need more resources than others to reach a given level of functioning—entitles some to a greater share of social resources than others, government must be in a position to make relevant judgments about people’s abilities. There is some doubt among capability theorists whether capabilities are subjective or objective, or whether they belong to the realm of what Cohen calls “midfare.”121 Can capabilities be measured? How are people’s natural endowments to be assessed, and how is the impact of specific resources on their capabilities to be identified? How do we distinguish empirically between what people actually do and what they are able to do? There is little concrete research on these questions though it can be argued that it is possible to operationalize the measurement of capability or infer capabilities from empirical data designed to measure well-being in other ways.122 Even if such judgments are practically possible, compensation for conversion inequality may have to be so extensive as to sacrifice the expectations of most citizens to make up for the high conversion inequality of a few. Although it claims to be more egalitarian than views that do not take account of conversion inequality, the capability approach implies a redistribution of social resources that many would regard as unfair. As long as further resources can raise

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

137

the capability of those with the lowest capabilities, justice would call for such expenditures. Indeed, it might require “indefinite increases in expenditures on those with the greatest capability shortfalls.”123 It can be replied that adapting policy to take account of conversion inequality does not involve society in unreasonable costs or complex interpersonal comparisons. The capability approach mandates capability enhancement up to only a threshold level below which truly human functioning is not available.124 This is different from requiring the state to meet the idiosyncratic requirements of specific conceptions of the good. Such a threshold can also be set in different ways, either to assure a lower capability threshold below which human existence is not possible, or to assure the development of the capabilities to the higher capability threshold needed for truly human functioning. Sometimes Nussbaum speaks of “determining a decent social minimum in a variety of areas.”125 But she clearly thinks the relevant threshold is the higher one at which people become capable of truly human functioning. At the same time, Nussbaum seems to acknowledge that a list of the central capabilities and the requirement that society promote them for each individual up to the higher capability threshold does not constitute a complete theory of justice.126 While everyone should be assured the central capabilities up to the threshold, a different method for comparing individual shares can be used above it. She suggests that questions about what to do when all citizens are above the threshold can be deferred.127 But issues of fairness will have to be faced quickly, probably before such a threshold has been reached. Improving the central capabilities of some even up to the lower capability threshold will involve diverting resources away from others. This is a question not only of equity and reasonableness but also of social and political stability. Why should those whose expectations are reduced to improve the capabilities of the less fortunate agree to such an arrangement?128 Resourcists reject the idea that capabilities should be the focus of policy. There is a gap between resources and what people can do with them that the state cannot cross. Not only may a person’s capabilities be influenced by factors that it lies beyond the power of the state to control. To make capabilities into the goal of policy requires us, as Pogge argues, to insert people into a natural hierarchy based on a valuation of endowments within which some are assigned an inferior position. This “inverted Aristotelianism” is a perfectionism that claims extra resources not for the better but for the worse endowed. Such policies are likely to incur unreasonably high social costs that have to be met by other participants in the social scheme. They also provide a logic for stigmatizing those who are classified this way.129 While capability theorists argue that individual shares should reflect factors that control the conversion of goods into an individual’s ability to pursue their

138

CHAPTER 5

ends, resourcists focus on institutional arrangements and the inequalities to which they give rise. A resourcist will examine a particular distribution of goods to see if some citizens get a share that is too large or too small relative to some criterion of social justice. Such a criterion, according to Pogge, needs to specify not only a theoretical space in which individual shares can be defined (in terms of capabilities, resources, or some other good) but also a criterion for their distribution. Most liberals are egalitarian in the sense that they hold that inequalities that do not result from a person’s choices are unfair, but many also accept that egalitarianism does not imply a strictly equal distribution of goods. Different patterns of distribution may be fair, as long as these patterns are not contingent on the identity of particular individuals. While “equalitarians” favor distributions that are as close to equality as possible, “prioritarians” favor a social scheme that generates the highest expectations for those with the lowest expectations, and “sufficientarians” a social scheme that guarantees each member of society certain goods up to at least a threshold level.130 As we have seen, Nussbaum advocates the latter strategy and may therefore, as Arneson argues, endorse some form of sufficientarianism.131 But whatever space of comparison and pattern of distribution a distribution-sensitive theory opts for, it must also provide a way of defining and comparing individual shares. To illustrate this point, Pogge describes a metric for a simple cooperative society in which people have roughly equal natural endowments and the space of income is used to define individual shares. Such a metric can be designed not only to secure some particular pattern of distribution (equalitarian, prioritarian, or sufficientarian), but also to be sensitive to individual differences in factors such as effort, contribution, or time worked. Rawls’s difference principle, on Pogge’s analysis, is prioritarian in the space of income over work time.132 This means individual shares are sensitive to how much people are prepared to work, but not to their net contribution to the social product. The overall scheme is designed to maximize the expectations of the least well off. Any workable scheme of social cooperation will need to include some metric (though not necessarily Rawls’s) for balancing the claims of individual participants, and a public conception of justice will have to embody some agreement about how complex such a metric may be before it ceases to be workable. Pogge notes that neither Sen nor Nussbaum proposes a metric, even for the simple case in which people’s natural endowments are assumed roughly equal. Far less do they address the question of how such a metric might be modified to take account of conversion inequalities.133 If we share Rawls’s view that social justice is not simply a matter of allocating a fixed stock of goods, but of sharing the burdens and benefits of cooperation, then the capability approach is incomplete as a theory of social justice, if only because it fails to propose such a metric.

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

139

One way of addressing this problem is to think of capabilities and resources as complementary rather than competing aspects of a single view that specifies a resourcist criterion of social justice from a perspective that is guided but not determined by a critical conception of truly human functioning. In elaborating this combined view, we can follow Pogge in assigning the capability principle a role that is heuristic and evidentiary.134 If there is evidence, from a capability perspective, that resources are distributed in such a way that some are systematically able to function better than others, a resourcist can attempt to correct the distribution of resources to take account of such differences. If women are less well nourished than men, we may propose to distribute food or income to individual family members rather than family heads.135 If children are growing up ignorant because they are unable to make use of free educational facilities, the resourcist can look for ways of removing obstacles such as poor school transport or a lack of free educational materials.136 Similar reasoning can address functional incongruities and distributional anomalies associated with other types of contingency. The logic of redistribution in such cases is neither compensatory nor is it to bring people up to a certain level or threshold of functioning, but to improve the usability of resources. A resourcist perspective that works with a one-dimensional conception of human functioning is exposed to the risks of both formalism and bias. Adopting the capability perspective not only draws attention to anomalies resulting from personal and social contingencies. It also obliges us to ask in a systematic way what kinds of resources a meaningful human life calls for. Such questions can only be raised if we think of people as purposive agents rather than passive recipients of welfare or resources. To promote social justice it is not enough to develop a list of resources and a metric for their distribution. The identification of resources and the discovery of ways of distributing them must be the product of a reasonable path of reflection about what people, viewed as purposive agents, can make use of. Nussbaum’s list of capabilities can be viewed as “a useful heuristic in the development of a resourcist criterion of social justice. It can help us think of all the personal and public goods and supports that human beings need to flourish fully, from the school curriculum to the organization of workplaces and organs of democratic decision making.”137 But the heuristic role of such a list does not extend to making capability into a currency for the distribution of goods. The state can distribute resources. But it cannot secure a specific quantity or quality of functioning for individual citizens in the way that making capabilities into the distribuendum of such a metric would require. This interpretation of the central capabilities is consistent with what Kaufman has called Kant’s “heuristic criterion” for political judgment.138 Alongside the formal theory of right, which is sometimes taken to endorse a libertarian view of the state, Kant’s political teleology would, on Kaufman’s reading, underwrite positive state

140

CHAPTER 5

action to improve social welfare through measures such as income support for the poor and public health care and education. Goods and resources are valued not unconditionally, but because they are “instrumental to the realization of the aptitude to act purposively.”139 We can, accordingly, think of the central capabilities as playing a teleological role in specifying regulative criteria of moral salience as a basis for political judgment.140 Such criteria are necessary if we are to avoid one-dimensional interpretations of both welfarism and resourcism. Resources must be the kinds of goods that it is meaningful to distribute, and the criterion of their meaningfulness a function of the contribution they make to human functioning. The heuristic role of an ideal of human functioning depends on a kind of reasoning that Kant calls “reflective judgment.”141 Reflective judgment, on Kaufman’s reading, enables individuals to “identify the morally significant characteristics of any particular set of circumstances.”142 When applied to problems of social justice, reflective judgment depends on an inventive and skillful use of social resources in specific contexts of purposes in use. This kind of judgment is well suited to the contextual applications that capability theorists see a need for in human development projects. If Kant is right, such an approach presupposes human ingenuity and inventiveness––not just rule following––to find ways of matching resources to human needs while also respecting the constraints of fairness as specified by a fair and workable criterion of social justice. The more we are concerned with the implementation of policies in specific contexts, the more important ingenuity in the discovery of such matches will be. There is no rule or formula for this process. The solution of such problems is a matter of human skill and judgment.143 Assigning the central capabilities a heuristic role in the development and application of a criterion of social justice makes it possible to avoid treating the distribution of resources as a matter of compensation. If there is a reason to believe that particular policies, or the way they are implemented, reflect intrinsic or extrinsic discrimination against individuals, or implementation biases that are systematic in character, resourcists will be prepared to examine and where necessary modify both their index of resources and the criteria for their distribution. But they will not be motivated by the goal of compensation, or what Rawls calls the “principle of redress.”144 The social system as a whole is conceived as a human response to social and historical contingency. It does not seek to play God by directly compensating people for their natural endowments any more than it seeks to reward them. Although the rationale of resourcism is not compensatory, resourcists can modify any metric that is embedded within a public conception of social justice to reflect significant allocable social sources of conversion inequality.145 They can adapt their account of socially necessary resources to reflect not only personal and social contingencies of the kind identified by Sen, but also structural influ-

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

141

ences on the quality of life ranging from the design of economic and administrative systems and technologies to public space and the environment.146 But there is an important difference between relying on a list of capabilities to guide the distribution of social goods and using the distribution of resources to shape the character and distribution of capabilities. The former is consistent with a theory of institutional arrangements that takes account of the relative gains and losses that participants in the social system must be prepared to endorse and accept. The latter subordinates institutional arrangements to an elusive teleological goal while ignoring the importance of fairness and reciprocity to democratic stability. Interpreted and applied heuristically rather than substantively, the capability principle can guide reflection on the usability and availability of social resources, and on the relation between resources and what individual people are able to do and be. It is important to know not only how much of a resource people are entitled to, but also what form resources take and how they can be integrated into everyday life. This applies as much to liberties and public goods as it does to income, external space, health care, housing, and other goods that are regarded as basic or primary. The capability principle raises questions that are likely to be suppressed or considered inscrutable if we think of people as passive recipients of social goods or consumers of welfare. In this way, it breathes life into the resourcist approach to social justice. We can refer to this view of social justice as capability-constrained resourcism. Capability-constrained resourcists hold that the development and implementation of a resourcist criterion of social justice should be guided but not determined by a normative conception of truly human functioning. The development of such a criterion is contingent on practical consensus about the resources on which truly human functioning depends. The application of this criterion must permit contextual adjustments when systematic inequalities in basic forms of human functioning provide evidence of inequalities in the availability and usability of resources. Such an approach faces us with the challenge of thinking in two ways—on the one hand, understanding the goods people need from a normative perspective suggested by the capability principle; and on the other, developing a social metric and a scheme for its implementation that is responsive to this perspective and can form the focus of a public agreement. The counterintuitive combination of the capability approach with resourcism has something in common with Fraser’s perspectival dualism.147 Like perspectival dualists, capability-constrained resourcists think of recognition and distribution not as substantive spheres corresponding to distinct societal or institutional domains but as “analytically distinct ordering dimensions which cut across institutional divisions.”148 Any view that makes concern about individual capability fundamental to the design of political institutions is bound to address

142

CHAPTER 5

the problems of misrecognition and marginalization that result from stereotyping according to gender, race, or class. But for capability-constrained resourcists, the criterion of individual misrecognition is not membership of a disadvantaged group, but the inadequate or lopsided capability development associated with a partisanship of social roles, habits, and expectations. It is not simply the fact of social exclusion, but the way people are excluded that matters. A human complex that encourages a one-sided development of the central capabilities is unjust because it denies people some basic condition of being human. If the division of roles in the family encourages men to develop capacities associated with planning and practical reason at the expense of caring for others, and if the same division encourages women to develop capabilities associated with care but denies them those associated with planning and practical reason, then both men and women are treated unjustly. If a school helps to produce a child with mathematical skills but no imagination, then it has betrayed both mathematics and the child. If society promotes the social bases of respect between humans, but overlooks the social bases of a similar respect for other species and nature, then there is every chance it has cultivated an ecological monster rather than a human being. Unlike perspectival dualism, capability-constrained resourcism works with a political conception of the person that gives content to the idea of social inclusion. People are accorded full recognition as citizens when judgments about the social resources they can claim under a publicly recognized scheme of social justice are guided by the capability principle. This criterion tells us more about the goals of recognition and distributive justice than does Fraser’s conception of participatory parity. It addresses the roots of misrecognition and resentment in disempowerment and disenfranchisement by connecting participation with individual capability and, as we shall argue, skill. At the same time, the capability perspective corrects the tendency of resourcism to focus debates about social justice on issues of distribution and maldistribution. Capability-constrained resourcism requires us to engage in systematic reflection about the purpose and character of the resources that justice requires, while also addressing the hard cases that arise when distributive policies run up against the complexities of social reality. Goods are not merely priced. They are valued. Income, literacy, education, opportunities, and self-respect are abstractions until their value is understood, and that value depends on the ways in which both goods and the mechanisms of their distribution fit and win saliency within the context of human functioning. Before we even consider the prioritization of goods and their subsequent ranking and distribution, we must first ask what kinds of goods human functioning requires. Without this step, a resourcist criterion of social justice is likely to overlook the gap between resources and functioning, the context dependence of resources, and the cultural significance of the ways in which they are distributed or otherwise become available.

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

143

Central Capabilities as Functions of the Skillful Self The idea of truly human functioning draws on intuitions that are both social and practical. Nussbaum borrows from Marx the example of a person who is unable to eat food in a fully human way. “He or she just grabs at the food in order to survive, and the many social and rational ingredients of human feeding can’t make their appearance.” Likewise, if they are to be truly human, the senses must be “cultivated by appropriate education, by leisure for play and self-expression, by valuable associations with others,” and by a variety of freedoms. Truly human functioning exemplifies the characteristics of practical reasoning and sociability.149 It is difficult, however, to detach this view of what it is to be truly human from Aristotle’s act-potency doctrine and a distinctively Western teleological view of human life. Nussbaum’s interpretation of the capability approach owes much to a Greek conception of being in which capability, excellence, and the “that for the sake of which” an action is performed are inextricably interconnected. En-ergeia and entelecheia are hard to hold apart. More important, central capabilities are not merely capacities for practical reasoning and sociability. They are capacities for significant forms of desire. Indeed, it is the component of desire that makes them worth securing. “The very fact that human beings characteristically desire play, and intimacy, and control over their environment provides at least some reason for politics to secure these things to people. . . . As we shall see, this will give desire a role in political justification that is more than merely heuristic.”150 The role of desire in political justification is explained by the continuity between “the intelligence and selectivity of basic appetitive elements in our animal nature and more complex choice-like elements.”151 Choice is influenced by desire and appetite in a way that is at once responsive and selective.152 The prominence of activity, agency, intentionality, and desire in her account of the self means that Nussbaum’s view of individual human functioning is likely to be perceived by many as individualistic.153 This is a problem if her aim is to elaborate a partial ideal of the person that can contribute to the development of a workable cross-cultural consensus. Many cultures attach more weight to values of positive interdependence than to individualism, self-actualization, and desire.154 What in one cultural situation might be regarded as evidence of a healthy individualism may in another be regarded as willfulness. Nussbaum addresses this issue by making a distinction between a central capability and its realization.155 Each of the central capabilities can be concretely realized in different ways in accordance with tastes, circumstances, and traditions. This may be plausible when it is a matter of interpreting a particular capability, say affiliation (Capability 7), in different cultural contexts. Cultures have

144

CHAPTER 5

different ways of expressing human relationships, human closeness and distance, human concern, and friendship, but they all have some way of doing so. But how does multiple-realizability help us to interpret the structure of human personality that is basic to all the capabilities in cultures for which a Western conception of functioning is foreign? What does it mean to realize a political conception of the person that prioritizes agency, intentionality, and desire in a cultural context that focuses on social interdependence or collectivism? It seems that Nussbaum offers us only a blank check to cover such cases. Although the capability principle has a Kantian interpretation, Nussbaum rejects a Kantian conception of moral agency in favor of the Aristotelian view that choice and desire form a continuum, and that “choice is a deliberative type of desire.”156 It is the possibility of just such a continuum that Kant questions in section 83 of the Critique of Judgment. Kant holds that the objects of choice and desire form distinct realms that require mediation if it is to be possible to speak of freedom. It is the task of culture to provide this mediation. Culture is the production in a rational being of “an aptitude for purposes generally . . . in a way that leaves that being free.”157 Human beings can only make moral choices because of this already established “aptitude” that culture supplies; “but not just any culture.” While a culture of discipline (or perhaps “training”) is needed to free ourselves from the “despotism that rivets us to certain natural things and renders us unable to do our own selecting,” a culture of skill is needed to desire and give form to a world within which moral choice is possible.158 Goods of whatever kind are not simply consumed, and choices of whatever kind are not simply made. They have to be integrated into human activity in a meaningful way. The language of resources and capabilities is too abstract when we are trying to take account of cultural variation.159 Resources are things people can use. Capabilities are what we have when we are able to make use of them. It is the way goods fit into the context of everyday life that we refer to as their “usability.” A blandly drafted list of primary goods may lead us to overlook the many social, institutional, and technological factors that affect the usability of things. Usability is not the same as efficiency, convenience, usefulness, or utility. It is not a property of things in the way that color, shape, or dimensions are. It expresses the availability of a thing for incorporation into everyday skillful activity. The usability of a machine or a tool is not something that can be discovered by looking at it. The fit between hand and tool is not simply a matter of external geometry or mechanics. It has to be tried out. The tool reflects the know-how of the user. It fits into the world of the user’s activity and the user’s concern with a certain task. Things are usable when they can be incorporated into the everyday activity of the skillful self. They are unusable when they are not available for the skillful self to make use of. Machinery is often unusable because it resists in-

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

145

corporation into everyday ways of acting and doing that the skillful self can appropriate and make its own. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, usable technologies sustain an organic equilibrium of the skillful self with its technological situation, whereas technologies that are not usable promote deskilling. A resourcist metric that specifies entitlements to a certain distribution of resources without considering the usability of those resources overlooks what we can refer to as their inner differentiation. This, in a socially valuable good, is determined by the possible ways of integrating the resources associated with it into everyday skillful activity. Usability is not the same as convertibility into functioning. A resource has to be usable before it can contribute to human functioning. Civil and political liberties, education, opportunities for employment, or health care all display a high degree of inner differentiation when considered with an eye to their usability. There is a difference from the point of view of usability between mere access to medical goods and services and the availability that enables people to make meaningful use of them. Resources connected with health care are not simply consumables but goods that people must be able to make meaningful use of. Resourcism may lead us to misconceive the relationship between people and their health, encouraging the view that not just support for health but health itself is something we can be owed by the state. Unusability may be both occasional and systematic, subjective and objective. Something is subjectively unusable if we lack the know-how or competences to use it. It is objectively unusable if we know how to use it but it doesn’t work. Subjective systematic unusability involves a breakdown of the capacity for skillful activity in a specific context of purposes in use. An example is the deskilling of workers in a factory or industrial plant. The machinery “works” but the skillful self does not use it—it operates it or is integrated into some part of its operation. Objective systematic unusability is exemplified by machines that by their very design tend to resist skillful incorporation within a context of purposes in use. Objective systematic unusability depends not only on what resources a person has access to but how they have access to them. Many resourcists overlook the fact that the usability of resources depends not only on what is distributed but also on how it is distributed. There is a difference between enjoying freedom of expression and having a formal right to it that is unusable, or between earning income and receiving monetary compensation because one has not. Goods and resources can contribute to the development of capabilities only if they are objectively usable. Public policy has to distinguish and achieve an appropriate balance between income support that may sustain “recipients in a dependent and unproductive existence” and antipoverty programs intended to improve the skills and capabilities of people.160 We can take account of usability within the context of capabilityconstrained resourcism by characterizing the central capabilities as functions of

146

CHAPTER 5

the skillful self. We use the words “capability” and “skill” to talk about different types of thing. Capability is about what a person is able to do, whereas skill has to do with how they do it. To have a capability is not necessarily to be skillful in exercising that capability. Someone who has a capability may have to gain certain skills to exercise it, up to even a threshold level. Not all capabilities involve skill, however. One may be capable of telling a lie without being a skilled liar and capable of reciting a poem without doing so well. Skill, on the other hand, does imply some kind of capability. A skilled musician must possess at least some of the capabilities implicit in musicianship. A skilled liar is surely capable of telling a lie. Talking about skill rather than capability directs our attention to the way people do things, and not merely to what they can do. It also adds something to our understanding of how people acquire capabilities. Skills are often a means to capability. One acquires capabilities by acquiring skills. An understanding of the role of skill and the skillful self in the central capabilities corrects the tendency to think of these capabilities as part of an ideal of the person that would justify excessive state intervention in the lives of citizens. Nussbaum, of course, holds that the central capabilities do not constitute a complete ideal of the person. They form a partial ideal based on a conception of human functioning without which a life would lack basic human features. But even in characterizing the partial ideal, she stresses mainly the positive aspects of truly human functioning. Yet there is such a thing as a perfectionism of the partial ideal that takes as its model the case in which skillful activity is functioning transparently. This transparency may lead her to overlook the role of skill in capability altogether. Skillful behaviors, even apparently simple ones, are hard to acquire though transparent once we possess them. Not understanding and not being able to do things play a central role in any capability. The human situation is often characterized not by transparency but by ignorance, ambivalence, and lack of insight. It is impossible to understand skills and human capabilities without recognizing that we are also truly human when things are not working properly and we are confronted with the problematic character of existence. To support the central capabilities is not to invoke a perfectionist ideal of the person but to grasp human beings as selves fully situated in life with all the problems and prospects this implies. The central capabilities should not be mistaken for paradigms of flawless human functioning. But even as it emphasizes the problematic character of human existence, an understanding of the skillful self also reminds us of its possibilities. Skill is a source of opportunities as well as obstacles. Only the pianist can draw music from a piano. The skilled carver can discover forms in wood of which others are unaware. A person who is skilled in the perception of other human beings can discover possibilities in a person that others cannot see.

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

147

Nussbaum is on safer ground with her criticisms of the psychological impoverishment of the family of views of political justification that Sunstein has characterized as “subjective welfarism.”161 Why should political psychology be limited to the austere vocabulary of preference and preference satisfaction that welfarists regard as basic? The language of preference promotes theoretical elegance and discourages certain kinds of philosophical obscurity. But taken too far, the desire for clarity can lead theory to miss its object altogether, particularly if we ourselves are that object. Human beings are not black boxes. Anchoring political psychology in the language of preference allows us to forget that people can only desire and choose what is already somehow meaningful to them. Subjective welfarism and the discourse of preference block out the everyday contexts of purposes in use within which something like a preference can take shape. Human beings do not live in a world of preferences and desires. We learn to desire certain things, and perhaps desire itself, only through skillful activity in the contexts of purposes in use within which we grow up and live our lives. We desire things because they are part of the more comprehensive framework of contexts that unfolds as we acquire the skills, aptitudes, and know-how necessary to deal with them. To want a house, a family, success in a specific activity or job, to want to live in a city, a village, or close to nature, to enjoy good food or do good for humanity—these things are desired neither in themselves nor because they may some day deliver a certain quantity of pleasure. We want them because we understand them to belong to more comprehensive structures that have already become meaningful to us through our own skillful engagement with the everyday world. Choice in its primary sense is not based on an intellectual decision for a certain set of options or alternatives, but begins in an understanding by the skillful self of what it can do. Things and future states are not merely a function of their utility, but possibilities that are more or less implicit in the human, instrumental, and technological complexes of which everyday experience is composed. Ways of living, doing, relating, and making are never selected from an unlimited range of theoretical options. They are available only because they are implicit in how we do things at the moment. Which lives the self can plan depends on which lives it can live skillfully. If skill is a means to capability, then concern about capability implies concern about skill. To characterize the central capabilities as functions of the skillful self is to change our understanding of the central capabilities and of the political institutions and arrangements that should promote them. It is to draw attention to the role of skill in capability and hence to the importance of promoting skill as a way of promoting capability. Deskilling is an obstacle to the development of the central capabilities and can subvert them no matter what other measures support them. Subjective welfarism is unable to address

148

CHAPTER 5

the phenomenon of deskilling because it obliterates the connection between preference and skill. But the capability approach also overlooks the structural relations between skill and desire. Skill is, in a sense, intermediate between capability and desire. It is in gaining skills that people get control of their desires in such a way as to develop capabilities. It is in losing skills that they lose control of their preferences. An understanding of the skillful self and of how systems, technologies, and skillful activity meet in everyday life lends psychological structure to our view of what Nussbaum calls the “adaptive self,” and of the ways in which systematic distortions of our everyday acting and doing shape both what we want and what we think we want.162

LIFE Social and political arrangements that promote central capabilities while ignoring skill can only intensify the problem of deskilling. Life (Capability 1) is not merely a biological process in time, though biological existence in time may be a condition of life.163 A human life, insofar as it presents the characteristics of truly human functioning, reflects the skillful activity of a self that is able to be both center and organizer of its own existence.164 The infant has no skills. The mother provides it with orientation, regulates its environment, guides its first efforts at sensorimotor, locomotor, and manipulative skill acquisition, and cultivates its skills of attention and communication, both verbal and nonverbal. Gradually, the child learns how to deal with things skillfully. As it does so, the skilled parent lets the child tackle more and more tasks for itself. Eventually it acquires all the skills involved in self-maintenance. This is an ongoing process that begins at birth and continues to maturity. Many aspects of social and political arrangements—dehumanizing work conditions, processes of automation, attacks on self-esteem, alienating political institutions, and administrative structures that encourage and instill feelings of passivity and helplessness—may distort and destroy the child’s skillful relation to the world and to itself, without ending or even threatening its biological life.

HEALTH Medical models of bodily health (Capability 2) often focus on the perspective of health, disease, and proper functioning. Disease counts in a population provide a “crude index of health status.”165 The classification of disease is correspondingly abstract. Health care may be viewed as a product or index good that society can deliver to those who need it, but health resources cannot be delivered in such a way as to take over people’s responsibility for their health. Health is not a

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

149

package a government can provide. Nor can the healthful relationship of the self to itself be characterized in terms of the relation of a subject to an object. Health is not merely a biological state, a physical fact, or an introspective condition. The human body is not a tool or a machine to be serviced, a thing with which “we” have contact, or a mechanical entity we inhabit. The transparency of everyday healthy functioning and its absorption in the task in hand lead the skillful self to overlook the fact that it has a body, so that being healthy is something of which we are normally unaware. The skillful self experiences itself primarily through the instrumental complexes in which it is involved and the things it is dealing with. We may become aware of the body for the first time only when it malfunctions. Now that we no longer understand how to use it, we realize the extent to which we depend on it for expressing ourselves and dealing with the world. Once lost, health is difficult to get back. When the body goes wrong, skillful activity may be interrupted for a while and the restoration of health comes only when the body is able to resume its everyday skillful functioning. Health is expressed in the capacity of the skillful self to care for itself. This is not merely a matter of encouraging “patient autonomy.”166 For autonomy to be of value we must be in a position to exercise the countless skills that constitute an awareness of both body and person. Such skills involve not only knowing how to observe the body and its signs, but also understanding oneself as an entity that is embodied. To treat medical care as an undifferentiated resource to be packaged, distributed, and consumed is not only to ignore the ways in which health is a matter of care of the self for itself but also to contribute to the process of deskilling by encouraging the identification of health care with consumption. The monetarization, industrialization, and bureaucratization of medicine threatens people’s health insofar as it encourages the confusion of being healthy with the consumption of health products and services, and promotes an understanding of the patient as a consumer. When the body is seen as a machine to be used to release labor power, to be serviced like a car or washing machine, then not understanding the body has become structural.167

BODILY INTEGRITY To protect a person’s bodily integrity (Capability 3) is not just to treat their physical boundaries as sovereign territory.168 The integrity of the human body cannot be separated from the space in which it lives, and the way it holds itself and moves within that space. It is not the physical integrity of a mere object. It is a certain way in which the skillful self comports itself within contexts of purposes in use. Bearing and posture express the integrity or “use” of the self.169 A healthy

150

CHAPTER 5

posture cannot be specified by specifying the coordinates of the body as it is correctly positioned in physical space at a given moment.170 Ways of moving, comportment, and posture are not mechanical, yet they do not come from nowhere. “They are incorporated into the modus operandi of the developing human body through a history of training and experience, under the guidance of already skilled practitioners, and in an environment characterized by its own distinctive textures and topography, littered with the products of previous human activity.”171 They are historical. Subtle violations of the organic equilibrium of the skillful self can have an impact on the integrity of the person the consequences of which are as profound as direct physical assault. Posture develops early in life. Education and socialization have not yet distorted the young child’s deportment. The bearing and carriage adopted in childhood shape our possibilities for years to come. We may have to fight to overcome an awkwardness acquired in youth. Because they are grounded in skillful activity, such ways of using ourselves quickly become transparent and cannot be changed by a simple choice or an act of will power. Violations of the bodily integrity of the skillful self may be occasional or systematic. It is possible to assail the integrity of the human body not only by transgressing its boundaries, but also by manipulating the character of the spaces in which it lives and functions.172 Public space and architecture, the layout of streets and roads, the character and organization of the workplace, and the design of technology systematically influence the integrity of the body. The factories and mass production facilities of the industrial revolution are prototypes of a deskilled space that decontextualizes and dehumanizes those who work in it. Bodily integrity, however, is not only susceptible to the decontextualizing influences of the spaces within which it moves. Social rules, regulations, and systems of knowledge are the buildings in which human society lives.173 The proliferation of legal and administrative systems may be coercive if they cease to function as instruments and tools of the skillful self and become instead a prison that organizes and forces it through life in a way that is not its own.174

SENSES, IMAGINATION, AND THOUGHT Senses, imagination, and thought (Capability 4) are all ways in which the skillful self deals with its practical situation.175 Skillful activity is characterized by perceptual and cognitive difficulty. Public ideologies that celebrate the omnipotence of human faculties, of science, of ideals, and of progress often obscure the problems associated with cognition and the acquisition of knowledge. Nearly all human progress is arduous and involves a struggle with the limits imposed by what we do not see or understand. The skillful self has difficulty in making the situa-

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

151

tions in which it is involved explicit and accessible to reflection. Only when something goes wrong may its attention be shifted from the activity in hand to what is not working properly or causing difficulty. Deliberation about a problem may then lead it to attend to other aspects of the situation and reflect on ways of dealing with it. Far from being active and constantly discovering the world, sense, imagination, and thought are normally blind to those aspects of the world to which they have no skillful relationship, even if such aspects are close at hand and obvious once pointed out. While television, telephone, computer networks and other technologies bring the world spatially and humanly closer, they simultaneously impinge on our capacity for skillful activity, transforming us into the kinds of beings who watch television, telecommunicate, and operate computers. Rather than opening it up, the communications media often lead the skillful self to close itself off from itself and its environment. The one thing we do not see or experience when we watch television is the world.176 Information is a type of knowledge that has been detached from specific contexts of purposes in use to make it transmittable. The visual images conveyed through the media are representations of things, situations, and events to which the skillful self cannot readily relate. When confronted with the electronic media, the skillful self takes on the role of the operator.177 The operator relates to the world through manipulation rather than skillful activity. To operate the switch, the electronic relay, the computer keyboard, or the control panel is to extend one’s action through this equipment into a situation to which one no longer has a skillful relationship. Where the skillful self is always in touch with the consequences of its actions, the operator can produce effects in situations to which it has no relationship. In human complexes, the operator is like the surgeon who “abstains from facing the patient man to man.”178 When the skillful self takes on the role of the operator, it tends to conflate information with knowledge. A constant supply of data merely reinforces the tendency to separate itself from that to which it has no skillful relationship. Information thus forms a “strange world which just overlies the world of personal acquaintance.”179

PLAY Imagination is not so much a relation to what is not as a way of relating skillfully to what is. It is exhibited in the make-believe play of the child who learns to prescind a form of skillful activity from its engagement with a specific context of purposes in use, bringing it to bear on situations to which it has, so far, no skillful relationship. Play (Capability 9) enables the child to free and redirect its concern. Initially it may involve pretending to eat a piece of make-believe food

152

CHAPTER 5

or to go to sleep. Later, the imaginary food may be used to feed a puppet or a doll. As make-believe play frees itself from the current context of purposes in use, it becomes possible for a child to create situations and scenarios involving everyday activities such as running a shop or preparing a meal.180 At first, play is concerned mainly with freeing skillful activity from particular instrumental complexes, but later it takes on human complexes as well. The child moves from the real playmate to the make-believe playmate. Still later, it learns to abstract from the current context of purposes in use and generalize about abstract states of affairs. Now it can grasp and participate in games involving rules. An understanding of rules is thus also a form of skillful activity. What is freed up in this way need not be physically absent. Imagination does not transport the child into a different physical space. Yet it does enable the child to view the physical space in which he or she is moving and acting in a different way. When the capacity for skillful activity breaks down, or when imagination no longer connects the skillful self with its environment, it ceases to be a way of looking at what is and becomes the frantic search for what is not, characterized by distraction, dispersal of attention, decentering, and the fragmentation of consciousness. For the operator, imagination is no longer an expression of the self, and of the way it relates to particular contexts of purposes in use, but a means of testing and recreating a reality to which it can no longer relate skillfully. At the same time, imagination ceases to be a form of play and becomes a type of work.

EMOTIONS It is sometimes asserted that emotional competence (Emotions: Capability 5) is the ability to label, express, and understand emotions.181 Yet emotional skill consists not merely in the ability to appraise, understand, and regulate emotions, but in the ability to have them at all. Emotion is a way in which the skillful self lets the world matter to it so it can deal with it and respond to the changing demands of ongoing activity.182 Children acquire the basic skills relevant to understanding emotion early in life. In doing so, they not only learn to give situations emotional significance but also to understand the role of emotion—when it is appropriate to express certain emotions and when the emotions must be concealed. Such rules usually reflect culturally specific differences in the way in which emotions are represented. When people can no longer relate skillfully to their situation it is sometimes said that they cannot cope.183 Failure to cope may take various forms. Stress, anxiety, depression, rumination, catastrophizing, and other psychopathologies are not themselves emotions but disturbances of the capacity for emotion. They re-

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

153

flect the inability of the skillful self to let a situation matter in such a way that it can deal with it. The skillful self feels anxiety when it recognizes that it is unable to guide a task or situation with understanding and know-how. Such an inability to cope may be occasional or systematic. When anxiety becomes systematic, the skillful self experiences its everyday situation as lacking in emotional significance. Anxiety is not merely a dysfunctional habit, as a learning theorist might hold.184 It is not a kind of emotion but the absence of emotion. When it becomes dysfunctional, the absence of emotion and the ability to let oneself be moved in such a way as to deal with one’s situation skillfully turns into an emotion about something that is absent and indefinite. The causes of such dysfunction are structural in that whatever is interfering with skillful activity is ongoing and pervasive. The skillful self has no way of reacting to such influences, and can no longer even assign to them the meanings normally associated with an obstacle.

PRACTICAL REASON For the skillful self that experiences itself as a center and organizer of meaningful activity, practical reason (Capability 6)—the ability to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about planning one’s life—has its roots in the skillful relationship to the way things are going at any given moment.185 When it deliberates about something, its primary concern is not with temporally remote goals, far less with a conception of the good, or a plan of life but instead with ways of doing things that are part of its current situation. The last thing it is concerned with is the ends of its activity, or the final reasons for doing some things rather than others. Far from being able to view its life as a whole, the skillful self is often blind to those aspects of its future to which it lacks a skillful relationship. It knows the future will come some day, but it cannot imagine what it will be like in a year or two, much less in ten or twenty. By interrupting what it is doing, and engaging in reflection and dialog with others, the skillful self pushes back its concern with the task in hand and attempts to discern the main features of its situation. Often it has little understanding of these larger contexts. We may have been told that we have a history, or that we have a certain station in life, yet we lack knowledge not only of the communities to which we belong, but also of those to which we do not belong but with which we are nevertheless involved. We ourselves are hard to see. We are not used to making explicit the contexts of purposes in use that form the framework of our everyday world. We are not aware of ourselves as the inhabitants of particular roles, or of the inner tensions and conflicts between these roles

154

CHAPTER 5

and self-understandings, all of which are firmly rooted in our everyday ways of doing things. A relation to the past is embedded in complex networks of meanings, activities, and contexts that are both more finite and more urgent than the study of history as a theoretical subject might suggest. Each person grows up at the intersection of an array of memories, expectations, and narrative knowledges that are embodied not in a conscious conception of the past but in ways of doing things in relation to the world and to others. Even if we have the economic independence to worry about such things, criticism and planning may be almost impossible. None of these processes depends on simple acts of insight. They have to be worked through skillfully, sometimes with, but often without, the guidance of others, and without rules or principles to lead the way. Yet all of this is necessary if drawing up a plan of life is to be more than a mechanical act. Projects cannot be selected at will or at random, but arise within a horizon of options defined by existing repertoires of skillful activity. When interpretation has begun to reveal to a person that he or she exists at the intersection of various roles, that person may for the first time raise the question of how these roles fit together, and make a meaningful choice about which roles to prioritize and paths of action to pursue. Often we cannot say with certainty which roles are ours. The skillful self is compelled neither to accept nor reject all the tasks and self-understandings that may be implicit in its situation. The consistency of a person is not the same as that of a logical proof or a mathematical system, but something that has to be worked through and worked out. To be able to interpret one’s situation in this way is not to seek the independence of circumstance characteristic of a radically situated subject, who in distinguishing himself or herself from a situation repudiates the social meanings of different goods, the social nature of human beings, or the goals set by that situation. Meaningful choice does presuppose a certain openness to the contexts of significance that frame important decisions, just as the interpretation of such contexts is in a sense a condition of meaningful deliberation. Critical reflection, deliberation, and choice in planning our lives is a matter of examining the meanings we have already given to our situation, and to the future, as much as it is about modifying objectives. The skillful self can never make a choice in a vacuum. It is balanced when it moves within a horizon defined by projects it understands and can interpret and reflect on. As life progresses, it gains a new understanding of the contexts that fall within this horizon and moves forward into new situations it may also interpret, deliberate about, and reflect on. The skillful self is thus always on the move, attempting to interpret and revise its understanding of its current situation.

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

155

AFFILIATION To grasp others as skillful selves is itself a form of skillful activity. Nussbaum characterizes affiliation (Capability 7) as the ability to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for them.186 This capability also embraces imagination and compassion. Social psychologists often base their assessment of a person’s skill in personal relationships on the adaptivity or adjustment of their behavior. By this, they mean the kind of behavior that can secure the approval of others. Delinquency is associated with a lack of the skills needed to gain the approval of others. Peer acceptance or popularity indices are used to assess a person’s social competence.187 The child who is well liked and has good relationships with other children is socially skilled. Social skills are classified according to their effectiveness in various forms of communication, the reinforcement they elicit, or the social outcomes they produce. Behavioral definitions usually treat social skills as situation-specific behaviors that maximize the chances of reinforcement and minimize the chances of punishment. Such approaches can be operationalized for purposes of assessment. But the capacity for affiliation is not just the ability to gain the approval of others. Sometimes it involves the ability to win their disapproval. The skillful self encounters others when it has dealings with them, and these dealings evolve in precisely those contexts of purposes in use in which it is already engaged in some other kind of skillful activity. Others are encountered not in isolation but along with activities that are already meaningful and in which the others also play a skillful role. When the skillful self does understand others, it is those with whom it has dealings it understands. Such interactions with others are largely transparent unless they confront an obstacle, are interrupted, or break down. The art of perceiving others often has its beginnings in such disruptions of joint action and communication. The skillful self begins to notice not only that the other has beliefs and opinions, wants, needs, and motives that are different from its own, but that the other is also a skillful self with a situation of its own to deal with, who may also feel the tug and pull of different roles that fit together well or awkwardly. Now the skillful self can put itself in the place of the other, not by a leap of empathy or compassion but by asking what it would be like to deal with a situation like theirs. Yet, far from being concerned with the perception of others on a routine basis, the skillful self for the most part does not take note of them at all because of its fundamental absorption in its own situation. It is only with effort that the skillful self learns to recognize the independent existence of those with whom it has to do beyond its immediate situation. Often the other is an abstract other whom we never meet.188 Most people do not have a skillful relationship to most others. The many others we never encounter

156

CHAPTER 5

we do not in any way understand, but simply know about. Constant moral demands to take account of others whom it simply knows about may lead the skillful self to close itself off from those to whom it has no skillful relationship. It realizes that they exist but it cannot care about them. Far from bringing these others closer, additional information about them may merely serve to make them seem more remote. Social values such as community, solidarity, reciprocity, and mutual recognition fit uneasily in this context. The larger society becomes, the more perplexing the moral demands it makes on the skillful self. Citizens find themselves confronted with a social scheme that exceeds their capacity to represent it.189 Overvaluing the positive character of truly human functioning obscures the difficulty the skillful self may have in imagining what it is like to be another person. Even less is it in a position to empathize with those from other cultures, or to care about those it will never see and never know.190 The art of perceiving other people is acquired laboriously and only with difficulty, and we may not be aware of the limitations to which our interpersonal perceptions are prone. This contradiction is at the heart of political systems built on powerful otherregarding emotions and ideals.191 Although social and political arrangements call for recognition and care for others, the human psychological resources available to support such attitudes are limited.

RELATION TO THE NATURAL WORLD Far from having a direct and fruitful relationship to the natural world and other species (Capability 8), the skillful self tends to overlook nature because of its preoccupation with its own situation.192 This is true although human beings are literally in nature all the time and are themselves part of the natural world. This being-in-nature, however, is obscured by the fact that the world in which the skillful self moves, with its houses, streets, signposts, machines, and electronic devices, is for the most part a world of its own creation. This applies not only to the inhabitants of cities. Even the country dweller deals with a world that is primarily of human making. The cherry tree is a product of agriculture or genetic engineering, farm animals and crops were bred long ago from other animals and strains that were themselves already tamed and domesticated. The contours of the landscape are shaped by farming and forestry or disfigured by strip mining and pollution. The environment and nature are discovered only indirectly along with skillful activity in contexts of purposes in use. The pencil that we use to write refers indirectly to the wood, the lumberyard, and the forest; the car to the iron and steel out of which it is constructed, and the earth’s interior from which the ore is

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

157

mined; and the fuel it uses to the oil deposits from which oil is pumped before it is shipped, refined, and distributed. The water that fills the bottle refers only indirectly to the reservoir, river, or rain cloud. The absorption of the skillful self in its everyday concerns tends to close it off from a natural world it comes up against only indirectly and may know about only vaguely. Processes that replace the products of skill with those of technology may isolate the skillful self even more from the natural world and its environment. The signs through which it indirectly encountered nature, which it could choose to take note of or ignore, are no longer available. Food that has been engineered and packaged no longer points even indirectly to natural foods, but at most to the factory from which it came.193 Here “it is not the adaptation of the environment itself which leads to problems, but rather the indirectness and abstraction that has come to characterize such adaptation in today’s complex systems.”194 Not noticing the environment may turn into an obliviousness that becomes systematic. Most humans never enter the slaughterhouse, the fur farm, or the animal research laboratory. Yet the failure to notice such phenomena is not accidental. It is not just that we do not happen to live near them. Even if we did, we would not see them, far less understand them or what we have to do with them. This separation cannot be remedied by increasing the supply of information about the natural environment. Indeed, an excess of such information may interfere with our understanding of nature as long as it cannot be integrated into everyday skillful activity. This is equally so when ecologists characterize nature in theoretical, axiological, or value theoretical terms—as a planetary ecosystem with a value in its own right, in terms of the integrity of the biosphere, or of life as an interconnected web or a single living being.195 Environmental policies are frequently influenced by such views. Yet comprehensive ecological theories are not only controversial but also impractical as a guide to public policy. Whether or not such views are true, they cannot provide the basis for a practical public consensus on pressing environmental issues. This does not imply that liberalism is committed to a sharp distinction between the human and natural realms, or that it can “never fully express the nature of the relationship between human beings and ‘nature’ that ecologism seeks to establish.” Even if such a distinction is embedded in the metaphysical background of many forms of comprehensive liberalism, political liberalism need not be anthropocentric.196 Attempts to reconceptualize the natural world as the basis for an environmental consciousness often invoke complicated states of mind that do not reach the skillful self. It is hard to understand the world if we think of it merely as a means to certain kinds of human experiences, as a source of pleasure, of feelings of value, or of a certain quality of life.197 The mediating relationships between skillful activity in contexts of purposes in use and the

158

CHAPTER 5

concept of a planetary ecosystem are missing. To the extent that human beings are constantly in the natural world and part of it, they tend to overlook it. Because the skillful self is preoccupied with its own activity, it tends to close itself off from anything that is not relevant to the task in hand. The skillful self is primarily absorbed in its own world. Yet this world in which it is absorbed is not the whole world but merely the part it calls its own and which it may yet think of as the world.198 Philosophical theories that try to explain why people should care about the natural world obscure the fact that we cannot not care about it because we are always part of it. Environmental education can only take root when it begins with local knowledge that the skillful self can understand. Yet what is local is not to be found in a particular place but in a certain way of relating skillfully to the world. A surfeit of information about environmental issues without a corresponding growth in skillful understanding of things in the world may merely reinforce the tendency of the skillful self to isolate itself from what is going on around it and from the tasks that it faces.

POLITICAL CONTROL Democracy has been celebrated for giving the people a voice in government, but deprecated as the rule of the incompetent. The idea of a citizen competence is sometimes viewed with suspicion because it implies a standard of citizenship that might be used to deny suffrage. But it has also been argued that the codification of civic competence is a significant vehicle of democratization, enabling people to influence the collective decisions that shape their lives in ways that can be accepted as legitimate.199 Political participation in this sense presupposes the basic political knowledge involved in control over one’s political environment (Capability 10.A). Yet a democratic political competence involves more than political knowledge or access to political information. It cannot be reduced to empathy with others, moral knowledge, or an understanding of how to manipulate and wield political power. Nor is it merely the ability to attend to politically relevant information and critically assess political claims. The skillful self does not think of its everyday involvements with others in terms of a political system that must be held together by a consensus. It simply has dealings with them. When it first encounters politics, it is usually in the form of some measure with which it agrees or disagrees: whether to build a road or a school, admit a stranger to the community, or impose a tax. Even when it agrees or disagrees with the others, the skillful self encounters them not as individuals with interests and rights to defend, but as selves like itself who are for or against something that it is for or against.

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

159

Far from having the ability to share effectively in the political choices that govern its life, the skillful self may not be able to understand its own place in a democratic political system, even when it has access to political information and is aware that it has constitutional and civil rights.200 Political involvement has its roots in everyday skillful activity. The primary concern of the skillful self is not with public policy and laws, the political system as a whole, or principles of justice, but with the task at hand. Tests of civic competence may cover subjects such as history, elementary civics and government, and current affairs. Such tests are intended to evaluate the effectiveness of democratic education in preparing citizens to make informed political decisions. Disappointing results are often taken to suggest that citizens know few political facts and little about government.201 But access to information and a grasp of concepts and ideas is not enough to cultivate the capacity for political participation. Citizenship may admit people to communities composed of millions of other human beings. Yet the skillful self does not simply lack a sense of connection with these others; it never sees or knows them. Political information is the kind of knowledge that has been removed from specific contexts of purposes in use to make it transmittable. People may know political facts without understanding them. A constant supply of political data reinforces the tendency of the skillful self to shut itself off from its political environment. “Reduced to passive robots at work, the members of industrial society are unlikely to acquire the educational and characterological qualifications for active citizenship.”202 The problem is not a lack of information, but of the skills that are needed to grasp a democratic political order as one’s own project.

MATERIAL CONTROL The opportunity to hold property in the form of land and movable goods, equal property rights, rights of employment, and the basic freedoms of the person are only meaningful if they are exercised within and serve to promote a usable human context.203 For the skillful self, control over one’s environment (Material– Capability 10.B) is a function of what is usable. The right to employment is the right to work conditions within which the skillful self is not systematically exposed to the decontextualizing, dehumanizing forces of deskilled spaces. Freedom of movement and other liberties presuppose, among other things, public spaces whose usability is not systematically destroyed by techniques of visual control and surveillance. The right to property is grounded in the right to a world in which the skillful self is not reduced to the role of a mere operator. The skillful self knows itself first of all through its world. Ownership as a condition of truly human

160

CHAPTER 5

functioning begins in a certain way of relating to the world skillfully.204 The skillful self is concerned primarily with the task in hand, or with the kinds of property that go along with skillful activity—with its tools, accessories, accouterments, with its clothing and materials, and with what it can make use of. Ownership in this sense is different from possession. It is possible to possess something without knowing how to make it one’s own. The skillful self is not, for the most part, interested in property as something from the use of which it can exclude others. This does not mean the skillful self cannot have its own things. But what counts as property is sometimes more important than how things are distributed.205 Property in this sense is more than a condition of personal independence and self-respect or an instrument by which we pursue our goals or seek to satisfy our physical needs. To uphold the right to property is not merely to protect something, the rights of exclusion and conveyance to which are specified in a deed. Ownership is not just a matter of mixing one’s labor with it or “putting one’s will” into something.206 What the skillful self regards as property is what it can deal with skillfully. Indeed, it is only when it is no longer concerned with formal possession that the skillful self can begin to own something. The things it can own are the things it can make use of in the contexts of purposes in use to which it has gained a skillful relationship. In a consumer society, ownership based on skill and not mere possession is the real luxury.

Notes 1. This account of the skillful self, and its place in a political conception of the person, belongs to the reconstruction of the subjective cultural conditions of autonomy discussed in chapter 2 above. I believe that it is possible to reconstruct the elements of such a competence while avoiding the teleological and metaphysical assumptions about skill and workmanship that we find in the Western tradition from Aristotle to Marx, and that are still evident, for example, in Veblen’s account of the “instinct of workmanship” or what James called the “proclivity to construction.” See Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship: And the State of the Industrial Arts (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1922), 11; Bernard Rosenberg, The Values of Veblen: A Critical Appraisal (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1956), 46. 2. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Skill. http://www.m-w.com/dictionary (accessed January 21, 2008). See also Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 37. Sennett contrasts skill as trained practice with “the coup de foudre, the sudden inspiration.” 3. Compare Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the habitus and the bodily hexis in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72–86; and Tim Ingold, “Situating Action V: The History and Evolution of Bodily Skills,” Ecological Psy-

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

161

chology 8 (1996): 178. To think of skill as a technique of the body “leads immediately to an unacceptable Cartesian dualism that reduces the body to a physical mechanism placed in the service of an enculturated but disembodied mind.” Ingold suggests we should view skill as “a property not of the individual human body as a thing-in-itself, but of the total system of relations constituted by the presence of the organism-person in a richly structured environment. The study of skill, in short, demands an ecological approach, which situates the practitioner in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of his or her surroundings.” See also Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 291, 299, where the author discusses skill, know-how, dexterity, and five dimensions of skilled practice. Ingold’s views on skill are influenced by the work of J. J. Gibson, in particular Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 4. In spite of this, skill is often identified with the know-how and professionalism of the craftsman. This is a recurring motif in both Plato and Aristotle. The correct practice of a craft avoids pleonexia and relies on true knowledge. Techne is not, as Heidegger points out, mere manufacture but productive activity that reflects care (epimeleia). See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1991), 1: 81–82, 164. To understand the concept of virtue in a good life, the craft of ruling, the role of the forms as paradigms, or the role of reason in a just society, we need to appreciate the diverse kinds of skillful activity on which they depend. On the role of craft and justice in the ideal state, see Richard D. Parry, Plato’s Craft of Justice (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). 5. Kaufman argues that, for Kant, “the task of sustaining the unconditioned quality of man’s purposiveness and the task of respecting man’s humanity are, in fact, identical.” See Alexander Kaufman, Welfare in the Kantian State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123, 148; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987). A public conception of justice must be able to draw on a practical political conception of purposive agency. For a reconstruction of the relationship between skillful coping and purposiveness see Hubert L. and Stuart E. Dreyfus, “The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science,” in Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, ed. Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (New York: Routledge, 1999), 112. 6. Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 175. 7. I use the term “thematize” to refer to the adoption of a reflective, objectifying perspective––the perspective of the spectator as opposed to the engaged standpoint of the skillful participant. The skillful self is not free to interpret its world in any way whatever. It always has an understanding of its situation, of the things it has to do with, and of what it can do with them. A thematic competence is already evident when we simply notice something, but it is possible to distinguish several stages in the transition from skillful engagement, through deliberation and reflection, to predication, pure observation, the formation of ideas, and the development of formal systems. “Thematize” (thematisieren) and “thematic” (thematisch) were often used by phenomenologists as technical terms. But the main focus here is on the how of thematization; on the skills and competences on which it depends, rather than on the what that is thematized, or the metaphysical relationship between being and consciousness. See Aron Gurwitsch, “On Thematization,” Research in

162

CHAPTER 5

Phenomenology 4 (1974): 35–49; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 68; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 414; Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991), 61–69, 74–84. I am indebted to Dreyfus’s work for an understanding of thematization, and of the various forms of availability, transparency, and malfunctioning on which this political interpretation of the skillful self draws. 8. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1917), 6. Taylor saw himself as a philanthropist. His aim was not to reduce labor costs but to improve efficiency. 9. Yehouda Shenhav, Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 134. See also Georges Friedmann, The Anatomy of Work: Labor, Leisure and the Implications of Automation, trans. Wyatt Rawson (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 11; and Pierre Naville, Vers l’automatisme social? Problèmes du travail et de l’automation (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). Friedmann thinks that Taylor’s system and methods reflected a more general trend toward the systematic deskilling of workers. Naville explores the ways in which automation intensifies deskilling in the workplace. Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), extends the critique of the methods of scientific management to clerical and service sector work. All three authors are discussed by Duncan Gallie in “The Quality of Employment: Perspectives and Problems,” in In Pursuit of the Quality of Life, ed. Avner Offer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 163–87; see esp. 165–66 on Naville’s view of the impact of automation on skills. Gallie argues that research has been handicapped by taking craft or artisanal work as the models of skilled work. 10. John Chamberlain, The Roots of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1959), 133. 11. Shenhav, Manufacturing Rationality, 134. 12. Early industrial engineers applied the methods of scientific management to a wide range of social and economic problems. See Janet T. Knoedler, “Veblen and Technical Efficiency,” Journal of Economic Issues 31 (1997): 1011–26. 13. Adolph L. Green, Jr., Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 65. 14. Mauro F. Guillén, The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 30. 15. Guillén, The Taylorized Beauty, 25–27. Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier were influenced by theories of scientific management. Gropius’s projects included the design of a “‘minimum existence housing unit’ . . . the smallest possible apartment that an average family could comfortably inhabit.” On the distinction between artisan and operative, and on the institutionalization of the division of labor between conception and execution, see Ingold, Perception of The Environment, 295. 16. Moisei Ginzburg, as quoted by Guillén, The Taylorized Beauty, 22. 17. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 1: 396–97, as

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

163

cited by Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 27. 18. Marx, Capital, 1: 462, as cited by Feenberg, Critical Theory, 27. The interpretation of Marx and Soviet Marxism is based on Feenberg’s account in Critical Theory, to which I am indebted. 19. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 42. 20. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 52. 21. The characterization of man as a prosthetic god is from Freud: “When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.” Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 39. 22. Compare Feenberg, Critical Theory, 183–88. Feenberg calls the process by which technical action is emancipated from contexts and social subsystems “primary instrumentalization.” In addition to decontextualization and autonomization, primary instrumentalization comprises a “reductionist” moment and a moment of “positioning” by which the subject situates itself strategically. Secondary instrumentalization recontextualizes technological objects within action systems. 23. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 184. 24. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 190. 25. Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 295. 26. See Albert Borgmann, “Technology and Democracy,” in Technology and Politics, ed. Michael E. Kraft and Norma J. Vig (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), 70. 27. Compare Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 25–27. 28. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 167, 184, 186. On the difference between handling a tool and operating a machine, and on the relation between skills and determining systems in the theories of Jean-Victor Poncelet, Franz Reuleaux, and Karl Marx, see Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 300–08. 29. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 187. 30. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 186. See also Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 301–2. The human-machine relation is more complex than such examples suggest. We can distinguish several constellations of the hand-machine interface, as well as a large number of stages in the transition from the hand tool to the fully automatic machine. The hand may fulfill several functions simultaneously, functioning as a source of power, of skilled guidance, and of somatic feedback. The decisive stages in the transition to machine power include the conversion of reciprocating to rotary motion which, as Ingold points out, decouples action from perception. In the automatic machine, as opposed to the machine tool, skill is dissociated from motive force. 31. See Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 300–1. 32. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 131; also Axel Honneth, “Recognition and Moral Obligation,” trans. John Farrell, Social Research 64, no. 1 (1997): 16–35. 33. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 468–69. 34. Rawls, Theory, 469.

164

CHAPTER 5

35. Karl Löwith, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen. Ein Beitrag zur anthropologischen Grundlegung der ethischen Probleme (München: Drei Masken-Verlag, 1928), 14, 127. 36. Compare Feenberg, Critical Theory, 185: “The worker as a human being always remained the center and organizer of technique, not its object.” 37. Most advanced industrial countries fund vocational schemes to improve the skill levels of the workforce, whether through apprenticeship (as in Germany), or through teaching skills on the job (as in Japan). On education, moral development, and enterprise culture, see Ruth Jonathan, “Agency and Contingency in Moral Development and Education,” in Education in Morality, ed. J. Mark Halstead and Terence H. McLaughlin (London: Routledge, 1999), 68. In enterprise culture, the market can be seen as an educational force that “rewards energy and innovation, forces people to think for themselves and stand on their own feet and punishes those who do not conform to its requirements.” See also Britain’s National Curriculum Handbook for Teachers (1999), which states that “enterprise can be associated with a set of attributes, skills and attitudes that enable people to create and thrive on change. Enterprise education enables pupils to develop confidence, self-reliance, and willingness to embrace change. Through participation in mini-enterprises, pupils can practice risk management, learning from mistakes and being innovative.” This passage is quoted by Liam Gearon, Learning to Teach Citizenship in the Secondary School: A Companion to School Experience (New York: Routledge, 2003), 86. 38. By the 1980s, Britain’s Youth Training Scheme had identified an extensive set of core skills that were believed to enhance skill transfer and mobility in the labor market. See Kenneth Roberts, Youth and Employment in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 11, 13, 27, 69. The 1991 SCANS Commission extended the inventory of competencies and foundation skills to take account of emerging technologies. See also David Steiner, “Searching for Educational Coherence in a Democratic State,” in Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, ed. Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 244. 39. Philip Garrahan and Paul Stewart, “Lean and Mean: Work, Locality and Unions,” in Beyond Survival: Wage Labor in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Cyrus Bina, Laurie Clements, and Chuck Davis (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 168. 40. Borgmann, “Technology and Democracy,” 62. 41. Borgmann, “Technology and Democracy,” 62. What Borgmann calls “focal practices”—activities such as the family meal, making music, or practicing a craft— counterbalance the disintegrative effects of the device paradigm by cultivating a skillful understanding of things, situations, and activities of ultimate value. See Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 208–19; Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 104. 42. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 5–7, 12–14. 43. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 6. 44. Stanley R. Carpenter, “Technoaxiology: Appropriate Norms for Technology Assessment,” in Philosophy and Technology, ed. Paul T. Durbin and Friedrich Rapp (Boston:

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

165

Lancaster, 1983), 117; as quoted by Heiner Hastedt, Aufklärung und Technik: Grundprobleme einer Ethik der Technik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 124. 45. Hastedt, Aufklärung und Technik, 124–25. 46. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 5–6. 47. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 6. 48. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 122. 49. Hastedt, Aufklärung und Technik, 129. 50. Hastedt, Aufklärung und Technik, 128 [author’s translation]. 51. A growing literature draws attention to the role of cultural construction in the perception and judgment of risk. See Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter (London: Sage, 1992). 52. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 14. 53. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 7; Feenberg also cites Ellul as a proponent of the substantive theory. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. J. Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964). 54. See, for example, Charles Jencks, What is Post-Modernism? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). Jencks abandons modernist notions of material integrity of the kind canonized by Adorno. A building can be thought of as a system of signs superimposed on a technologically sophisticated, but aesthetically neutral, substrate. 55. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); Feenberg, Critical Theory, 67, suggests that Marcuse “wavers between instrumental and substantive interpretations of his ‘onedimensionality’ thesis.” 56. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 7. 57. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 17. 58. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 14; on techno-science, see esp. 75, 165. 59. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 154; quoted by Feenberg, Critical Theory, 70. 60. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 70. 61. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 9. 62. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 7–9; Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 37–54, 87–88. 63. For a more detailed account of Marcuse’s views on labor and necessity, see C. Fred Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature: Marcuse and Habermas (Tampa, FL: University Press of South Florida, 1985), 42. 64. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 176. 65. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 174, 180, 182, 185–96; Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). 66. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 218. 67. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 319; Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 217–18. 68. Axel Honneth, “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,” chapter 4 in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical

166

CHAPTER 5

Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke (London: Verso, 2003), 241. 69. Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität: Rede, gehalten bei der feierlichen Übernahme des Rektorats der Universität Freiburg i.Br. am 27.5.1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983). The word “derationalized” may be more appropriate to describe Heidegger’s views on truth and choice. See Lawrence Vogel, The Fragile “We”: Ethical Implications of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 62–64. See also Habermas’s commentary on Heidegger’s relationship to National Socialism in Jürgen Habermas, “Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective,” trans. John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1989): 453. 70. Compare Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, esp. part 2: “Beyond the Reality Principle,” 129–237. 71. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 208–37. 72. On Heidegger’s view of the relationship between technology and democracy, see Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, trans. Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989), 218, 299; many of the important sources and discussions of this question are brought together in Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 73. I borrow the term “hybridity” from Mike Michaels, “The Invisible Car: The Cultural Purification of Road Rage,” in Car Cultures, ed. Daniel Miller (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 59; see also Ingold, “Situating Action V,” 176–78, and Feenberg, Transforming Technology, 30. The use of the term “hybridity” here is not ontological in the sense criticized by Feenberg. 74. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 81. 75. John B. Rae, American Automobile Manufacturers: The First Forty Years (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1959), 45. 76. Rae, American Automobile Manufacturers, 8. Rae points out that carriage and wagon makers were slower to turn to automobile production than bicycle makers. 77. See Ingold, “Situating Action V,” 176. I use “assimilation” and “accommodation” to characterize not cognitive processes in the sense of Piaget, but phases in the adaptation of the skillful self to new technologies. Just as skillful activity constitutes a kind of assimilating scheme that constrains the ways in which technical elements can enter into the repertoire of the skillful self, so also the competences of the skillful self must over time accommodate to new constellations of technical elements that cannot be assimilated within its existing repertoires of skills. Jean Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child (New York: Ballantine, 1937/1971). 78. On equilibrium, maximum grip, and the “intentional arc” in bodily experience, see Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 60, 70, 157, 177, 182, and Dreyfus, The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, 111–14, 118. 79. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 78–84, 183–84. 80. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 183: secondary instrumentalizations are a kind of metatechnical practice “that treats finished technical objects and the technical relation-

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

167

ship itself as raw material for more complex forms of technical intervention.” If we think of primary instrumentalization as the process by which technique is emancipated from contexts of purposes in use, then secondary instrumentalizations are practices which address the reintegration of technologies within human and instrumental complexes. 81. Andrew Feenberg, “Summary Remarks on My Approach to the Philosophical Study of Technology,” http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/method1.html (accessed November 19, 2007). 82. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 82. 83. See Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in Technology and Politics, ed. Michael Kraft and Norman Vig (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988): 38. Winner draws on Robert Ozanne, A Century of Labor-Management Relations at McCormick and International Harvester (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967). 84. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 183. 85. Feenberg follows Marx and Braverman in arguing that capitalist economic interests influence the design of technology in such a way as to reinforce control from above. 86. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 127–30. 87. Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 18. 88. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 189. The concretization of technology, for example, promotes the skills and intelligence of the user by combining multiple functions in a single structure or designing technologies so they can work in various milieus. 89. Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 306. 90. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 177. 91. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 178. 92. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 14. 93. Andrew Feenberg, “Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiques of Technology,” Inquiry 39 (1996): 45–70. 94. Feenberg, Transforming Technology, 28. 95. Feenberg, Transforming Technology, 34. 96. Amartya Sen and Martha C. Nussbaum are leading exponents of the capability approach. In Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), at 40, Sen characterizes capability in terms of a person’s freedom to achieve valuable functionings; see also Amartya Sen, “Utilitarianism and Welfarism,” Journal of Philosophy 76, no. 9 (1979): 463–88, and “Capability and Well-Being,” in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 30–53. Nussbaum incorporates the concept of capability into a normative political theory, proposing a more comprehensive, though still provisional list of central capabilities as a basis for the justification of constitutional principles “that citizens have a right to demand from their governments.” See Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 12. For a detailed comparison of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s views, see Sabina Alkire, Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 26–42; and David A. Crocker, “Functioning and Capability: The Foundations of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s Development Ethic,” Political Theory 20, no. 4 (1992): 584–612.

168

CHAPTER 5

97. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 96. 98. For a typology of approaches to the measurement of well-being, see Stein Ringen, Citizens, Families, and Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 30. 99. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 60. 100. Amartya Sen, Commodities and Capabilities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 19. 101. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 74. 102. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 78–80. Nussbaum proposes the following provisional list of central human functional capabilities: Capability 1, life; Capability 2, bodily health; Capability 3, bodily integrity; Capability 4, senses, imagination, and thought; Capability 5, emotions; Capability 6, practical reason; Capability 7, affiliation (a. being able to live with and toward others, b. having the social bases of self-respect and nonhumiliation); Capability 8, other species; Capability 9, play; Capability 10, control over one’s environment (a. political, b. material). 103. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 74; John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 19. 104. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 72, 76. 105. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 12. Nussbaum follows Sen in thinking of human life as consisting of “beings and doings.” These together constitute “functionings.” 106. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 72–4. 107. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism,” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (1992): 213. 108. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 12, 55–59, 188. Nussbaum writes of the “principle of each person’s capability.” 109. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 74. 110. On liberalism and resourcism, see Thomas W. Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” Philosophical Topics 30, no. 2 (2002): 176. Rawls links the desire for resources (primary social goods) to the powers of moral personality and the higherorder interests which he attributes to the citizens of a well-ordered society. Dworkin takes resources to embrace not only social (“impersonal”) resources such as land, income or rights, but also “personal resources,” which he characterizes as “qualities of mind and body that affect people’s success in achieving their plans and projects: physical and mental health, strength, and talent.” Dworkin is skeptical about the coherence of the capability approach. See Ronald Dworkin, “Foundations of Liberal Equality,” in Equal Freedom: Selected Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Stephen L. Darwall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 224; and Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 12–14, 65–124, 301–3. 111. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 54. 112. The worth of liberty, according to Rawls, is a measure of the extent to which people are able to make use of their liberty to pursue their goals. Theory, 204. 113. Sen, Development as Freedom, 70–71. 114. On the conversion problem, see also Sen, Inequality Reexamined, 33. 115. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 84–86.

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

169

116. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 54–55. 117. Albert W. Dzur, “Liberal Perfectionism and Democratic Participation,” Polity 30, no. 4 (1998): 668–71. 118. Dzur, “Liberal Perfectionism,” 670–72. 119. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 59. 120. On political liberalism, see chapters 2 and 4 above. 121. G. A. Cohen, “Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods, and Capabilities,” in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 18. According to Cohen, midfare is “constituted of states of the person produced by goods . . . in virtue of which utility levels take the values they do. It is ‘posterior’ to ‘having goods’ and ‘prior’ to ‘having utility.’” See also Christine M. Korsgaard’s commentary on Cohen’s paper, “G. A. Cohen: Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods, and Capabilities, Amartya Sen: Capability and Well-Being,” in the same volume, esp. 59–60. Korsgaard defends Rawls’s prioritization of the basic structure of society as the first subject of justice against Cohen’s claim that “‘midfare’ is a legitimate political objective in its own right.” 122. The capability approach may face what Richardson calls the problem of “illusory precision.” Henry S. Richardson, Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 86. Richardson discusses Bohman’s attempt to recast Habermas’s ideal conditions in terms of the “requisite capacities” of individuals. Besides being “quite idealized,” this raises the problem of illusory precision because “we have no meaningful way to measure individuals’ capacity to initiate public debate on a theme or topic.” See James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 120–21. See also Paul Anand, Graham Hunter, and Ron Smith, “Capabilities and Well-being: Evidence Based on the Sen-Nussbaum Approach to Welfare,” Social Indicators Research 74, no. 1 (2005): 9–55. 123. Compare Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” 212; also Sandrine Berges, “Why the Capability Approach Is Justified,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 24, no. 1 (2007): 23. Berges argues that the language of compensation is inappropriate here, indeed that “talk of compensations is part of the problem rather than of the solution . . . Compensation is, in many cases, simply a way of reconciling people with the fact that they are disadvantaged, not a way of making sure they are not.” Berges may miss Pogge’s point, which is made from the perspective of a resourcist who does not accept the independent status of capability-based claims as a criterion of social justice. From this perspective, devoting extra resources to people because their capabilities are judged suboptimal is providing them with unearned compensation. 124. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 6. 125. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 75. 126. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 75. 127. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 12, 86. 128. Compare Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” 208–9: “We must ask not merely whether we approve of the relative gains [particular institutional schemes bring] to the ‘naturally disfavored,’ but also whether we can accept the relative losses they bring to others. And we must ask whether proposed compensation rules achieve equity among their beneficiaries with their diverse special needs, and equity also among their

170

CHAPTER 5

contributors. Thus . . . capability theorists also face the difficult task of specifying a plausible . . . criterion of social justice in detail.” 129. Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” 206. The inverted Aristotelianism, which Pogge attributes to Nussbaum and Sen, would underwrite a social system in which people can claim additional social resources because of their natural endowments. To justify such claims it is not enough for them to be merely differently endowed. They must assert that their endowments are inferior “all things considered.” Pogge distinguishes the “vertical diversity” implicit in the capability approach from a “horizontal view,” which does not put a value on people’s natural endowments. The acceptance and enjoyment of horizontal diversity allows us to see people as being different without having to think of them as “better” or “worse.” 130. Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” 171–72. Equalitarian interpersonal aggregation functions favor distributive patterns with “smaller deviations from the center,” prioritarian interpersonal aggregation functions favor “distributive patterns with higher minima,” while sufficientarian interpersonal aggregation functions specify a threshold level below which no citizen should fall, but above which inequality is permissible. 131. Richard Arneson, “Distributive Justice and Basic Capability Equality: ‘Good Enough’ Is not Good Enough,” in Capabilities Equality: Basic Issues and Problems, ed. Alexander Kaufman (London: Routledge, 2006), 17–43. The situation may be more complex than this analysis suggests. As Kaufman has pointed out, Nussbaum distinguishes several different types of capability––basic, internal, and combined––to which no single distribution-sensitive principle can easily be ascribed. While she may be committed to some kind of sufficientarianism in the case of the basic capabilities, the complete realization of the so-called internal and combined capabilities is not the object of a similar commitment, even up to a threshold level. Nor does Nussbaum claim to offer a complete account of the necessary conditions of social justice. The capability approach is more complex than Arneson’s sufficientarian interpretation suggests. See Alexander Kaufman, “A Sufficientarian Approach? A Note,” in Kaufman, Capabilities Equality, 72, and Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 84–86. 132. Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” 197. 133. Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” 199. 134. Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” 210. 135. See Susan Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), as cited by Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” 221n51. 136. Berges, “Why the Capability Approach Is Justified,” 18. 137. Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” 210. 138. Kaufman, Welfare in the Kantian State, 74–75. 139. Kaufman, Welfare in the Kantian State, 153. 140. Kaufman, Welfare in the Kantian State, 86–89. 141. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 394, 399–400. 142. Kaufman, Welfare in the Kantian State, 69. 143. On Kant’s view of judgment, see John Stopford, “Transcendental Arguments and the Theory of Signs,” in Gedankenzeichen: Festschrift für Klaus Oehler zum 60. Geburtstag,

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

171

ed. Regina Claussen and Roland Daube-Schackat (Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1988), esp. 317. 144. Rawls, Theory, 100. 145. Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” 177–86. 146. Resourcists may thus be able to treat nondistributable goods and systemic influences on the quality of life as affecting a person’s resources “broadly conceived.” See Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” 181. 147. Nancy Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition: A Rejoinder to Axel Honneth,” chapter 3 in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 217–18, 222. 148. Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition,” 217. 149. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 72. 150. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 148. 151. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 148. 152. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 147. 153. Sen also embraces an activist view of capability when he connects it with the perspective of positive freedom (“what can the person do?”) rather than basic needs (“what can be done for the person?”). 154. Triandis claims that 70 percent of the world’s population hold alternative belief systems that emphasize social interdependence or collectivism. Psychological theories developed with data from Western populations overlook such cultural differences. Harry C. Triandis, “Cross-Cultural Studies of Individualism and Collectivism,” in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1989, ed. J. Berman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 41–133; “The Psychological Measurement of Cultural Syndromes,” American Psychologist 51 (1996): 407–15. 155. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 105. 156. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 145. It may be to the concept of skill that we must turn for an account of the psychological issues that Nussbaum misses from Scanlon’s view. 157. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 319 [translator’s brackets removed]. 158. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 319. In his translation of the Critique of Judgment, Bernard translates Zucht with “training,” placing the word “discipline” in brackets. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), 282. 159. In “Situating Action V,” Ingold argues that it is necessary to take account of variations of skill if we wish to understand cultural variation (in an evolutionary context). See also Alkire, Valuing Freedoms, 1. Alkire’s description of a rose cultivation project in Arabsolangi, Pakistan, illustrates the difficulty of applying abstract political conceptions to concrete problems of resource distribution in specific contexts. 160. Kaufman, Welfare in the Kantian State, 157. 161. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 121; Cass R. Sunstein, Free Markets and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15. Sunstein describes subjective welfarism as the view that government “should attend exclusively to conceptions of welfare as subjectively held by its citizens, and these conceptions are best found in the market domain.”

172

CHAPTER 5

162. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 136, 164–65. 163. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 78–80, lists the central human functional capabilities, together with short descriptions of each. 164. Such a self might be said to be “purposive in a Kantian sense.” Compare Kaufman, Welfare in the Kantian State, 101–2; Kant, Critique of Judgment, 429–30. 165. James Larson, The Measurement of Health: Concepts and Indicators (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 3; see also Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 78, 91. 166. On patient autonomy see Lawrence B. McCullough and Stephen E. Wear, “Respect for Autonomy and Medical Paternalism Reconsidered,” Theoretical Medicine 6, no. 3 (1985): 295–308; and Merle Spriggs, Autonomy and Patients’ Decisions (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), xii, 42–44, 246. 167. On “Fordist” approaches to health care, see Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 46–50. The proponents of the wellness movement have traditionally argued that people should strive to be “more well,” even in the absence of illness or disease, and not merely less ill. Steiglitz’s conception of constructive medicine focuses on the patient rather than on the disease. Dunn, likewise, focused on the state of wellness rather than sickness asking why doctors, nurses, and health workers were preoccupied with disease, death, and disability. See Edward J. Steiglitz, The Second Forty Years (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1952); D. B. Ardell, High Level Wellness: An Alternative to Doctors, Drugs, and Disease (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1977); H. B. Dunn, High Level Wellness (Arlington, VA: R. W. Beatty, 1961). 168. Compare Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 78. 169. F. M. Alexander, The Use of the Self (London: Gollancz, 1985). 170. Pedro de Alcantara, Indirect Procedures: A Musician’s Guide to the Alexander Technique (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 14. 171. Ingold, “Situation Action V,” 178. 172. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Foucault’s “technologies of the body,” even when supposedly beneficial or lenient, “microorganize” the everyday world in a way which makes the skillful self largely invisible. 173. See Jürgen Habermas, “Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit,” in Kleine Politische Schriften V (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), 151: “The deformations of a regulated, organized, controlled, and supervised lifeworld are surely more subtle than the palpable forms of material exploitation and impoverishment; but social conflicts that are psychically and physically displaced and internalized are not therefore any the less destructive” [author’s translation]. 174. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170–94. Compare the view expressed here with Mill’s remarks on individuality in On Liberty (New York: John B. Alden, 1885), 193: “A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”

SKILL, TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILIT Y

173

175. Compare Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 78. 176. John Berger and others, Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972), 7–11, 19–33; Helmut Pape, Die Unsichtbarkeit der Welt: eine visuelle Kritik neuzeitlicher Ontologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 24–29. 177. The experience of the operator is largely tactile and mastered primarily by habit. See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 240; Berger, Ways of Seeing, 8–9. 178. Benjamin, Illuminations, 233. 179. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 219. 180. See Jacqueline W. Liebergott, Paula Menyuk, and Martin C. Schultz, Early Language Development in Full-Term and Premature Infants (Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), 30–31. 181. See Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 79. 182. Kay Milton, Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion (London: Routledge, 2002), 149–50. 183. Compare C. R. Snyder, Coping: The Psychology of What Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 157–58. 184. See Iain Wilkinson, Anxiety in a Risk Society (New York: Routledge, 2001), 16–17, 65–84. 185. Compare Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 79. 186. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 79. 187. See, for example, F. M. Gresham, “Conceptual Issues in the Assessment of Social Competence in Children,” in Children’s Social Behavior: Development, Assessment, and Modification, ed. Philip S. Strain, Michael J. Guralnick, and Hill M. Walker (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1986), 143–79; Kenneth W. Merrell and Gretchen A. Gimpel, Social Skills of Children and Adolescents: Conceptualization, Assessment, Treatment (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998), 1–28; Carolyn Webster-Stratton and Deborah Woolley Lindsay, “Social Competence and Conduct Problems in Young Children: Issues in Assessment,” Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 28, no. 1 (1999): 25–93. 188. Seyla Benhabib, “The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The KohlbergGilligan Controversy and Moral Theory,” in Women and Moral Theory, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987), 154–77. 189. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 37–38. 190. Compare Fiona Robinson, Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory and International Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). 191. Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 249. 192. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 80. 193. On the power of packaging, see James B. Twitchell, Lead Us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 123–58.

174

CHAPTER 5

194. Peter A. Hancock and Mark H. Chignell, “On Human Factors,” in Global Perspectives on the Ecology of Human-Machine Systems, ed. John Flach and others (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), 1: 37. 195. Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep: Long-Range Ecology Movements: A Summary,” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95–100. 196. Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 172. See also Brian Baxter, A Theory of Ecological Justice (London: Routledge, 2004), 96–102, and Derek R. Bell, “Political Liberalism and Ecological Justice,” Analyse & Kritik 28, no. 2 (2006): 206–22. 197. For a utilitarian approach to ecological and environmental questions, see Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 264–88. 198. Mill, On Liberty, 33. 199. Karol Edward Soltan, “Civic Competence, Democracy, and the Good Society,” introduction to Elkin and Soltan, Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, 3. 200. Compare Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 80. 201. See Samuel L. Popkin and Michael A. Dimock, “Political Knowledge and Citizen Competence,” in Elkin and Soltan, Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, 117–46. 202. Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, 17. 203. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 80. 204. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 156. 205. See J. E. Penner, The Idea of Property in Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 5: “The real distributive question which property raises is this: why do we treat some things of value as objects of property, and deny the same treatment to others?” 206. See Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 49. Hegel thinks of the will as the “primary substantive basis of property,” whereas use is “a further modification of property, secondary to that universal basis, and is only its manifestation and particular mode.”

CHAPTER 6

Politics of Skill

It might be argued that to characterize the central capabilities as functions of the skillful self is no less perfectionist than grounding them in a partial ideal of truly human functioning that overlooks the skillful self altogether. It is to encourage a craft-oriented perfectionism that makes the acquisition and exercise of skill into a cornerstone of the social system.1 The view that the cultivation of skill is perfectionist is most persuasive when we understand skill through the things it produces. Many skills are closely linked to the production of things for use. The skills of the bricklayer, the joiner, or the carpenter are inseparable from the construction of houses and furniture. To develop skills one must have ideas of excellence, and these ideas are necessarily perfectionist.

Representable and Nonrepresentable Skills We can refer to skills that are exercised in the creation of specific usable things as “productive skills.” Acquiring them allows some latitude regarding the kinds of things to be produced. To learn carpentry is to gain skills that can be used to produce different kinds of wooden things such as furniture. The craftsworker may begin by learning to produce in ways that have been passed on by others and by tradition as perfectly as possible. But productive skills are generalizable and can be brought to bear on the construction of things of different kinds. With time and experience, the person who practices a craft will not only apply his or her skills to modifying these things to produce new kinds of objects but may also try these skills in different media. To gain the skills of a carpenter is also to pick up the kinds of generalizable skills that anyone who practices a craft needs.

175

176

CHAPTER 6

Acquiring productive skills shapes the body. It trains the senses, perception, and judgment. Practitioners must learn to see and feel differences that remain invisible to others—they must note and respond to the grain of the wood, the nap of the cloth, and understand the feel and functionality of a tool. They must develop the imaginative skills needed to plan and realize a product. Productive activity also relies on secondary skills such as self-discipline, learning how to organize one’s work, and learning how to learn. These secondary skills cannot be standardized and taught independently. They are picked up through learning and exercising productive skills, and vary from individual to individual. Selfdiscipline and self-organization are intrinsic when developed as an integral part of the skillful response to the exigencies of the task in hand, and extrinsic when imposed on productive activity from without. Productive skills may play a role in the development of generalizable and secondary skills associated with a wide range of skillful activities. But the idea that cultivating skill is inherently perfectionist is even less plausible when we consider that many forms of skillful activity are concerned not with making things but with relationships of various kinds.2 People relate skillfully to others as well as to themselves, to human communities and to their environment, to different species and to the natural world. We understand others and ourselves in ways we have skillfully derived from our cultures. Here, skill is manifested not in producing things but in communication and the characteristically human forms of encounter and care. The skillful relationship to others involves more than dialogical skill or artful interpersonal perception. To understand others is first of all to recognize that we are no different from them and that they are no different from us. This understanding is acquired primarily by doing things skillfully with others and not merely by debating with them, observing them, or trying to interpret them. Because the skillful self understands itself primarily through its situation, when people understand themselves in terms of the same situation, they also understand each other. Sensing, perceiving, and understanding the world of objects and entities as well as deliberation and judgment involve relational skills. We do not simply see things. We have to learn how to look if we want to see, and what we see when we look is a function of what we can deal with skillfully.3 Sight is rooted in the ways things are used and dealt with. It is by virtue of the ways in which we handle and use things in the present that we are able to have a past. Each object— the doorknob, the window, the table—has a history to which we relate when we make use of it, normally without an explicit awareness that we are doing so. The shape of the doorknob is something that has evolved slowly with the culture by which it was formed, along with the hands of those who knew how to make it, turn it, paint it, and polish it. It reflects a concern of the maker with shape, line, and usability that the whole of life participates in forming.4

POLITICS OF SKILL

177

The skills of political participation are also relational, exhibited in the ability to understand ourselves as political beings who have a say in the affairs of their society and who have the right to make themselves heard on important issues that affect the commonweal. Citizenship and participation in a democratic political community presuppose practical and cognitive skills. Voters must judge character, understand politically relevant information, and grasp the virtues of tolerance and fairness. They must know how to assume and share the burdens and benefits of cooperation, how to regard themselves as having a right or a duty to protect the rights of others, and how to view their political system as a project. Productive, secondary, generalizable, and relational skills merge and form a network in which one supports the other. Each type of skillful activity may break down, whether occasionally or systematically. When one breaks down, the entire network of mutually supporting skills connected with it is affected. Deskilling is never confined to a single kind of dysfunction. If the productive skills break down because of technological change or because of the rationalization of factories and workspaces, then the development of secondary skills such as the skills of self-organization and relational skills is also adversely affected. The loss of productive skills detracts from the abilities involved in looking, discrimination, and judgment, and from the acquisition of those skills that would have been a natural consequence of skill generalization. To make the skillful aspect of the central capabilities explicit is not to invoke the perfectionist ideal of a culture of skill, but to focus on the structural role of skill in a nonperfectionist conception of truly human functioning, and on the social conditions of individual capability as a function of skill. The skill principle modifies the capability principle in such a way as to characterize the central capabilities as functions of the skillful self. To promote capability it is necessary to support skill. Skills that play this structural role in the central human functional capabilities may be said to be nonrepresentable in the sense that they cannot be performed by one person on behalf of another. Representable skills can be delegated to a third party without loss of function. We can pay a doctor to look after our health or a gardener to look after our garden. The skills of the gardener or the doctor are representable skills that anyone with proper training can perform and possession of which we do not regard as essential to being human, however desirable it might be that some should possess them. Skills are nonrepresentable when they can be acquired only in one’s own right and when their acquisition and the role they play in human functioning cannot be delegated to others. We can no more develop or exercise the nonrepresentable skills on behalf of another person than another person can develop or exercise them on our behalf. It is by virtue of the nonrepresentable skills that an individual is able to function as center and organizer of his or her own existence. Each person’s life is an

178

CHAPTER 6

issue for her or him in a way that it can be for no one else. We cannot hire another person to exercise the specific skills involved in the care of the self or others, in responding to beauty, or in being imaginative, on our behalf. The capabilities involved in being healthy cannot be equated with the know-how and expertise of a doctor or nurse. They are not a matter of professional expertise or the product of an expert culture. A person may elect to be his or her own doctor, but the care of the self for itself is different in kind. Health presupposes a certain skillful relation of the self to itself that others, not even the doctor, cannot take over from us. Bodily integrity involves ways of holding, moving, and using the self that only a self has at its disposal. Sense, imagination, and thought are forms of skillful activity in which other people cannot represent us. Others may acquire, organize, and retain information on our behalf, but only we ourselves can learn to look, think, experience, and reason for ourselves, and in this way learn to direct our action. We cannot delegate the organization of our lives to others in the way that we might entrust the management of a factory or a hospital to a qualified professional. I may acquire the skills of logic and the capacity for planning and yet still lack the ability to think for myself and conceive my life as a project. I may be represented by professional politicians who know how the political process works, yet lack the nonrepresentable skills fundamental to membership in a political community. The skill principle thus asserts that the central capabilities, as conditions of truly human functioning, are themselves a function of the nonrepresentable skills. The skill principle is not a moral principle.5 It is concerned with value, but focuses on the capacity to have value rather than on the choice and selection of particular values. Like the capability principle, the skill principle applies to individuals rather than to groups.6 Though skills are often relational and interactive, it is their value for the skillful self that is of political importance. Measures to promote the nonrepresentable skills of individuals may be pursued by promoting the organic good of groups in various ways. But here the skill principle requires us to ensure that such measures promote the nonrepresentable skills of all citizens and not merely some. Rejecting the priority of the group over the individual does not imply a commitment to social atomism, possessive individualism, or the idea of an “unencumbered self.” Nonrepresentable skills do not underpin a metaphysic of autonomy, self-reliance, or authenticity, nor does the skill principle promote the stereotype of the independent self-sufficient individual at the expense of the skills involved in positive interdependence. On the contrary, its implication in the central capabilities means that an important consequence of the skill principle is the encouragement of the relational skills involved in affiliation. The skill principle, however, adds to the capability principle not only the idea that affiliation and positive interdependence involve the acquisition of concrete skills in

POLITICS OF SKILL

179

specific contexts, but also that the broader the human, instrumental, and technological complexes within which such skills are invoked, the more important the growth of reasonableness and judgment to their development. The politics of skill makes no claims about the ontological priority of the self. But it does imply, given the relational character of the nonrepresentable skills, that membership and belonging are achievements of individual human beings rather than badges of inclusion. What is valuable about individuality has its roots not in the desires and volitions of an unencumbered self but in the kinds of nonrepresentable skills that people can bring to the way they live their lives and the choices they make. People are never in communities in the way that a piece of furniture is in a room or a house in a street. To belong is to be able to belong skillfully, to have the know-how, skills, and competences that participation in a particular human group presupposes. Any cultural group is an achievement of its members even if this achievement is seldom the product of conscious choice. The politics of skill focuses the question of the meaning of cultural participation not on groups of people but on the social conditions of individual capability viewed as a function of skill. To say the capabilities are a function of the skillful self is thus to assert that statements about a person’s central capabilities can, in principle, be reformulated as statements about the various forms of skillful activity of which they are capable. The nonrepresentable skills are engaged and activated only when a person does things for themselves. But what does this mean? Doing something for oneself is sometimes taken to involve acting on things, and experiencing the consequences of having done so. People think and act on their own behalf when their action is guided by concern about the future and by the anticipated impact of action on their current situation. Yet there is a difference between merely acting on things and dealing with them in a way that is skillful. This distinction is often overlooked in the literature of “learning by doing.” It is not merely the experimental variation of conditions, but the qualities of care and concern the individual brings to such alterations that matters.7 To do something for oneself is not only to be involved in a situation but also to think and act in a way that reflects that involvement. Dewey thinks that the contents of formal instruction originate in the systematization of the meanings that are important to the life of a group. A curriculum is a subject matter that puts “the essential ingredients of the culture to be perpetuated, in such an organized form as to protect [the instructor] from the haphazard efforts he would be likely to indulge in if the meanings had not been standardized.”8 Eventually “the bonds which connect the subject matter of school study with the habits and ideals of the social group are disguised and covered up.”9 Subject matter then seems to exist as knowledge on its “own independent behoof.”10

180

CHAPTER 6

The task of the teacher is to restore understanding of this lost connection by creating learning situations in which the future-directed quality of human concern and interest is engaged. Children acquire intellect and understanding as they grasp the meaning of such situations. Education must integrate the theoretical skills exercised in knowledge, reflection, and judgment with “typical modes of activity, whether play or useful occupations, in which individuals are concerned, in whose outcome they recognize they have something at stake.”11 “The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of moment or interest to him, and dealing with things not as gymnastic appliances but as conditions for attainment of ends.”12 Mere action becomes an expression of the skillful self when it is guided by an awareness that its actions have consequences and that those consequences matter. But it is not enough that children experience action in a learning situation as a condition for the attainment of ends, or that they have a stake and involvement in the outcome of such actions. They need to be involved in a way that is skillful. The educator must see in the capacities of the schoolchild or student, who has already learned and achieved so much, an expression of the skillful self, encouraging the learning process to become a continuation and extension of what the child can already do skillfully. It is not easy to satisfy this requirement, in part because of the quantity of communicated subject matter. It is “easier to swamp a pupil with this than to work it into his direct experiences.”13 Such information “forms another strange world which just overlies the world of personal acquaintance.”14 Most people grow up thinking of knowledge as “the body of facts and truths ascertained by others.”15 Statements and propositions, the record of knowledge, are conflated with knowledge itself. Even philosophers and logicians have identified knowledge with propositions stating information. Such knowledge is secondhand and often burdensome. Unless it can be organized “into the existing experience of the learner, it becomes mere words.”16 Education becomes disempowering when it leaves children feeling small and unimportant in relation to the world of knowledge and facts. It is empowering when they learn to discern themselves and their skills in the process of knowing. At the beginning, children are aware neither of the learning process nor of their own skillful achievements that have already become transparent and are no longer noticed. Far less are they aware of the connections between them. The task of the educator is to bring together what children can already do skillfully with knowledge, skills, and ways of acting and doing that have not yet been encountered but which form part of the life of the larger groups to which they belong. This does not imply that what is learned actively is learned better than what is merely told. For the question is not whether one acts or whether one is told,

POLITICS OF SKILL

181

but how one acts and how one is told. The skillful self often learns best alongside a more skillful other. The significant difference between the educator and the child lies not in a disparity of power, but in the different levels of skill and understanding that each is able to bring to some specific task. Vygotsky calls the distance between a child’s actual capabilities and what it can do with the assistance of more capable peers or adults the “zone of proximal development.”17 A well-ordered education provides a framework or scaffolding for the skillful development of functions that are still maturing, and yet within the child’s reach. The skill of the teacher consists in recognizing what the child can achieve with the help of the skillful other, and in providing the conditions for this developmental process to unfold. Rogoff argues that such processes of “guided participation” may include not only instructional interactions, but also “side-by-side or distal arrangements in which children participate in the values, skills, and practices of their communities without intentional instruction or even necessarily being together at the same time.”18 The structure, pace, and character of individual development can only be understood when we take account of the cultural contexts within which such apprenticeships unfold.19 Different cultures facilitate the development of different skills at different ages, affecting the way children perform in tests of concrete operational thinking and other measures of development that are often viewed as developmental universals. Cognitive, perceptual, and social, capabilities should thus be thought of as “aspects of sociocultural activity rather than as separate, free-standing capabilities or ‘faculties,’ as has been traditional in psychology.”20 In setting up the connection between what children can already do skillfully and what they have not yet encountered, the teacher must not only identify concerns already implicit in their everyday activity, but also know how to bring these to bear on the broader horizon of knowledge and skills with which they are not yet familiar. This connection is neither routine nor can it be established by curricular force. “The great mistake teachers make . . . is in linking what is to be learnt at school this week with what was learnt last week, instead of bringing out its connexions with what the child is learning outside the school. School knowledge and ordinary experience are thus irretrievably sundered.”21 It seems obvious that the task of the educator is to engage the interest, perhaps even the self-interest of the child, making the material to be learned in this way palatable. This is not enough, however, to enable children to acquire the nonrepresentable skills. Indeed, it is but a step away from treating the child as a consumer for whom the process of learning is only as interesting as it is gratifying. When education emphasizes the active involvement of children in learning without doing so in a way that also engages their skills, it may merely reinforce the discontinuity between the skillful self and the learning situation. “Energy

182

CHAPTER 6

becomes dissipated and a person becomes scatterbrained. Each (school) experience may be lively, vivid and ‘interesting’ and yet their disconnectedness may artificially generate dispersive, disintegrated, centrifugal habits.”22 This obscures the sense in which knowledge carries the skillful self beyond itself, making it bigger than it is by broadening its horizon rather than leveling it in such a way that it fits within the scope of the familiar. When it is engaged in skillful activity, the skillful self is not concerned with itself but with the task in hand. Even if it has not yet learned to be reflective, it is already more than itself. The child learns to interpret what he or she learns at school through patterns of skillful activity that are familiar from other contexts. Often education takes the opposite direction. Rather than encouraging the child to be more than it is, enabling it to encounter limits from a position of strength and confidence, it makes the child less than it is. We encounter much the same question about what it means to do something for oneself in Mill’s remarks on the free development of individuality and his view that not only a person’s understanding but also their desires and impulses should be “their own.”23 It is easy to disparage Mill’s arguments for liberty as the expression of a perfectionist metaphysic and a specific ideal of human development. What is at stake for Mill, however, is that the value of what a person says, thinks, and does depends on the kind of person they are able to be, not simply on what they say or do. When people allow themselves to be represented by others in forming their views and making choices that have a bearing on the central questions of their existence, they fail to use faculties, capacities, and skills that can only be exercised on one’s own behalf.24 This suggests that the development of the nonrepresentable skills is connected with a particular conception of individual liberty. To be oneself is to be able to act and do according to one’s own plan and in one’s own way. Mill conceives liberty as a check on the rigidity of political institutions which, in the name of a dominant system of beliefs or social ideals such as productivity, organization, and efficiency, domesticate people and tame them into conformity. The more rational the social order and the more pervasive the influence of institutions, the greater the threat. Mill thinks of individuality as an outgrowth of the authenticity and vigor of a person’s desires and impulses, and of their ability to form and cultivate them. To be oneself and to make a plan of life of one’s own is not merely to introduce order into one’s preferences. It is to be able to build preferences on desires and impulses that are not borrowed but an expression of the self. Even if society finds the existence of such impulses uncomfortable, liberty should allow their expression as long as they are consistent with the rights and interests of others. An essential ingredient in this balancing act is the ability to “give style to one’s character”—not merely to have impulses but to cultivate them and lend

POLITICS OF SKILL

183

them order and form.25 The experiments in living that liberty protects are the product of this balancing act. Viewed in this way, the cultivation of individuality has strong perfectionist elements that derive from specific Christian and Greek ideals.26 But what is not perfectionist is Mill’s understanding of the process of self-formation as the skillful shaping of purposes and goals in ways that each can engage in only on their own behalf. People need conditions of liberty if they are to be able to explore their possibilities in this way. In a closed society, it is this aspect of individuality that is subject to the “eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship.”27 Censorship is not concerned with the way in which, or the reason why, someone is different, but merely with the fact that they are different. Difference is enough to make one an object of suspicion. At the root of social discrimination is a lack of intellectual discrimination, and the effect of social repression is not only to change what people think but how they think. When deciding how to act and what to do, people are not guided by a feeling of self and what they are capable of. Instead, they see themselves as arguments of a social function. They ask what it would be appropriate for someone in their position to do.28 They prefer to identify with a class or a group rather than be guided by their sense of what they themselves are capable of. Abuses of political liberty may be direct and brutal, violating bodily integrity, censoring beliefs and opinions, denying opportunities to choose careers or types of work, or the opportunity to share in government. Dependence on the will of others is destructive of self-formation. Coercion does more than interfere with a person’s actions. It changes them in such a way as to deny them these possibilities. It is often at its most profound when it takes the form of the simple demand for conformity. People must want the same things others want, think what they think, and do what they do. The denial of liberty is the denial of the kind of difference that threatens conformity. But other forms of coercion are less direct. People may be controlled not merely by cutting them off from their goals and desires, but by dismembering the everyday contexts of purposes in use within which skillful acting and doing are possible. If they are to take place at all, experiments in living must be worked out in the world as well as in the head. Yet the organizational forms of modern life suspend the skillful self in the decontextualizing, autonomizing, and dehumanizing frameworks propagated by technology, administration, and bureaucracy.29 The result is an awkward compromise situation in which the skillful self is forced to subordinate itself to the machine, the workplace, the timetable, the rule. The schoolchild who is constantly nagged into conformity grows up hunched and awkward. The factory worker must adapt the capacity for natural unimpeded movement and meaningful human relationships to the exigencies

184

CHAPTER 6

and isolation of continuous production on the assembly line. The shift worker who once nurtured ambitions can no longer imagine what it might mean to have a plan of life. The natural human feeling for time and rhythm of activity has to be reconciled with the alarm clock, the siren, and the time stamp. A public world that enmeshes people in complicated systems of rules they cannot fully understand, a welfare system that fosters dependency without know-how, a physical environment that distorts the capacity for meaningful movement and human relationships may be as destructive of the skillful self as a fence of barbed wire. The result is a clumsy and dispiriting complicity of skillful activity with external forces that enchain people as surely as direct coercion. It is, no doubt, a matter of controversy whether the conditions of everyday human life that are associated with deskilling in the workplace, with technological development and economic and administrative rationalization, can be classified as deprivations of liberty. If they cannot be said to deprive people of liberty, then it might at least be accepted that they reduce the worth of that liberty.30 Yet many political philosophers have been reluctant to acknowledge the influence of such factors on liberty or the worth of liberty. One reason may be that they regard these factors as too vague to be specifiable within a workable political conception. Because of the underlying theory of the person on which it relies, subjective welfarism and many forms of resourcism have no way of registering the sources, mechanisms, and human consequences of deskilling. A normative conception of the person that acknowledges and makes space for recognition of the nonrepresentable skills is needed if we are to address these neglected but decisive aspects of the self.

Factors Affecting the Development of the Nonrepresentable Skills Capability presupposes skill, and though the skill principle is not a moral principle it imposes constraints on the design of democratic political institutions.31 Even if many aspects of human functioning are not in themselves a matter of skill, the way we deal with the resources, goods, or opportunities, both human and material, to which we have access depends on the skills we can enlist in using them. A truly human life presupposes the development of both proficiencies and nonrepresentable skills. Proficiencies are skills acquired by training for a particular job, craft, trade, or profession. They are characterized by the facility and transparency that result from practice and familiarity. Which proficiencies people need will depend on the demand created by the market in skills and talents.

POLITICS OF SKILL

185

Political institutions and arrangements should thus be designed with the distinction between proficiencies and nonrepresentable skills in mind. Schools, for example, will prepare children for life by providing them with the proficiencies they need to become productive members of society, encouraging them to develop their talents, and trying to direct them to where they will be most useful. The proficiencies children are encouraged to acquire are likely to vary from one state of society to the next. Adeptness with the slide rule gives way to skill with the calculator and computer. Some proficiencies may be of such general utility and so frequently called upon that they can be regarded as core proficiencies everyone should have. Reading, writing, and elementary mathematics, for example, are core proficiencies in most cultural contexts.32 It is hard to imagine a modern society in which literacy is not considered a core proficiency. Governments and their various agencies devote much effort to eliminating illiteracy.33 But literacy embraces a family of overlapping skills and competences that are constantly shifting. This has to do with the fundamental ways in which the skillful self understands its situation and may embrace many types of competence—not just the ability to read and write a natural language, but to distinguish between a shopping list and a poem, computer literacy, cultural literacy, information literacy, and media literacy. Even understanding a natural language presupposes a grasp of many different kinds of sign system. Language may be used to denote, but also to represent and express.34 It can scarcely be separated from understanding not only speakers, but also the culture of the speaker and the poetry of their language. This does not mean that students of literacy should not be expected to acquire specific, measurable linguistic skills. But as well as defining such expectations, a good teacher will have a sense of what the point of a specific competence is, and of how it meshes with the existing abilities of any given student. It may be objected that literacy is merely about teaching to read and write, and that this task alone is challenging enough. But what matters is not only reading and writing, but also the reasons we learn to read and write. Those who would focus education on basic skills often rely on a narrow, culturally specific view of literacy practice. This view is premised on the assumption that skills of reading and writing are context free, universal in time and space, and generate consequences for cognition, social progress and individual achievement. In short, reading and writing are considered to be generic skills. As a result, the teaching focus is on the individual and his or her ability to “crack” the code or derive meaning from the letter/sound correspondence. . . . However, resources associated with this approach such as decontextualised phonic word lists and spelling lists do little to assist adults

186

CHAPTER 6 with the highly situated texts and tasks which they have to perform daily.35

What many regard as basic skills are often better seen as core proficiencies, the relevance of which is a function of social, historical, and cultural contingencies. Literacy education has the potential to be coercive as soon as the cultural relativity of any particular set of core proficiencies is overlooked or suppressed. Fetishizing basic skills not only interferes with acquisition of the nonrepresentable skills. It also discourages the adaptation of core proficiencies to new and different social situations: “The old tried and true approaches, which nostalgia prompts us to believe might solve current problems, were designed neither to achieve the literacy standard sought today nor assure successful literacy for everyone.”36 When proficiencies are taught without an awareness of their social and cultural contingency, they become both oppressive and maladaptive. Similar observations apply to the proficiencies associated with numeracy. Basic mathematical skills should be thought of as core proficiencies, the constitution of which is a function of particular conditions of social, economic, and technological development. “Numeracy is not a watered down mathematics—instead, ‘mathematics’ . . . is a particular kind of numeracy.”37 It has often been argued that teaching mathematics must connect mathematical content to everyday life. Yet what is this content that is decisive for mathematical learning? We do not know much about the ways in which people situate and give meaning to mathematics in their everyday lives, or about how context affects a person’s ability to understand mathematical problems. The capacity for mathematical logical thought cannot be developed independently of a skillful understanding of context. Children can learn to count three pencils or three chairs only when they have the capacity to deal skillfully with pencils and chairs. Numeracy is acquired not theoretically but through disparate numerical practices that may crop up in a variety of contexts of purposes in use.38 “Numeracy is not limited by number concepts and numeration processes; instead, numerical practice typically involves the concrete (i.e. in situ) management of a repertoire of concepts including number, space, data, chance and abstractions of these.”39 Later, when they have grasped numeracy in the form of specific contextualized numerical practices, children may learn to count things they have never seen and only know about. Competency-based education has had a significant impact on the way that “education and training is conceptualised, planned, delivered and assessed. More than ever before, teachers and trainers are being called upon to interpret sets of competencies and related performance criteria in ways that are, firstly, responsive to industry and workplace environments and, secondly, legislatively, financially and morally accountable.”40 But schools may teach proficiency in logic

POLITICS OF SKILL

187

and critical thinking and yet not only fail to equip children and students to think for themselves but actually discourage them from doing so. They may provide instruction in health and nutrition and yet fail to educate students to care for their health; they may teach literature and life skills without enabling them to understand the burden that goes with responsibility, or the opportunities that freedom can bring. The nonrepresentable skills involve the cultivation not of proficiency but of the most fundamental kinds of relationships people can have—to others, to themselves, to the world, to the past, to the future, to what they are and what they might be. To know how to care for another person, to be able to find one’s place in the world, to possess the skills essential to imaginative self-expression, to be able to let the world matter in such a way that one can be moved to feel emotion, these skills cannot be bought though poverty and deprivation may destroy them. The nonrepresentable skills are basic to political personality in a way that core proficiencies are not. Because they are involved in preparing people for citizenship, the skills of political participation are nonrepresentable in as far as they include an understanding of how to have a political voice, how to make oneself heard in the public forum, and how to be represented politically. The criteria for the acquisition of the nonrepresentable skills are different from those for core proficiencies, and often the acquisition of the one may interfere with acquisition of the other. While proficiencies depend on familiarity and facility with a task, the nonrepresentable skills are not, indeed cannot be acquired by practice alone. They require the learner to confront complexity and difficulty. Too much facility in a task can lead to mere cleverness. Meritocratic society encourages facility and adeptness at the expense of understanding the reasons for doing things. People are able to satisfy each other with the expertness of their performances and displays of specialized knowledge. Preoccupation with the virtues of execution and adeptness blocks inquiry into the reasons for performing the activity, the realization of which is so prized. Acquiring the nonrepresentable skills does not presuppose a high degree of intelligence. Children who might be judged poor in acquiring core proficiencies may still acquire competency in the nonrepresentable skills. A child may gain the skills necessary to grasp itself as a historical being and come to understand what it means to have a past without displaying the skills of historical understanding that a student of history might be expected to possess. She or he may gain the skills involved in perceiving and relating to others without acquiring the skills of a psychologist. Nor is acquisition of the nonrepresentable skills linked directly to the study of a particular subject matter. They can be taught in conjunction with many kinds of proficiencies. A student might acquire literary understanding while studying mathematics and physics, or learn to think critically while mastering a trade.

188

CHAPTER 6

The distinction between proficiencies and nonrepresentable skills overlaps in certain respects with Passmore’s distinction between closed and open capacities.41 Closed capacities are distinguished from open capacities by the fact that they are completely masterable. Counting, tying a knot, holding a baseball bat, or operating an electric switch are closed capacities, whereas speaking a language, playing the piano, and critical thinking are open capacities. Open capacities can be cultivated but not perfected. However well an open capacity is exercised, it always makes sense to say that it could be exercised better, whether by ourselves or by another. Closed capacities may involve sophisticated techniques that can be aggregated, and may differ in complexity. Painting in perspective, according to Passmore, is a capacity that is both complex and closed.42 As time passes, closed capacities may become routine, whereas open capacities cannot. Yet a closed capacity may also prepare the way for one that is open. To master a language, according to Passmore, is to make the transition from a closed to an open capacity. The main evidence that someone has acquired an open capacity is that he or she can take steps they have not been taught to take. To be inventive, to display scientific imagination or historical judgment, is to show one has acquired “something other than a closed capacity.”43 Traditional educationalists, as Passmore points out, often assumed that open capacities depend on and in a sense build on closed capacities. Children must first learn the conventional way of doing things if they are eventually to be able to do things in their own way, with imagination and inventiveness.44 Yet there is a risk that prioritizing the development of closed over open capacities will produce people who are incapable of acting and doing in ways that are their own. On the other hand, giving early precedence to spontaneity, inventiveness, or other virtues associated with open capacities will be equally unsatisfactory, in particular if this tactic is motivated by a metaphysical opposition to tradition at the expense not only of particular skills or traditions, but of skill itself. Spontaneity without skill is the formula for barbarism. Even acquiring closed capacities requires children to learn to do things for themselves in their own way, yet also in the right way. Besides offering praise when things are going well, and warning when they are not, teachers can help a child along the path to competency by demonstration, instruction, and correction.45 In the hands of a good teacher, such techniques are far from routine. What works for one child will not work for another. The left-handed, the big handed, the nearsighted, the fine fingered must each find his or her own way of producing an inscription that is recognizable to all as the same letter a or b. Correction has the character of guidance. Teaching is not simply a matter of seeing children’s potential. Rather than imposing a solution, it helps children find their own way of reaching the goal in question. The teacher must begin from what the

POLITICS OF SKILL

189

child can already do and point it toward the skillful performance of which it is not yet capable. This calls for more than an understanding of the child’s point of view. A point of view is always grounded in something more fundamental. To guide the child is not merely to instruct it in the “right” way of doing things but to understand that for the child the way it already does things is right. Even as children learn conventional ways of doing things, they can also be encouraged to understand and apply these conventions in their own way. Learning to exercise initiative or think for oneself and acquiring techniques may thus be thought of as “alternating phases in the acquisition of an open capacity.”46 Open capacities are best conceived not as a different class of skills but as a certain way of approaching the closed capacities. Although many techniques can be mastered and in this sense are reducible to closed capacities, no set of masterable techniques applies to all the situations the skillful self might face. Teaching in this sense is a skillful activity. No rules or guidelines enable the teacher to achieve a perfect balance between the open and the closed, between cultivating an excessive, even fearful, respect for tradition and encouraging openness and innovation at the risk of recklessness and wildness.47 The nonrepresentable skills are not only open capacities. They are irreducibly local in the sense that they are in every case my own. The heart of the modern political community is composed of individuals who face the challenge of forming themselves both personally and politically, individually and collectively. People understand their world through the meanings things have for them. The totality of these meanings constitutes their situation. Skillful human activity is always local and finite, and its finitude is always expressed through the concern and preoccupation of the skillful self with the task in hand. Nussbaum may be referring to this kind of understanding when she argues that a curriculum for world citizenship, which she thinks should form the core of a liberal education, should make local knowledge central.48 Local knowledge, however, is not simply knowledge of the localities in which we live or “operate.” It is a certain way of knowing. Mere knowledge of the facts connected with cultural diversity may have little or no impact on a person’s ability to understand other cultures—not because they do not know that such cultures exist but because they do not grasp the significance of this fact. The skillful self lives in a world of its own making, yet often without realizing that it does so. When it is absorbed in everyday activity, the skillful self not only does not understand other cultures, it is hardly aware they exist. What most people mean by “the world,” as Mill notes, is the part of it with which they come into contact––their party, sect, church, or class. A person “may be called, by comparison, almost liberal and large minded to whom it means anything so comprehensive as his own country or his own age.”49 Because the skillful self is for the most part self-absorbed, the gaps in understanding between members of different cultures can hardly be overestimated.

190

CHAPTER 6

If such gaps are to be crossed, people must not merely know about cultural diversity—it must become meaningful to them. Multicultural education often fails because, in its anxiety to communicate information, it does not address the self-absorption that is the real obstacle to understanding cultural difference. Yet such self-absorption asks not to be criticized but to be recognized and understood. Unless people are able to honor and understand what they feel to be closest to them, they cannot hope to understand that for which they have as yet no feeling. To understand this is to lay the foundations of respect for members of other cultures. Ignorance about what is different is not something culpable for which the skillful self should be punished. It is neither through accident nor ill will that people find it difficult to understand or care about those they do not know. It is a reflection of each person’s preoccupation with his or her own situation, and of the difficulty of grasping that to which one has no skillful relationship. Only by beginning from an understanding of those we already have dealings with can we address the task of understanding those we do not know, but only know about. Disproportionate expectations of altruism may not only not encourage but also interfere with the acquisition of the nonrepresentable skills. Education in a multicultural context requires us to understand not only that, but also why the skillful self overlooks those with whom it is not directly involved. It means understanding that care is one thing when expressed through skillful relationships in a human complex in which one is involved, and another when applied to a much broader set of people one may never meet. It means asking not only why someone should feel a commitment to a human community of unimaginable size, but also what intellectual, emotional, and imaginative skills are necessary to participate in such a community. An understanding of what is foreign can only begin in each individual’s understanding of his or her own situation, and of how what is not yet known can be understood through what is already known. The pattern for relationships to everything that is foreign is provided by the human and instrumental complexes with which we are already familiar through our own skillful acting and doing. It is impossible to specify global principles of morality and justice, or a world ethos, without first securing the networks of skills, capabilities, and human relationships in which they must be anchored.50 Such principles cannot be identified by employing experts to systematize and extend the area of shared value commitments.51 Philosophical efforts to specify global moral principles presuppose some common ultimate values. Yet the search for an ethic that binds people globally is hindered not by a lack of shared values but by the difficulty of bringing local values to bear on social and political contexts to which people have only an abstract relationship. Intellectual recognition of the political and economic interdependence of different peoples and states is of little significance unless it is combined with the

POLITICS OF SKILL

191

ability to grasp the meaning of an international system and the responsibility that participation in such a system involves. As a rule, the skillful self neglects and overlooks global relationships. This tendency is not a consequence of selfishness. The virtue of a reasonableness that extends beyond the nation to encompass global society depends on an idea for which the skillful self can develop little feeling. Reasonableness depends not on formal skills but on the readiness to seek a consistency that embraces the complex ramifications of a situation that transcends one’s own. It is forgotten that it is one thing to be reasonable in a village, another at the level of a state, and yet another in a global context. This kind of consistency is undermined by the absorption of the skillful self in its own affairs, by factors connected with the scale, character, and operation of modern societies, and by the abolition of the natural sense of distance that evolving communication technologies have brought about. People care deeply about their world. But they cannot care about what they do not understand.

Conclusion What is true of education holds for political institutions in general. To characterize the central capabilities as functions of the skillful self is to make developing the nonrepresentable skills central to our conception of democratic political personality. Political philosophy has grown used to working with a view of the person that ignores the skillful self and hence also the need for social and political institutions to support it.52 Bentham’s utilitarianism was conceived from the perspective of the theorist and the legislator.53 It accented the virtues of simplicity, clarity, and elegance. But despite their progressive role in the rationalization of law, utilitarianism and its modern counterparts in economic theory work with a view of the self that is—as Nussbaum puts it—so seriously impoverished that it hardly claims serious attention as the basis for a political view of persons.54 Present-day economics has “not yet put itself onto the map of conceptually respectable theories of human action.”55 By treating people as “just bags of unscrutinized desires,” it effaces the critical and deliberative character of human choice. In extreme cases, the black box becomes the model for humanity and the chief instrument of political psychology.56 Subjective welfarism began to dominate political theory after World War II—a period marked by suspicion of mentalism and psychologism. It was often linked with theoretical models that substituted mathematical functions and the study of behavior for the dubious psychological entities of faculty psychology. Many positivists were convinced that it was essential to separate psychology from mathematics and logic, hoping the elaboration of formal systems would clarify

192

CHAPTER 6

confusions arising from the misidentification of logic with psychology that provide a fertile breeding ground for social and political irrationalism.57 But expelling mentalism from political psychology leaves nothing behind. It throws out the baby of the self with the bathwater of psychologism. Where positivists saw traditional psychology—much of which derived from Aristotle—as a source of confusion, Nussbaum thinks that political psychology must make use of more rather than less distinctions if it wishes to reflect the complexity of human motivation and action, and allow for the role of deliberation and choice in human existence. Subjective welfarism leaves too little space for the criticism of existing preferences. Policies that are guided by it are unable to register and adjust for socially induced inequalities that have crept into people’s desires because of habituation to unfavorable circumstances. Yet the problem lies not just in a lack of psychological distinctions but in a certain view of the role and character of political theory. Everyday experience and most aspects of human existence are not theoretical. Although theory adopts the standpoint of the observer, human life begins in the situations we are involved in and with preferences that have long ago been shaped by the meanings things have in those contexts. Nor is our involvement in the contexts that shape our preferences in this way passive. They are contexts of purposes in use. That is, the meaning of the contexts that shape the scope and possibilities of human choice is a product of our skillful engagement in those contexts. The justification of democratic political arrangements cannot depend on an elaborate process of proof that few are able to follow. In times of antagonism and deep social division, the only reasonable place to start is with an agreement about what we can agree about. For there to be such a beginning, the judgments and values we are least willing to abandon must match those that others are most ready to share. When such a common ground can be found, theory can guide us in broadening the basis of agreement. To focus on one value—such as community, or justice, or the recognition of difference—is not enough. It is necessary to integrate these values within a single view. There is little merit in celebrating the values of community if we are not also ready to address the sources of cultural conflict within and between communities. There is no point in calling for the recognition of human diversity if we fail to grasp that it is the recognition of diversity that raises the problem of justice in the first place. When Rawls argues that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, he is not denying the meaning and value of community or the importance of diversity. He is asserting a relation of priority. The challenge is to combine the claims of these moments of the human situation in a single view. An understanding of the basis of human motivation in the things that people find meaning in is more important to the stability of democracy than the satisfaction of preferences or the maximization of utility, by whatever measure. Peo-

POLITICS OF SKILL

193

ple are more likely to accept the burdens of social cooperation if they see doing so as meaningful, and they will often do so even if they feel that to do so is against their interests. The more a social scheme takes a person’s well-being to consist in the satisfaction of their preferences, without reference to the meanings within which those preferences are anchored, the more it lays the foundation for an adversarial social situation in which society disintegrates into a zero sum game, a modus vivendi focused on the clash of interests. This does not mean that we must abandon theory. But theory must be kept in context. We provide that context when we characterize political institutions in a way that reflects our self-understandings not simply as members of a political community but as skillful selves. All too often, the theoretical point of view represents a kind of public solipsism—the theorist projects a particular way of thinking, and with it the limitations of his or her perspective, onto the entire field of theory. The more we pursue the goals of theory, the more we are compelled to abstract from the significance of particular human situations. But in doing so we risk overlooking the skillful self and its role in the cultural constitution of meaning and value. The skill principle imposes a fundamental constraint on theoretical discussions of social justice. Political debate in a pluralistic democracy is a continuous process in which the legitimate and sometimes shared, sometimes conflicting, interests of different parties confront the interest of the group in normative consensus. If this process is not to be vacuous, reason is compelled to develop its own criteria of reasonableness, the legitimate and generic reasons that “people have in virtue of their situation.”58 A capability-constrained resourcism in which the central capabilities are conceived as functions of the skillful self proposes such a criterion. When we are looking for rules of relevance and priority, for ways of assessing and balancing the claims and expectations of different members of society, or for ways of specifying the goods that society ought to secure for its members, we must look to the skillful self. For it is the skillful self, who is constantly confronted with the difficulties and dangers of the human situation, with the problematic usability of things and of the social world, that must deal with the social reality that reason proposes and institutions enact. Recognition of and respect for the skillful self thus shapes our understanding of reasonableness. The goods that form the focus of social expectations must be usable. This provision applies as much to liberties as it does to health care or to education. The usability of the goods with which society responds to such claims must be distinguished from both usefulness and utility. The usability of a thing varies not only from culture to culture but also from person to person. But the need for things to be usable does not. Society cannot provide a differentiated response to every social, cultural, or individual difference. But it can know when such a response is more important, and when it is less so. Considerations of

194

CHAPTER 6

usability will impose a pragmatic constraint on most policy decisions in a democracy. Usability is morally important, however, when it is a condition for people to develop and exercise the nonrepresentable skills. Society and institutions violate people’s deepest and most legitimate interests when, without good reasons derived from consideration of the legitimate interests of others, they hinder people from acting and doing and pursuing their lives in their own ways. To exist skillfully is to be able to understand one’s place in the world, and to have a reasonable grasp of the relationship between one’s actions and the institutions and social arrangements of which one is part. In traditional human groups, contexts of purposes in use form a nontechnical network of involvements through which the skillful self is constantly in touch with the ways in which its activity shapes the human and instrumental complexes to which it belongs. In complex, modern societies the systems and processes of feedback and adjustment by which the skillful self regulates its relation to society and the world are unstable. The machinery of the bureaucratic, redistributive liberal state, the globalization of production and of information, and the decontextualizing impact of advanced technologies enframe the self in action systems within which it can no longer live and act skillfully. When the skillful self cannot understand the consequences of its actions, when it cannot connect the burdens and benefits of social cooperation to a situation it can call its own, when it is unaware of the human, social, and environmental costs of the things it makes and consumes, we can no longer speak of a society that is truly human. Of the factors that systematically affect the development and sustainability of the nonrepresentable skills, the forces of economics, administration, and technology are the most significant. The more the human situation is structured by an ill-regulated alliance of free market arrangements, advanced technologies, and global methods of production, the greater the threat to the skills that are fundamental to social cooperation. Globalization is not merely a geographical, economic, or even a technological event. It is an event in the human world with which the skillful self must come to terms. The international sphere is not a place but a relationship between human beings. Only once this is recognized and accepted can we begin to develop the international civic awareness and humanizing institutions needed to address the anomalies of economic growth and worldwide industrial development. Here too we must recognize the need to combine several intuitions in a single view: on the one hand the virtues of free market arrangements that leave space for unregulated human economic interaction, and on the other the need for constraints and limitations on those arrangements to make the overall scheme of economic cooperation not only fair but truly human.59 Such an awareness is necessary to preempt and contest injustices that arise from the domination of the international sphere by extraterritorial, footloose or-

POLITICS OF SKILL

195

ganizations and institutions. The multinational corporation is in many ways a machine for the decontextualization of the skillful self. It is not only hierarchical, opaque, and undemocratic. It inserts the skillful self into a system of action and effects that it cannot understand. This is as true of the managerial oligarch as it is of the helpless employee.60 Such a state of affairs is not only bad for society. It is also bad for the firm if we view this as a place in which capabilities must be acquired and developed.61 An international system that secures a disproportionately high share of income and wealth for a few, but ignores the basic needs of many, may be efficient. But it is not just, and whatever stability it has depends on coercion, whether blatant or subtle. Dewey already calls for the abandonment of industrial feudalism in favor of schemes of democratic self-management. Early legislation constrained the corporation by denying it political and civil rights, restricting its size, longevity, capitalization, the scope of its activities, and subordinating it to the control of the community. Such constraints become plausible when we understand that large inequalities of income are not necessary to motivate the skillful self, and that democratic reforms of corporate governance are most likely to take root when they allow the skillful self to shape its own ways of working. The challenge is to encourage accountability and the capacity for skillful activity without glorifying self-reliance and opportunism. To develop as an individual is to develop not away from others but toward them and the world. Even at the earliest stage, the task of the parent is to grasp the individuality of the child as a person in its own right. This is not a matter of turning the child into an egoist or a Cartesian subject. It is not to cultivate voluntarism or exclude relationships involving positive interdependence. On the contrary, it is a matter of understanding that the problems the child faces in learning are in each case specific and its own. When it learns to write, each child does so with a hand, eye, and soul that is more or less different from that of the other, not just because it is leftor right-handed, or because this or that finger is longer or shorter. The educator must make space for the individuality of the child, not in order that the child should learn to be different from others but so it can learn to grasp what people and things have in common. To give people a chance to develop in life means to allow them to develop as individuals in this sense. To preserve and support conditions for the growth of individuality is to view a human being as a self capable of existing and living meaningfully in the world. To recognize the role of the skillful self in democratic political personality is to see citizens not only as members of self-governing political communities but also as individuals who must grapple with the meaning of their own lives and projects. Individuality in this sense is not a license to be different for the sake of being different, nor is it a license to be egotistical. It is a license to be oneself.

196

CHAPTER 6

Not all aspects of individuality are readily accessible to dialog. Western ideals of discourse and civic humanism may be incompatible with values of positive interdependence that enjoy preeminence in other cultures. The preoccupation with dialog may introduce an artificial separation between the self-absorbed, nontransparent aspects of the self and the social and political processes of which they should be part. A model of political participation based on dialog may, by virtue of its form, exclude and marginalize ways of life and cultures for which discourse is not a central value, undermining recognition of and respect for this kind of cultural difference. The more we make an ideal form of discourse into the focus of the social and political system, the more difficult it is to identify and criticize social processes that operate at the edge of discourse, which discourse may not capture.62 The fixation on communicative rationality and the sharp distinction between communicative and purposive rationality can obscure the theme of skillful activity, and with it the inner differentiation of the various paths of human, organizational, and technological development.63 The risks of this strategy are apparent when we recognize the impact of technological development on the cultural conditions of autonomy. Clarification of the conditions of communicative rationality is not enough to illuminate the ways in which skillful activity shapes and is shaped by new technologies and the forms of social organization that go with them. We cannot create a dialogical boundary around the skillful self without obscuring these interactions, and hence postponing the possibility of a technological democracy that is guided by the skillful self’s understanding of what it can do. For a full understanding of such interactions, we must recognize the hybridity of technology and skillful human activity. Technological change is also an event in the world of the skillful self. The technical code and the skillful self are co-implicated in the configuration of technological practices, and the immanent critique of technology cannot be separated from criticism of the human relationship to technology that this implies. Each emerging technological situation holds the potential for coherent configurations of human and technical resources that are more or less consistent with the development of the central capabilities viewed as functions of the skillful self. An efficient organization of work and social reproduction is not incompatible with the development of the nonrepresentable skills. But efficiency is not the only constraint on technological choices. There are many conceptions of efficiency and many efficient ways of arranging human cooperation. The skill principle requires democratic communities to pry apart the technical and human aspects of such formal structures, identifying biases implemented within their design, and reconstitute them as public choices. When we are unwilling to reflect on the technological conditions of social cooperation in this way, we are but a step away from justifying the hard labor of the child because it is more efficient than that of the adult.64

POLITICS OF SKILL

197

Technology is neither a fact nor a fate. It is a way in which the skillful self shapes both its world and the conditions of its own action. When technology cuts the skillful self off from the consequences of its actions, it does so by establishing a fundamental imbalance and disproportion between technical action and its human consequences.65 To accept responsibility for technology, it is necessary first of all to accept responsibility for this disproportion. Social and political arrangements that encourage the dissociation of actions from their consequences are fundamentally flawed. The decontextualization of work, the autonomization of social reproduction, and the dehumanization of the human world are human responsibilities. They are not something that machines have done to human beings. A society in which people are unable to grasp the consequences of their actions is not merely lawless. It is no longer human. There is no formula for such a responsibility. The human consequences of a technology are not the result of a single decision such as the dropping of a bomb or the pulling of a trigger. Society lays the foundation for such decisions over long periods of time through the technologies it adopts, and through the forms of social organization and economic arrangements with which it surrounds them. Responsibility requires the skillful self to fashion a technical world in which it can recognize itself and the consequences of its actions. This certainly means that we must seek to operationalize economic, administrative, and technological systems in such a way as to minimize the effects of decontextualization, autonomization, and dehumanization. Yet it is a mistake to think of human beings simply as an operating environment to which the machine must be adapted. If they are to take root, such revisions must be rooted in a human attitude. The skillful self must take responsibility for what it is. To be responsible is to be reasonable. To be reasonable is to understand that the same considerations that make me think and act as I do in my present situation would incline, if not determine, me to think and act as others do in their situations. Only when we have understood what it means to act skillfully in a situation that we can call our own can we also understand what it means to see things in a way that is not our own. This recognition lays the foundation for a respect for others that is not purely formal. It makes it possible to see them not merely as claimants on the social system and potential adversaries, but as human beings who, like ourselves, face all the difficulties and challenges of understanding the world from a perspective that is their own and no one else’s.

Notes 1. Preraphaelites, guild socialists, and the proponents of self-governing workshops advocated an aesthetic that would combine beauty, craftsmanship, and utility. In a culture

198

CHAPTER 6

of skill, as they conceived it, craftsworkers would both design and manufacture products, thus uniting head and hand. See Niles Carpenter, Guild Socialism: An Historical and Critical Analysis (New York: D. Appleton, 1922), 141–57. Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1946), 433–58. 2. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 299. 3. See John Passmore, The Philosophy of Teaching (London: Duckworth, 1980), 61. 4. Compare Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), chapter 5. 5. Compare Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 37. 6. Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capability Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 12–13, 188–90. 7. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 156. 8. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 214 9. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 213. 10. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 213. 11. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 156. 12. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 155. 13. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 219. 14. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 219. 15. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 220. 16. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 221. 17. L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, ed. Michael Cole and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 84–91. 18. Barbara Rogoff, The Cultural Nature of Human Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 284. 19. Barbara Rogoff, Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 148; “Children’s Guided Participation and Participatory Appropriation in Sociocultural Activity,” in Development in Context: Acting and Thinking in Specific Environments, ed. Robert H. Wozniak and Kurt W. Fischer (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993), 131–49. 20. Rogoff, Cultural Nature of Human Development, 237. 21. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 90; Passmore is summarizing the views of Dewey. 22. From Dewey’s Experience and Education, as quoted by Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 91. 23. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: John B. Alden, 1885), 100, 103, 113. 24. Mill, On Liberty, 98–99. 25. The phrase “give style to one’s character” is from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 232. 26. Thus “‘pagan self-assertion’ is one of the elements of human worth, as well as ‘Christian self-denial.’ There is a Greek ideal of self-development, which the Platonic and Christian ideal of self-government blends with, but does not supersede.” To this Mill

POLITICS OF SKILL

199

adds: “It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it, and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation.” Mill, On Liberty, 105. 27. Mill, On Liberty, 102. 28. Mill, On Liberty, 103. 29. See Jürgen Habermas, “Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit,” in Kleine Politische Schriften V (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), 141–63. 30. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 204; Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 84–86. 31. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 37–40. 32. See Jean Searle, “Developing Literacy,” in Developing Vocational Expertise: Principles and Issues in Vocational Education, ed. John Stevenson (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2003), 61–62: “Reading, writing and enumerating are viewed as cultural practices, which are learnt in specific cultural contexts and which . . . cannot be generalised across cultures.” Searle adds: “given that the meaning of literacy depends upon the social context in which it is embedded, and that the particular reading and writing practices involved depend upon social structures and the institutions of education or training, there cannot be a single, autonomous ‘literacy’. It would be more appropriate to refer to multiple ‘literacies.’” 33. Searle, “Developing Literacy,” 54. 34. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1976), 40–43, 225–26. 35. Searle, “Developing Literacy,” 58–59. See also Brian V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1–18. 36. Daniel P. Resnick and Lauren B. Resnick, “The Nature of Literacy: An Historical Exploration,” Harvard Educational Review 47, no. 3 (1977): 370–85, quoted by Searle, “Developing Literacy,” 59. 37. Clive Kanes, “Developing Numeracy,” in Stevenson, Developing Vocational Expertise, 99. 38. Kanes, “Developing Numeracy,” 82. Kanes adapts the concept of numerical practices from Valerie Walkerdine’s The Mastery of Reason: Cognitive Development and the Production of Rationality (London: Routledge, 1988). He also cites the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, according to which numeracy “involves using some mathematics to achieve some purpose in a particular context.” See AAMT, Numeracy— Everyone’s Business (Melbourne: Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, 1997), 13. 39. Kanes, “Developing Numeracy,” 99–100. 40. Searle, “Developing Literacy,” 71–72. 41. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 40. 42. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 41. 43. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 42–43. 44. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 46–47. 45. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 41–42. 46. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 49.

200

CHAPTER 6

47. Passmore, Philosophy of Teaching, 47. 48. Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 68, 295. Nussbaum believes that local knowledge should be presented in a way that reminds students of the broader world of which the Western tradition is part. Such courses may use the Socratic method to expose students to the possible narrowness and limitations of their own perspectives. See also Martha C. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” Boston Review 19, no. 5 (1994): 3–16; and Jeremy Waldron,“Teaching Cosmopolitan Right,” in Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities, ed. Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 23–55. It has often been observed that there is no direct relationship between physical proximity and locality or “localness.” See, for example, Graham Fennell, “Local Lives—Distant Ties: Researching Community under Globalized Conditions,” in Living the Global City: Globalization as a Local Process, ed. John Eade (London: Routledge, 1997), 90–109. 49. Mill, On Liberty, 33. 50. Hans Küng, for example, proposes a consensus ethic or world ethos based on moral nonsectarian core values. See Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1991); also Hans Küng and Karl-Josef Kuschel, eds., Erklärung zum Weltethos: Die Deklaration des Parlaments der Weltreligionen (München: Piper, 1993). 51. Compare Thomas W. Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 235. 52. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 119–20. 53. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: Clarendon Press, 1879). Mill, who took a broader view of utility, saw himself as an educator of national character. 54. Such considerations already led Mill to reject Bentham’s utilitarian calculus, writing in a letter to Lytton Bulwer in 1836 of a program for utilitarianism of “the whole of human nature.” Mill opposes Bentham’s conception of utility with a more complex conception of the person in which mature faculties, character, and individuality are the conditions that make preference and choice valuable. 55. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 122. 56. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 122. See Paul A. Samuelson, “A Note on the Pure Theory of Consumer’s Behavior,” Economica 5 (1938): 61–71 and Foundations of Economic Analysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947). 57. For a logical positivist’s view of the relation between logic and psychology, see A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 107–8. On logic, psychology, and psychologism see also John Stopford, “Frege, Heidegger and Kant’s Two Theses on Existence,” in Zeit und Zeichen, ed. Tilman Borsche, Johann Kreuzer, Helmut Pape, and Günter Wohlfart (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1993), 85–87. 58. Thomas M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 204, quoted by Erin Kelly in “Habermas on Moral Justification,” Social Theory and Practice 26, no. 2 (2000): 223–49. 59. Rawls, Theory, 270–74.

POLITICS OF SKILL

201

60. See Robert J. S. Ross and Kent C. Trachte, Global Capitalism: The New Leviathan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 2: “individual agents, global firms, and financial institutions, are not sovereigns but severely constrained competitors committed to the economic war of each against all.” 61. Edith T. Penrose, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 24–25, 33–35. Penrose argues that firms do not simply react to changes in prices, costs, and other market conditions. The firm can be conceived as a “collection of physical and human resources,” competences, skills, and routines that provide the basis for its competitive advantage in a particular business. Such competences are not easily transferable, and must often be developed within enterprises. Chandler also argues that developing people’s capabilities is essential to entrepreneurial activity and team entrepreneurship, which is to be distinguished from management. Corporate structures that undermine the development of capabilities are likely to discourage innovation and discovery. See Alfred D. Chandler, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), and Frédéric E. Sautet, An Entrepreneurial Theory of the Firm (London: Routledge, 2000), 94. 62. John Stopford, “Peirce, Habermas, Rawls, and the Democracy of Signs,” in Pragmata: Festschrift für Klaus Oehler zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Kai-Michael Hingst and Maria Liatsi (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2008), 185–86. 63. Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (New York: Oxford University press, 1991), 178. 64. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 128. 65. Feenberg, Critical Theory, 187.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” Translated by Anson G. Rabinbach. New German Critique 6 (1975): 12–19. ———. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by C. Lenhardt. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder & Herder, 1972. Albrow, Martin. The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Alexander, F. M. The Use of the Self. London: Gollancz, 1985. Alexy, Robert. Theorie der juristischen Argumentation. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978. ———. “Eine Theorie des praktischen Diskurses.” In Normenbegründung, Normendurchsetzung: Materialien zur Normendiskussion, edited by Willi Oelmüller, 2: 22–58. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1978. Alford, C. Fred. Science and the Revenge of Nature: Marcuse and Habermas. Tampa: University Press of South Florida, 1985. Alkire, Sabina. Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Allman, Dwight D. “Citizenship and Soulcraft in Contemporary America.” Introduction to Cultivating Citizens: Soulcraft and Citizenship in Contemporary America, edited by Dwight D. Allman and Michael D. Beaty, ix–xxv. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002. Altman, Andrew. “Liberalism and Campus Hate Speech: A Philosophical Examination.” Ethics 103, no. 2 (1993): 302–17. Anand, Paul, Graham Hunter, and Ron Smith. “Capabilities and Well-being: Evidence Based on the Sen-Nussbaum Approach to Welfare.” Social Indicators Research 74, no. 1 (2005): 9–55. Anaya, S. James. Indigenous Peoples in International Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 203

204

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Elizabeth. Value in Ethics and Economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Anner, John. Introduction to Beyond Identity Politics: Emerging Social Justice Movements in Communities of Color, edited by John Anner, 5–13. Boston: South End Press, 1996. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections.” In Kwame Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, 30–105. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. ———. “Liberal Education: The United States Example.” In Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities, edited by Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg, 56–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ———. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Ardell, D. B. High Level Wellness: An Alternative to Doctors, Drugs, and Disease. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1977. Arneson, Richard. “Distributive Justice and Basic Capability Equality: ‘Good Enough’ Is Not Good Enough.” In Capabilities Equality: Basic Issues and Problems, edited by Alexander Kaufman, 17–43. London: Routledge, 2006. Arnold, Matthew. “Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism.” In Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, edited by Stefan Collini, 53–211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers (AAMT). Numeracy—Everyone’s Business. Melbourne: Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, 1997. Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth and Logic. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971. Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism, edited by Josué Harari, 73–81. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media.” In Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster, 207–19. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Baumol, Hilda, and William J. Baumol, eds. Inflation and the Performing Arts. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Baumol, William J., and William G. Bowen. Performing Arts—the Economic Dilemma: A Study of Problems Common to Theater, Opera, Music and Dance (Modern Revivals in Economics). New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1966. Baxter, Brian. A Theory of Ecological Justice. London: Routledge, 2004. Baynes, Kenneth. “Democracy and the Rechtsstaat: Habermas’s Faktizität und Geltung.” In The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, edited by Stephen K. White. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Translated by M. Ritter. London: Sage, 1992. Bell, Derek R. “Political Liberalism and Ecological Justice.” Analyse & Kritik 28, no. 2 (2006): 206–22. Benhabib, Seyla. “The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Moral Theory.” In Women and Moral Theory, edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers, 154–78. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

205

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Bennett, William J. Our Country and Our Children: Improving America’s Schools and Affirming the Common Culture. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. London: Clarendon Press, 1879. Berger, John, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, and Richard Hollis. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972. Berger, Stefan. The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany Since 1800. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997. Berges, Sandrine. “Why the Capability Approach Is Justified.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 24, no. 1 (2007): 16–25. Berlin, Isaiah. Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays. Edited by Henry Hardy. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981. Bernard, William S., Carolyn Zeleny, and Henry Miller, eds. American Immigration Policy, a Reappraisal. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950. Blake, Nigel. “Modernity and the Problem of Cultural Pluralism.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 26, no. 1 (1992): 39–50. Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang. Staat, Gesellschaft, Freiheit: Studien zur Staatstheorie und zum Verfassungsrecht. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976. Bohman, James. “Public Reason and Cultural Pluralism: Political Liberalism and the Problem of Moral Conflict.” Political Theory 23, no. 2 (1995): 253–79. ———. Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Bolton, Richard. Introduction to Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, edited by Richard Bolton, 3–26. New York: The New Press, 1992. Borden, George A. Cultural Orientation: An Approach to Understanding Intercultural Communication. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991. Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ———. “Technology and Democracy.” In Technology and Politics, edited by Michael E. Kraft and Norma J. Vig, 54–72. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988. ———. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Bork, Robert H. Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction.” In Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change, edited by Richard K. Brown, 71–112. London: Tavistock, 1973.

206

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Braunstein, Elissa, and Gerald Epstein. “Creating International Credit Rules and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment: What Are the Alternatives?” In Global Instability: The Political Economy of World Economic Governance, edited by Jonathan Michie and John Grieve Smith, 113–33. London: Routledge, 1999. Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974. Brennan, Frank. The Wik Debate: Its Impact on Aborigines, Pastoralists and Miners. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998. Brumbaugh, Robert S. “Plato: The Fundamental Principles of Education.” Chapter 2 in Philosophers on Education: Six Essays on the Foundations of Western Thought, edited by Robert S. Brumbaugh and Nathaniel M. Lawrence, 10–48. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. Buechler, Steven M. Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism: The Political Economy and Cultural Construction of Social Activism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Burns, Rob. Introduction to German Cultural Studies: An Introduction, edited by Rob Burns, 1–8. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Callan, Eamonn. Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Camus, Albert. L’Homme révolté. Paris: Gallimard, 1951. Carpenter, Niles. Guild Socialism: An Historical and Critical Analysis. New York: D. Appleton, 1922. Carpenter, Stanley R. “Technoaxiology: Appropriate Norms for Technology Assessment.” In Philosophy and Technology, edited by Paul T. Durbin and Friedrich Rapp, 115–36. Boston: Lancaster, 1983. Chamberlain, John. The Roots of Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1959. Chambers, Simone. Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Chandler, Alfred D. Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2002. Chomsky, Noam. “Free Trade and Free Market: Pretense and Practice.” In The Cultures of Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 356–70. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. ———. Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. Boston: South End Press, 2000. Christman, John. “Liberalism, Autonomy, and Self-Transformation.” Social Theory and Practice 27, no. 2 (2001): 185–206. ———. Social and Political Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. Cohen, Gerald A. “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice.” Ethics 99 (1989): 906–44. ———. “Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods, and Capabilities.” In The Quality of Life: A Study Prepared for the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

207

of the United Nations University, edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, 9–29. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Commonwealth of Australia, Native Title Act No. 110 of 1993. http://www .austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/num_act/nta1993147/ (accessed January 8, 2008). Cook, Deborah. Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society. New York: Routledge, 2004. Cooke, Maeve. “Between ‘Objectivism’ and ‘Contextualism’: The Normative Foundations of Social Philosophy.” In Critical Theory after Habermas: Encounters and Departures, edited by Dieter Freundlieb, Wayne Hudson, and John Rundell, 35–76. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Copp, David. “Democracy and Communal Self-Determination.” In The Morality of Nationalism, edited by Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan, 277–300. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Cornwell, Terri Lynn. Democracy and the Arts: The Role of Participation. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990. Craven, Matthew C. R. The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights: A Perspective on Its Development. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Crewe, Ben. Representing Men: Cultural Production and Producers in the Men’s Magazine Market. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003. Crocker, David A. “Functioning and Capability: The Foundations of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s Development Ethic.” Political Theory 20, no. 4 (1992): 584–612. D’Agostino, Fred. Free Public Reason: Making It Up as We Go. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Danopoulos, Constantine P., and Kostas G. Messas. “Ethnonationalism, Security, and Conflict in the Balkans.” In Crises in the Balkans, Views from the Participants, edited by Constantine Danopoulos and Kostas Messas, 1–18. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. de Alcantara, Pedro. Indirect Procedures: A Musician’s Guide to the Alexander Technique. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Deligiorgi, Katerina. Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment. Albany, NY: State University of New York Presss, 2005. Dershowitz, Alan M. The Best Defense. New York: Random House, 1982. Devine, Philip E. Human Diversity and the Culture Wars: A Philosophical Perspective on Contemporary Cultural Conflict. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1996. Devlin, Patrick. The Enforcement of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Dewey, John. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: Macmillan, 1916. ———. Experience and Education. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Digeser, Peter. Our Politics, Our Selves? Liberalism, Identity, and Harm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Dobson, Andrew. Green Political Thought, 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2000. Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildavsky. Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Drachsler, Julius. Democracy and Assimilation: The Blending of Immigrant Heritages in America. New York: Macmillan, 1920.

208

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dreben, Burton. “On Rawls and Political Liberalism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman, 316–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Stuart E. Dreyfus. “The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science.” In Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, edited by Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber, 103–20. New York: Routledge, 1999. du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Jones, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage Publications, 1997. Dunn, H. B. High Level Wellness. Arlington, VA: R. W. Beatty, 1961. Durbin, Paul T., and Friedrich Rapp, eds. Philosophy and Technology. Boston: Lancaster, 1983. Dworkin, Dennis L.. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Dworkin, Ronald. Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. ———. A Matter of Principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. ———. “Foundations of Liberal Equality.” In Equal Freedom: Selected Tanner Lectures on Human Values, edited by Stephen L. Darwall, 190–306. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. ———. Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Dzur, Albert W. “Liberal Perfectionism and Democratic Participation.” Polity 30, no. 4 (1998): 667–90. Eco, Umberto. Postscript to The Name of the Rose. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Translated by J. Wilkinson. New York: Vintage, 1964. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “Constituents of a Theory of the Media.” New Left Review 64 (1970): 13–36. Eriksen, Erik Oddvar. “Deliberative supranationalism in the EU.” In Democracy in the European Union: Integration through Deliberation? edited by Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum, 42–64. London: Routledge, 2000. Etzioni, Amitai. The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda. New York: Crown Publishers, 1993. ———. The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Farías, Victor. Heidegger and Nazism. Edited by Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore. Translated by Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989. Federal Republic of Germany. Strafgesetzbuch. Bundesministerium der Justiz: www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/BJNR001270871.html (accessed January 8, 2008).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

209

Feenberg, Andrew. Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ———. “Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiques of Technology.” Inquiry 39 (1996): 45–70. ———. Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. “Summary Remarks on My Approach to the Philosophical Study of Technology,” http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/method1.html (accessed November 19, 2007). Fennell, Graham. “Local Lives—Distant Ties: Researching Community under Globalized Conditions.” In Living the Global City: Globalization as a Local Process, edited by John Eade, 90–109. London: Routledge, 1997. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. ———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Franzmeyer, Fritz. “The Consequences of the Uruguay Round for the OECD Countries.” In World Trade after the Uruguay Round: Prospects and Policy Options for the Twenty-first Century, edited by Harald Sander and András Inotai, 52–70. London: Routledge, 1996. Fraser, Nancy. “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘PostSocialist’ Age.” In Feminism and Politics, edited by Anne Phillips, 430–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation.” Chapter 1 in Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, edited by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth. Translated by Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke, 7–109. London: Verso, 2003. ———. “Distorted Beyond All Recognition: A Rejoinder to Axel Honneth.” Chapter 3 in Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, edited by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth. Translated by Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke, 198–236. London: Verso, 2003. Freeman, Samuel. “John Rawls—An Overview.” Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman, 1–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———. “Congruence and the Good of Justice.” In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman, 277–315. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Edited and translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961. Friedman, Susan S. “Beyond White and Other: Relationality and Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse.” Signs 21, no. 1 (1995): 1–49. Friedmann, Georges. The Anatomy of Work: Labor, Leisure and the Implications of Automation. Translated by Wyatt Rawson. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961.

210

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frings, Manfred S. Introduction to Ressentiment, by Max Scheler, translated by Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim, 1–21. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1994. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd, Revised Edition. Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2004. Gallie, Duncan. “The Quality of Employment: Perspectives and Problems.” In In Pursuit of the Quality of Life, edited by Avner Offer, 163–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Galston, William A. Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Garrahan, Philip, and Paul Stewart. “Lean and Mean: Work, Locality and Unions.” In Beyond Survival: Wage Labor in the Late Twentieth Century, edited by Cyrus Bina, Laurie Clements, and Chuck Davis, 161–75. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996. Gearon, Liam. Learning to Teach Citizenship in the Secondary School: A Companion to School Experience. New York: Routledge, 2003. Gee, James Paul. “The Narrativization of Experience in the Oral Style.” In Rewriting Literacy: Culture and the Discourse of the Other, edited by Candace Mitchell and Kathleen Weiler, 77–101. New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1991. Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. ———. “Moral Orientation and Moral Development.” In Women and Moral Theory, edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers, 19–33. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987. Glendon, Mary Ann. Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. New York: Free Press, 1991. Gombrich, E. H. “The Museum: Past, Present and Future.” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977): 449–70. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1976. Goody, Kenneth. “Arts Funding: Growth and Change Between 1963 and 1983.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 471 (1984): 145–57. Graber, Christoph Beat, Michael Girsberger, and Mira Nenova, eds. Free Trade versus Cultural Diversity: WTO Negotiations in the Field of Audiovisual Services. Zürich: Schulthess, 2004. Gray, Alexander. The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1946. Green, Adolph L., Jr. Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Gresham, F. M. “Conceptual Issues in the Assessment of Social Competence in Children.” In Children’s Social Behavior: Development, Assessment and Modification, edited by Philip S. Strain, Michael J. Guralnick, and Hill M. Walker, 143–79. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1986.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

211

Griffin, James. Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. ———. “Group Rights.” In Rights, Culture, and The Law: Themes from the Legal and Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz, edited by Lukas H. Meyer, Stanley L. Paulson, and Thomas W. Pogge, 161–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Guillén, Mauro F. “Is Globalization Civilizing, Destructive or Feeble? A Critique of Five Key Debates in the Social Science Literature.” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 235–60. ———. The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Gunn, Giles B. The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gurwitsch, Aron. “On Thematization.” Research in Phenomenology 4 (1974): 35–49. Gutmann, Amy. “The Disharmony of Democracy.” In Nomos XXV: The Democratic Community, edited by John W. Chapman and Ian Shapiro, 126–60. New York: New York University Press, 1993. ———. Democratic Education, reprinted with new preface and epilogue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Haas, Ernst B., Sally Roever, and Anna Schmidt. “Germany and the Norms of European Governance.” German Politics and Society 20, no. 2 (2002): 148–75. Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and Human Interests. Translated by Jeremy Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972. ———. “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method.” In Understanding and Social Inquiry, edited and translated by Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas McCarthy. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977. ———. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. ———. “Modernity—An Incomplete Project.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 3–15. Port Townsend, WA: Washington Bay Press, 1983. ———. “Wahrheitstheorien.” In Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 127–83. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. ———. The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. ———. “Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit.” In Kleine Politische Schriften V, 141–63. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985. ———. The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. ———. “Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective.” Translated by John McCumber. Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1989): 431– 56. ———. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. ———. Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994.

212

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann, 107–48. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ———. “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism.” Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3 (1995): 109–31. ———. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. ———. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Translated by Max Pensky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Hancock, Peter A., and Mark H. Chignell. “On Human Factors.” In Global Perspectives on the Ecology of Human-Machine Systems, edited by John Flach, Peter Hancock, Jeff Caird, and Kim Vicente, 1: 14–53. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. Hart, H. L. A. Law, Liberty and Morality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963. Hastedt, Heiner. Aufklärung und Technik: Grundprobleme einer Ethik der Technik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Translated with notes by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962. ———. The Question Concerning Technology. Translated by W. Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. ———. Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität: Rede, gehalten bei der feierlichen Übernahme des Rektorats der Universität Freiburg i.Br. am 27.5.1933. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983. ———. Nietzsche, vols. I–II. Translated by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1991. Hetata, Sherif. “Dollarization, Fragmentation, and God.” In The Cultures of Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 273–90. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. Hofstede, Geert H. Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980. ———. “Cultural Constraints in Management Theories.” Academy of Management Executive 7, no. 1 (1993): 81–94. Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by Joel Anderson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. ———. “Recognition and Moral Obligation.” Translated by John Farrell. Social Research 64, no.1 (1997): 16–35. ———. “Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser.” Chapter 2 in Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, edited by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth. Translated by Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke, 110–97. London: Verso, 2003. ———. “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder.” Chapter 4 in Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, edited by Nancy Fraser and

BIBLIOGRAPHY

213

Axel Honneth. Translated by Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke, 237–67. London: Verso, 2003. Hook, Sidney. Convictions. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990. Hoover, Kenneth R., James Marcia, and Kristen Parris. The Power of Identity: Politics in a New Key. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1997. Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Hurka, Thomas. “The Justification of National Partiality.” In The Morality of Nationalism, edited by Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan, 139–57. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Ingold, Tim. “Situating Action V: The History and Evolution of Bodily Skills.” Ecological Psychology 8 (1996): 171–82. ———. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000. International Labor Organization. “Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries.” (ILO No. 169), 72 ILO Official Bull. 59. Entered into force September 5, 1991. Geneva: International Labour Organization. http://www1.umn.edu/ humanrts/instree/r1citp.htm (accessed January 28, 2008). Jacobs, James B., and Kimberley Potter. Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. ———. “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.” In The Cultures of Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 54–77. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Jencks, Charles. What Is Post-Modernism? New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Jendrysik, Mark S. “The Modern Jeremiad: Bloom, Bennett, and Bork on American Decline.” Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 2 (2002): 361–83. Jensen, Richard. “The Culture Wars, 1965–1995: A Historian’s Map.” Journal of Social History 29 Supplement (1995): 17–37. Johnson, David W., and Roger T. Johnson. “Cooperative Learning and Achievement.” In Cooperative Learning: Theory and Research, edited by Shlomo Sharan, 23–38. New York: Praeger, 1990. Jonathan, Ruth. “Agency and Contingency in Moral Development and Education.” In Education in Morality, edited by J. Mark Halstead and Terence H. McLaughlin, 62–78. London: Routledge, 1999. Kanes, Clive. “Developing Numeracy.” In Developing Vocational Expertise: Principles and Issues in Vocational Education, edited by John Stevenson, 81–109. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2003. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner Press, 1951. ———. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987.

214

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kauffman, L. A. “The Anti-Politics of Identity.” Socialist Review 20, no. 1 (1990): 67–80. Kaufman, Alexander. Welfare in the Kantian State. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. “A Sufficientarian Approach? A Note.” In Capabilities Equality: Basic issues and Problems, edited by Alexander Kaufman, 71–6. London: Routledge, 2006. Kautz, Steven. Liberalism and Community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Kekes, John. The Morality of Pluralism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Kellner, Douglas. “Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention.” In Perspectives on Habermas, edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn, 259–88. Chicago: Open Court, 2000. Kelly, Erin. “Habermas on Moral Justification.” Social Theory and Practice 26, no. 2 (2000): 223–49. Kessler, Kirsten L. “Protecting Free Trade in Audiovisual Entertainment: A Proposal for Counteracting the European Union’s Trade Barriers to the U.S. Entertainment Industry’s Exports.” Law and Policy in International Business 26, no. 2 (1995): 563–611. Klamer, Arjo. The Value of Culture: On the Relationship Between Economics and Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996. Klemm, Gustav E. Allgemeine Culturgeschichte der Menschheit, 10 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1843–1852. Klemperer, Victor. LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen. Leipzig: Reclam, 1996. Kluckhohn, Florence Rockwood, and Fred L. Strodtbeck. Variations in Value Orientations. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1961. Klusmeyer, Douglas. “A ‘Guiding Culture’ for Immigrants? Integration and Diversity in Germany.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 519–32. Kly, Y. N., ed. A Popular Guide to Minority Rights. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 1995. Knapp, Mark L. Essentials of Nonverbal Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. Knoedler, Janet T. “Veblen and Technical Efficiency.” Journal of Economic Issues 31 (1997): 1011–26. Kolm, Serge-Christophe. “The Values of Freedom.” In Freedom in Economics: New Perspectives in Normative Analysis, edited by Marc Fleurbaey, Nicolas Gravel, JeanFrançois Laslier, and Alain Trannoy, 17–44. London: Routledge, 1998. Korsgaard, Christine M. “G.A. Cohen: Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods and Capabilities, Amartya Sen: Capability and Well-Being.” In The Quality of Life: A Study Prepared for the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) of the United Nations University, edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, 54–61. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Kressel, Neil J. Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror. New York: Plenum, 1996. Kroeber, Alfred L., and Clyde Kluckhohn, eds. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. New York: Random House, 1952. Küng, Hans. Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic. Translated by John Bowden. London: SCM Press, 1991. ———, and Karl-Josef Kuschel, eds. Erklärung zum Weltethos: Die Deklaration des Parlaments der Weltreligionen. München: Piper, 1993.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

215

Kukathas, Chandran. “Are There Any Cultural Rights?” Political Theory 20, no. 1 (1992): 105–39. ———. The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Kymlicka, Will. Liberalism, Community, and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. ———. Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. ———. “The Rights of Minority Cultures: Reply to Kukathas.” Political Theory 20, no. 1 (1992): 140–46. ———. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. ———. “Modernity and National Identity.” In Ethnic Challenges to the Modern Nation State, edited by Shlomo Ben-Ami, Yoav Peled, Alberto Spektorowski, 11–41. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000. ———. Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. “Liberal Theories of Multiculturalism.” In Rights, Culture, and The Law: Themes from the Legal and Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz, edited by Lukas H. Meyer, Stanley L. Paulson, and Thomas W. Pogge, 229–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Laden, Anthony Simon. Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Larson, James S. The Measurement of Health: Concepts and Indicators. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Lasson, Kenneth. “To Stimulate, Provoke, or Incite: Hate Speech and the First Amendment.” In Group Defamation and Freedom of Speech: The Relationship between Language and Violence, edited by Monroe H. Freedman and Eric M. Freedman, 267–306. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. Lecce, Steven. Against Perfectionism: Defending Liberal Neutrality. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Levinson, Meira. The Demands of Liberal Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Levin-Waldman, Oren M. Reconceiving Liberalism: Dilemmas of Contemporary Liberal Public Policy. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. Levy, Jacob. “Classifying Cultural Rights.” In NOMOS XXXIX: Ethnicity and Group Rights, edited by Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka, 22–66. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Lewinsohn-Zamir, Daphna. “Consumer Preferences, Citizen Preferences and the Provision of Public Goods.” Yale Law Journal 108, no. 2 (1998): 377–406. Librett, Jeffrey S. The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Liebergott, Jacqueline W., Paula Menyuk, and Martin C. Schultz. Early Language Development in Full-Term and Premature Infants. Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. Löwith, Karl. Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen: Ein Beitrag zur anthropologischen Grundlegung der ethischen Probleme. München: Drei Masken-Verlag, 1928. Lukes, Steven. Marxism and Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

216

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. London: Duckworth, 1985. Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Mander, Kai, and Alex Boston. “Wal-Mart: Global Retailer.” In The Case Against the Global Economy: And for a Turn Toward the Local, edited by Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, 335–43. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1996. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. ———. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Margalit, Avishai. The Decent Society. Translated by Naomi Goldblum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. ———, and Moshe Halbertal. “A Response to Amélie Oksenberg Rorty.” Social Research 62, no. 1 (1995): 171–73. ———, and Joseph Raz. “National Self-Determination.” Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 439–61. Reprinted in Joseph Raz. Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics, 125–45. Revised Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Edited by Frederick Engels. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: Modern Library, 1906. McAnany, Emile G., and Kenton T. Wilkinson, introduction to Mass Media and Free Trade: NAFTA and the Cultural Industries, edited by Emile G. McAnany and Kenton T. Wilkinson, 3–29. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. McCarthy, Thomas. “Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue.” Ethics 105 (1994): 44–63. McCullough, Lawrence B., and Stephen E. Wear. “Respect for Autonomy and Medical Paternalism Reconsidered.” Theoretical Medicine 6, no. 3 (1985): 295–308. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002. Merrell, Kenneth W., and Gretchen A. Gimpel. Social Skills of Children and Adolescents: Conceptualization, Assessment, Treatment. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Skill. http://www.m-w.com/dictionary (accessed January 21, 2008). Michaels, Mike. “The Invisible Car: The Cultural Purification of Road Rage.” In Car Cultures, edited by Daniel Miller, 58–80. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Michaels, Sarah. “Hearing the Connections in Children’s Oral and Written Discourse.” In Rewriting Literacy: Culture and the Discourse of the Other, edited by Candace Mitchell and Kathleen Weiler, 103–22. New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1991. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. New York: John B. Alden, 1885. Milton, Kay. Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion. London: Routledge, 2002. Mitchell, Basil. Law, Morality and Religion in a Secular Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Mitchell, Candace. Preface to Rewriting Literacy: Culture and the Discourse of the Other, edited by Candace Mitchell and Kathleen Weiler, xvii–xxvii. New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1991.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

217

Moore, Margaret. Foundations of Liberalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Morgan, Ann Lee. “Cultural Commitments: Rethinking Arts Funding Policy.” Afterimage 23, no. 4 (1996): 12–15. Mulhall, Stephen, and Adam Swift. “Rawls and Communitarianism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman, 460–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Naess, Arne. “The Shallow and the Deep: Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary.” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95–100. Naville, Pierre. Vers l’automatisme social? Problèmes du travail et de l’automation. Paris: Gallimard, 1963. Nelson, Richard Alan. A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Newman, Otto, and Richard de Zoysa. The Promise of the Third Way: Globalization and Social Justice. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967. ———. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Nussbaum, Martha C. “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism.” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (1992): 202–46. ———. “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.” Boston Review 19, no. 5 (1994): 3–16. ———. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. ———. Women and Human Development: The Capability Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Oehler, Klaus. “Pragmatismus und Religion.” Philotheos: International Journal for Philosophy and Theology 3 (2003): 14–30. O’Neill, John. The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics. London: Routledge, 1998. Okin, Susan. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Olsson, Sven E., and Dave Lewis. “Welfare Rules and Indigenous Rights: The Sami People and the Nordic Welfare States.” In Social Welfare with Indigenous Peoples, edited by John Dixon and Robert P. Scheurell, 141–85. New York: Routledge, 1995. Ozanne, Robert. A Century of Labor-Management Relations at McCormick and International Harvester. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Pankratz, David B. Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1993. Pape, Helmut. Die Unsichtbarkeit der Welt: eine visuelle Kritik neuzeitlicher Ontologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. Parry, Richard D. Plato’s Craft of Justice. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Passmore, John. The Philosophy of Teaching. London: Duckworth, 1980. Patterson, Orlando. “Taking Culture Seriously: A Framework and an Afro-American Illustration.” In Culture Matters, How Values Shape Human Progress, edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, 202–18. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Penner, J. E. The Idea of Property in Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

218

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Penrose, Edith T. The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Piaget, Jean. The Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Ballantine, 1937/1971. Plato. Republic. Translated with introduction and notes by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pogge, Thomas W. Realizing Rawls. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. ———. “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?” Philosophical Topics 30, no. 2 (2002): 167–228. Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966. ———. Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi. Edited by Marjorie Grene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. ———. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1997. Popkin, Samuel L., and Michael A. Dimock. “Political Knowledge and Citizen Competence.” In Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, edited by Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan, 117–46. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Provenzo, Eugene F., Jr. “Educational Technology.” In Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: Politics and the Rhetoric of School Reform, edited by David A. Gabbard, 297–302. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000. Quine, Willard Van Orman. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. Rae, John B. American Automobile Manufacturers: The First Forty Years. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1959. Ramsey, Maureen. What’s Wrong with Liberalism? A Radical Critique of Liberal Political Philosophy. New York: Continuum, 1994. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. ———. “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980.” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (1980): 515–72. ———. “The Basic Liberties and Their Priority.” In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, III, edited by Sterling M. McMurrin, 1–87. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982. ———. “Reply to Habermas.” Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3 (1995): 132–80. ———. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. ———.“The Idea of Public Reason Revisited.” The University of Chicago Law Review 64, no. 3 (1997): 765–807. Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. ———. Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics. Revised Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Rescher, Nicholas. Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Resnick, Daniel P., and Lauren B. Resnick. “The Nature of Literacy: An Historical Exploration.” Harvard Educational Review 47, no. 3 (1977): 370–85. Richards, David A. J. Free Speech and the Politics of Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

219

Richardson, Henry S. Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Ringen, Stein. Citizens, Families, and Reform. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Roberts, Kenneth. Youth and Employment in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Robinson, Fiona. Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory and International Relations. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. Rodrik, Dani. Has Globalization Gone Too Far? Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1997. Rogoff, Barbara. Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. “Children’s Guided Participation and Participatory Appropriation in Sociocultural Activity.” In Development in Context: Acting and Thinking in Specific Environments, edited by Robert H. Wozniak and Kurt W. Fischer, 121–53. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993. ———. The Cultural Nature of Human Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Rosenberg, Bernard. The Values of Veblen: A Critical Appraisal. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1956. Ross, Robert J. S., and Kent C. Trachte. Global Capitalism: The New Leviathan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Samuelson, Paul A. “A Note on the Pure Theory of Consumer’s Behaviour.” Economica 5 (1938): 61–71. ———. Foundations of Economic Analysis. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1947. Sandel, Michael J. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. ———. “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self.” Political Theory 12, no. 1 (1984): 81–96. ———. Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated with an introduction by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1958. ———. “Portrait of the Antisemite.” In Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, edited by Walter Kaufmann, 329–45. New York: Meridian, 1975. Sautet, Frédéric E. An Entrepreneurial Theory of the Firm. London: Routledge, 2000. Scanlon, Thomas M. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ———. “Rawls on Justification.” In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman, 139–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Scatamburlo, Valerie L. Soldiers of Misfortune: The New Right’s Culture War and the Politics of Political Correctness. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Scheler, Max. Ressentiment. Translated by Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim, with an introduction by Manfred S. Frings. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1994.

220

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters. Edited and translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Searle, Jean. “Developing Literacy.” In Developing Vocational Expertise: Principles and Issues in Vocational Education, edited by John Stevenson, 51–80. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2003. Sen, Amartya. “Utilitarianism and Welfarism.” Journal of Philosophy 76, no. 9 (1979): 463–88. ———. “Equality of What?” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 1, edited by Sterling M. McMurrin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ———. Inequality Reexamined. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. ———. “Capability and Well-Being.” In The Quality of Life: A Study Prepared for the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) of the United Nations University, edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, 30–53. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. ———. Commodities and Capabilities. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Shaw, Martin. Introduction to Politics and Globalisation: Knowledge, Ethics, and Agency, edited by Martin Shaw, 1–6. London: Routledge, 1999. Shenhav, Yehouda. Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Shklar, Judith N. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Sibley, W. M. “The Rational versus the Reasonable.” Philosophical Review 62, no. 4 (1953): 554-60. Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Smith, Anthony D. “The Ethnic Sources of Nationalism.” In Ethnic Conflict and International Security, edited by Michael E. Brown, 27–42. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Smith, Bradley R. “The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate.” In Documents of American Prejudice: An Anthology of Writings on Race from Thomas Jefferson to David Duke, edited by S. T. Joshi, 415–22. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Smith, Howard L. “Literacy and Instruction in African American Communities: Shall We Overcome?” In Sociocultural Contexts of Language and Literacy, edited by Bertha Pérez, 189–222. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998. Snyder, C. R. Coping: The Psychology of What Works. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Soltan, Karol Edward. “Civic Competence, Democracy, and the Good Society.” Introduction to Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, edited by Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan, 1–13. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Spriggs, Merle. Autonomy and Patients’ Decisions. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Steiglitz, Edward J. The Second Forty Years. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1952.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

221

Stein, Eric. “History Against Free Speech: The New German Law against the ‘Auschwitz’—and Other—‘Lies’.” Michigan Law Review 85, no. 2 (1986): 277–324. Steiner, David. “Searching for Educational Coherence in a Democratic State.” In Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, edited by Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan, 225–57. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Stopford, John. “Structuralism, Semiotics, and Musicology.” British Journal of Aesthetics 24, no. 2 (1984): 129–37. ———. “Transcendental Arguments and the Theory of Signs.” In Gedankenzeichen: Festschrift für Klaus Oehler zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Regina Claussen and Roland Daube-Schackat, 313–19. Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1988. ———. “The Death of the Author (as Producer).” Philosophy and Rhetoric 23, no. 3 (1990): 184–91. ———. “Frege, Heidegger and Kant’s Two Theses on Existence.” In Zeit und Zeichen, edited by Tilman Borsche, Johann Kreuzer, Helmut Pape, and Günter Wohlfart, 79–88. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1993. ———. “Culture and Political Theory.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly, 4: 16–19. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. “Peirce, Habermas, Rawls, and the Democracy of Signs.” In Pragmata: Festschrift für Klaus Oehler zum 80. Geburtstag, edited by Kai-Michael Hingst and Maria Liatsi, 178–86. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2008. Straubhaar, Joseph. “Choosing National TV: Cultural Capital, Language, and Cultural Proximity in Brazil.” In The Impact of International Television: A Paradigm Shift, edited by Michael G. Elasmar, 77–110. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. Street, Brian V. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Sunstein, Cass R. Free Markets and Social Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Tamir, Yael (Yuli). “Against Collective Rights.” In Rights, Culture, and the Law: Themes from the Legal and Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz, edited by Lukas H. Meyer, Stanley L. Paulson, and Thomas W. Pogge, 183–204. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Taylor, Charles. Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Philosophical Papers 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ———. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. ———. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann, 25–73. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ———. “Two Theories of Modernity.” Hastings Center Report 25, no. 2 (1995): 24–33. ———. “Nationalism and Modernity.” In The Morality of Nationalism, edited by Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan, 31–55. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1917. Teitel, Ruti G. Transitional Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Thi Dieu, Nguyen. “The State versus Indigenous Peoples: The Impact of Hydraulic Projects on Indigenous Peoples of Asia.” Journal of World History 7, no. 1 (1996): 101–30.

222

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thompson, Becky. “Subverting Racism from Within: Linking White Identity to Activism.” In Becoming and Unbecoming White: Owning and Disowning a Racial Identity, edited by Christine Clark and James O’Donnell, 64–77. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999. Thornberry, Patrick. Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Tibi, Bassam. Europa ohne Identität? Die Krise der multikulturellen Gesellschaft. München: Bertelsmann, 1998. Triandis, Harry C. The Analysis of Subjective Culture. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1972. ———. “Cross-Cultural Studies of Individualism and Collectivism.” In Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1989, edited by J. Berman, 41–133. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. ———. “The Psychological Measurement of Cultural Syndromes.” American Psychologist 51 (1996): 407–15. Twitchell, James B. Lead Us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Tylor, E. B. Primitive Culture, Vol. 1. Reprinted from the 5th edition [1913] as The Origins of Culture. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958. UNESCO. World Conference on Cultural Policies: Final Report. Paris: UNESCO, 1982. UNESCO Institute for Statistics. International Flows of Selected Cultural Goods and Services, 1994–2003: Defining and Capturing the Flows of Gobal Cultural Trade. Montreal: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2005. United Nations. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). U.N.G.A. Resolution 217A (III). Entered into force December 10, 1948. Geneva: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1948. www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm (accessed January 8, 2008). ———. International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). U.N.G.A. Resolution 2200A (XXI). December 16, 1966. Entered into force January 3, 1976. Geneva: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. http://www .unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/a_cescr.htm (accessed January 8, 2008). ———. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). U.N.G.A. Resolution 2200A (XXI). December 16, 1966. Entered into force March 23, 1976. Geneva: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1966. www2.ohchr .org/english/law/ccpr.htm (accessed January 15, 2008). Veblen, Thorstein. The Instinct of Workmanship: And the State of the Industrial Arts. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1922. Vogel, Lawrence. The Fragile “We”: Ethical Implications of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994. Vygotsky, L. S. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Edited by Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Waldron, Jeremy. “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative.” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25, no. 3 (1992): 751–93.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

223

———. Law and Disagreement. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. ———. “Teaching Cosmopolitan Right.” In Citizenship and Education in LiberalDemocratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities, edited by Walter Feinberg and Kevin McDonough, 23–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Walker, Samuel. Hate Speech. The History of an American Controversy. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. ———. The Rights Revolution: Rights and Community in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Walkerdine, Valerie. The Mastery of Reason: Cognitive Development and the Production of Rationality. London: Routledge, 1988. Walzer, Michael. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Wang, Jianglong. “Knowing the True Face of a Mountain: Understanding Communication and Cultural Competence.” In Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, unit 16, chapter 3, edited by Walter J. Lonner, Dale L. Dinnel, Sue A. Hayes, and David N. Sattler. Bellingham, WA: Western Washington University, Center for Cross-Cultural Research, 2002. www.wwu.edu/~culture/Wang.htm (accessed December 13, 2007). Webster-Stratton, Carolyn, and Deborah Woolley Lindsay. “Social Competence and Conduct Problems in Young Children: Issues in Assessment.” Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 28, no. 1 (1999): 25–93. Weithman, Paul J. Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Wellmer, Albrecht. Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne: Vernunftkritik nach Adorno. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985. Werther, Guntram F. A. Self-Determination in Western Democracies: Aboriginal Politics in a Comparative Perspective. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. Wilkinson, Iain. Anxiety in a Risk Society. New York: Routledge, 2001. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780–1850. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958. ———. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961. Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” In Technology and Politics, edited by Michael E. Kraft and Norman J. Vig, 33–53. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988. Wolff, Robert Paul. Understanding Rawls: A Reconstruction and Critique of a Theory of Justice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Wolin, Richard. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Woods, Ngaire. “Order, Globalization, and Inequality in World Politics.” In Inequality, Globalization and World Politics, edited by Andrew Hurrell and Ngaire Woods, 8–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Woodward, Susan L. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995. Wundt, Wilhelm. Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte. Leipzig: Kröner, 1920.

224

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Yellow Bird, Michael. “What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples’ Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels.” American Indian Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1999): 1–21. Young, Iris Marion. “Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory.” New Left Review 222 (1997): 147–60. ———. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Index

AAMT. See Australian Association Of Mathematics Teachers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) law, 73 abstract endangerment, 70, 86n84 acquis communautaire, 9 adaptive self, 148 Adorno, Theodor W., 12n17, 50n79 advocacy/incitement distinction. See freedom of expression affiliation, 144, 155–56, 168n102, 178; as a central capability, 155–56 affirmative strategies, 71 Albrow, Martin, 14n44 Alexander, F. M., 172n169 Alkire, Sabina, 171n159 Anaya, S. James, 87n95, 87n102 Anderson, Elizabeth, 48n40 anxiety, 134, 152–53 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 10n3, 11n12, 13n24, 30, 111n37 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 22 Aristotelian principle (Rawls), 29 Aristotle, 2, 22, 134, 143, 161n4, 192 Arneson, Richard, 138. Arnold, Matthew, 109n2 assimilation (cultural), 4, 12n23, 20, 76 assimilationism. See assimilation (cultural)

attachment, cultural, 27, 78–79 ATSI Law. See Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander law Auschwitz lie, 69, 86n83 Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers (AAMT), 199n38 autonomization, 119, 120–21, 123, 129, 163n22, 197 autonomy, xi,1, 23–4, 28, 30–32, 39, 196; objective cultural conditions of, 40–41; political, xi, 35, 43–45, 48n38, 65; private, 24, 34, 37, 43, 45; public, 34, 37, 43, 44, 102; and recognition, 58–59, 65; and social interdependence, 98; subjective cultural conditions of, xi, 41–45, 196, 160n1. See also patient autonomy availability of goods, xiii, 116, 123, 141–42, 144–45, 147; Weithman on, 45, 55n145 Baynes, Kenneth, 51nn85–86 Bentham, Jeremy, 191, 200nn53–54 Berges, Sandrine, 169n123 Berlin, Isaiah, 38 bivalent collectivities, 64, 83n44 Blake, Nigel, 113n85 Bloom, Harold, 109n5

225

226

INDEX

bodily health. See health bodily integrity, 149-50, 168n102, 178, 183 Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang, 10n3 Bohman, James, 113n87, 169n122 Borden, George A., 54n133 Borgmann, Albert, 120, 123–24, 164n41 Bourdieu, Pierre, 160n3 Braunstein, Elissa, 14n43, 15n50 Brennan, Frank, 87n98, 87n102 burdens of judgment, xii, 38, 47n21, 99–100, 104, 107, 109 Burns, Rob, 11n13 Callan, Eamonn, 100, 102, 104–5, 113n88 Camus, Albert, 84n62 canon, Western. See education capability, xiii, 133–41, 143–44 146–48, 167n96; and conversion inequality, 136, 137; and desire, 143; and skill, xiii, 132–33, 140, 142, 146–47, 175, 177–79; and theory of the firm, 195, 201n61; and truly human functioning, 134, 137, 139, 141, 143, 146, 148, 156, 175, 177–78 capability-constrained resourcism, xiv, 141–42, 146, 193; contrasted with perspectival dualism, 142; and the usability of resources, 146 capability principle, 134, 135, 139, 141, 142, 144, 168n108; and skill principle, 177–78 capacities, open and closed, 188–89 care, 60, 64, 142, 161n4; for others, 107, 156; for the natural world, 158; and the nonrepresentable skills, 178–79; and skill, 121–22, 149, 156, 158, 176, 187, 190–91 Carpenter, Stanley R., 164n44 central capabilities, xiii, xiv, 133–34; as criteria of moral salience, 140; as functions of the skillful self, 146–48; measurability of, 136; multiplerealizability of, 136, 144; Nussbaum’s

list of, 168n102; and perfectionism, 135–36, 146; and usability, 144–46 Chamberlain, John, 162n10 Chandler, Alfred D., 201n61 Chignell, Mark H., 174n194 choice: and capability, 135–136, 138, 143–44; and the cultural conditions of autonomy, 43–44; culture as a context of, x–xi, 25–26, 28–29, 39, 40–41, 144; and desire, 143–44; Kant on the role of culture in, 144; and skill, 147, 150, 154, 159, 178–179 182, 192; and technology, 124–126, 129–30, 196. See also rational choice Christman, John, 17 citizenship: 43, 99, 103, 158–59, 177–78, 189; and citizen competence, 158; conditions of realized, 44–45, 65; and education, 99–100, 102–4; and political culture, 43. See also world citizenship civic humanism, 37, 39, 196 civic virtue, 44, 101 coercion, 23, 33, 62, 119, 183–84, 195 Cohen, G. A. 136, 169n121 collectivism, cultural, 98, 111n35, 144, 171n154 colonization of the lifeworld, x, 9, 32, 50n76. See also lifeworld communication, 6, 32, 76, 96, 102, 105, 148; nonverbal, 94, 95, 148; and skill, 95, 105, 115, 116, 119, 151, 155, 176 communications media and technologies, 8, 14n43, 49n45, 73, 77, 119, 151, 191. See also media, mass communicative action, x, xiv, 32, 33, 37, 38, 50n79, 107 communicative power, 33 communicative rationality, x, 33–34, 36, 37, 51n82m, 52n109, 131–32, 196 communitarianism, ix–x, 1, 17–20, 26–28, 71; and autonomy, 28–31; and culture, ix, 17, 25–26, 28–29, 31, 39,

INDEX 43; and justice, 20–21; and perfectionism, 23; pluralistic, 20 consensus 20, 107–8; communicative, 33–34; and dialog, 108–9; overlapping, 38, 99, 100; public political, 37 consumerism ix, 1, 6, 118 control over one’s environment as a central capability: material, 159–60; political: 158–69 conversion inequality, 136–37, 140 Copp, David, 88n114 core proficiencies. See proficiencies corporations, multinational, 8, 15n50, 194–95 critical social theory, x, 3, 32, 36–37, 38, 125 critical thinking 97–98, 106, 186–87 Critique of Judgment (Kant), xi, 144 cultural background, 28–29, 40 cultural bias, 95–96 cultural competence, xi–xii, 42–3, 79–80, 94–97, 108; basic, xi, 45 cultural difference, xii, 1, 3, 7, 19–20, 60, 67, 93–97, 105, 108, 190, 196 cultural diversity, 1, 3, 7, 10, 25, 38; and access to culture, 78, 80; and cultural competence, 80; and general education, 93–97, 98; and the original position, 63; and political consensus, 107–8; and skill, 189–90; and technological development, 124 cultural integrity, 33, 35, 72–74, 86n94 cultural knowledge, 25, 80. See also cultural competence cultural membership, 25, 40–41, 76, 79 cultural participation, ix, xii, 1, 3–5, 7–10, 17, 25, 76, 179 cultural policy, ix, 2, 4–5, 13n30, 24 cultural recognition, 9, 60, cultural rights. See rights, cultural cultural structure(s), xii, 40–1, 75–8, 80, 88n117 cultural studies, 2, 11n13 cultural trade, 9–10

227

“cultural turn,” 7, 80n1 culture, ix–xiv, 1–10, 17–19; as a context of choice, xi, 26, 28–29, 39, 76–79, 144, 199; definition of, 2, 11n10, 11n12; etymology of, 2; and identity, 57, 60–62; mass, 3, 6, 17; as a primary good, 24–25; as a public good, 24; and recognition, 57, 60; and redistribution, 63–65; and skill, xi–xiv, 4, 25, 39, 41, 44, 79–80, 94, 122, 144, 178–79; and technology, xiv, 123, 124, 126, 127, 130, 132 culture of accessibility, 5, 7 culture of hatred, 66–67, 71 culture industry, 2, 3, 6 culture of skill, xi, 53n121, 127, 132, 144, 177. See also Kant, Immanuel cultures, minority, 9, 40–41, 76–77, 78 Davis, Jonathan, 16n58 de Alcantara, Pedro, 172n170 decontextualization, 119–20, 123, 163n22, 195, 197 dehumanization, 121–23, 197 deliberation, 28–29, 78, 192; and deliberative rationality, 28–29, 49n58; public, 34, 72, 132; as a skill, 151, 154, 161n7, 176 Dershowitz, Alan M., 85n78 desire, 2, 5, 25, 28, 30, 33, 48n40, 49n60, 50n61, 191–92; and capability 143–44; and individuality, 179, 182–83; and skill, 147–48. See also preference deskilling, xiv, 115, 117–19, 130–31, 145, 147–49, 162n9, 177, 184; Marx on, 118–19; and upskilling, 122–23. See also, autonomization; decontextualization; dehumanization; network of skills device paradigm, 123, 164n41 Dewey, John, 43, 116, 179–82, 195 dialog, 35, 58, 61, 72, 98, 100, 104–9, 153, 176, 196; multicultural, 105, 108

228

INDEX

difference principle, 23, 25, 138, discourse: culture of, 37; in educational contexts, 96, 98, 107 ; of experts, 32–33, 35; ideal, 33, 34, 196; and political justification, 35–37; public, 33, 35, 36; and technology, 39, 132. See also Habermas, Jürgen disrespect, 59, 121 diversity, cultural. See cultural diversity Dobson, Andrew, 174n196 dominant culture, 4, 13n24, 94, 105 Dreben, Burton, 53n112 Dreyfus, Hubert L., 54n130, 161n5, 161n7 Dreyfus, Stuart E., 54n130, 161n5 Dworkin, Ronald, x, 40, 41, 46n12, 75–76, 168n110 ecological theory, 157, 160n3 education, xii; and capability, 133–35, 181; and core proficiencies, 185–87; and cultural participation, 25; democratic, 159; Dewey on, 179–80; liberal, 98–109, 189; and the nonrepresentable skills, 181, 184–90; and the Pestalozzian method, 106; and skill, 180–82, 185, 190. See also proficiencies education, environmental, 158 education, multicultural, xii, 97, 105, 190–91; and burdens of judgment, 99, 100, 103, 104, 107; and critical thinking, 97, 106, 187; and cultural bias, 95–96; and cultural competence, 94–96; and cultural sensitivity training, xii, 67, 96; and dialog, 98, 100, 104–9; and educational models of the public sphere, 100–2; and local knowledge, 99, 189–90; and reasonableness, 98, 99, 100, 102–8; and the Western canon, 91–94. See also cultural diversity; discourse; perfectionism

emotion, 117, 121, 134, 152–53, 168n102, 187. See also anxiety; ressentiment encompassing groups, 74 enlightenment, ideology of, 105 enterprise culture, 13n31, 122, 164n37 Epstein, Gerald, 14n43, 15n50 equalitarianism, 138, 170n130 expert cultures, x, 32–33, 35–36, 178 fair equality of opportunity, 23, 25, 94 fairness, 21, 35–36, 62–63, 75, 99, 137, 140, 141 family, 98, 117, 133, 135, 139, 142 Federal Arts Projects (U.S.), 4 Feenberg, Andrew, xiv, 39, 119–21, 124–25, 127–32 female identity, conceptions of 60–61 “fighting words” doctrine. See freedom of expression First Amendment (U.S. Constitution), 68, 70, 85n75 Foucault, Michel, 92, 172n172 Fourier, Charles, 127 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 82n28 Fraser, Nancy, xii, 7, 17, 64, 65, 71, 72, 80n1, 141, 142, freedom of expression, 25, 74, 145; and advocacy/incitement distinction, 68–69; and “fighting words” doctrine, 68–69, 85n78; and hate speech 68, 107; Mill on, 68–69; and social exclusion, 71 Freeman, Samuel, 49n58 Freud, Sigmund, 163n21 Frings, Manfred S., 84n67 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 106 Gee, James Paul, 110nn22–23 Gilligan, Carol, 82n27 Ginzburg, Moisei, 162n16 globalization, ix, 2, 3, 7–10, 194; and cultural trade, 9–10; and the “cultural turn,” 7; dimensions of, 7, 14n43; and global principles of morality, 190

INDEX Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 4 Gombrich, E. H., 92 goodness as rationality, 29–31 goods: cultural, 5, 9, 24–25; community, 74–75; primary social, 21, 22, 23, 24–25, 36, 136, 144, 168n110; public, 24, 48n40, 139, 141; usability and availability of, xiii, 45, 139, 141, 144, 145, 193 Goodman, Nelson, 26, 49n52 Green, Adolph L., 162n13 Griffin, James, 78 Gropius, Walter, 162n15 group identities, 61, 64 guided participation, 181 guiding culture (Leitkultur), 4, 13n25 Guillén, Mauro F., 162n15 Gutmann, Amy, 48n39 Habermas, Jürgen, x, xiv, 32–39, 58, 65, 107, 131, 172n173 Hancock, Peter A., 174n194 Hastedt, Heiner, 165n50 hate crime, 67, 84n69, 85n71 hate speech, 67–71, 85nn70–71, 85n79, 107. See also culture of hatred; Holocaust denial; ressentiment health, 124, 133, 135, 145, 148–149, 168n102, 177–78, 187; public, 24, 140 health care, xiii, 140, 141, 145, 148, 149, 172n167, 193 Hegel, G. W. F., 12n22, 174n206 Heidegger, Martin, 107, 108, 113n82, 125, 127, 161n4, 161n7, 166n69, 166n72; Rektoratsrede (inaugural address), 127 Hetata, Sherif, 15n48 high culture, ix, 1, 2, 5, 53n121 history, xiv, 4, 21, 30–31, 40, 101, 150, 153–54, 159, 176, 187; pseudohistory, 62; and usability, 131 Hitler, Adolf, 4 Hofstede, Geert H., 111n35 Holocaust denial, 69, 70, 86n81

229

Honneth, Axel, 36, 58, 59, 60, 64, 65, 80n1, 121, 127 Hook, Sidney, 109n3 human body, 149–50, 160n3 ICCPR. See International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ICESCR. See International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights ideal theory (Rawls), 38, 52n110 identity politics. See politics of identity ILO. See International Labor Organization imagination, 49n58, 126, 134, 142, 150–52, 155, 168n102, 178, 188 immanence/transcendence distinction, 58 indigenous peoples, xii, 7, 57, 72–74, 78, 86n94 individualism (liberal), x, 1, 58, 105, 178; and the capability approach (Nussbaum), 143; contrasted with collectivism, 98,111n35; and positive interdependence, 98; and Rawls, 23, 49n54, 63 individuality, xii–xiii, 1, 23, 43, 172n174, 195–96; Mill on, 18, 182–83, 172n174, 200n54; and nonrepresentable skills, 179; and skill, xiv, 179 Ingold, Tim, 120, 160n3, 162n15, 163n28, 163n30, 171n159 instrumentalization, primary and secondary, 128–30, 163n22, 166n80 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 73–74 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), 12n20, 87n100 International Labor Organization (ILO): Convention 169 of, 73, 86n94 Jameson, Fredric, 13n31, 15n54, 15n56 Johnson, David W., 111n36 Johnson, Roger T., 111n36 Jonathan, Ruth, 13n31, 164n37

230

INDEX

juridification, 32, 50n76 justice, social, x, xii, 19–28, 30–31 34–36, 38, 46n12, 48n29, 75, 103–4, 159, 192, 195; and capability, 133, 137–42, 169n123; global principles of, 190; and participatory parity, xii, 64–65, 71–72; and pluralistic communitarianism, ix, 20; Rawls’s “political” conception of, 38, 47n21, 99–100; and Rawls’s principles of social justice, 23–24, 34, 35, 63, 159; and recognition, xii, 58, 61–65; and the skill principle, 193. See also reasonableness Kanes, Clive, 199nn37–39 Kant, Immanuel, 24, 33, 47n21, 99, 126–27, 134, 139–40, 161n5; on the culture of skill, xi, 53n121, 127, 144; on reflective judgment, 140 Kaufman, Alexander, 139, 140, 161n5, 170n131, 172n164 Klemm, Gustav, 11n12 Kluckhohn, Florence Rockwood, 111n35 Klusmeyer, Douglas, 13n27 Kymlicka, Will, 37, 40–41, 53n119, 54n124, 75–78, 88n117, 88n125, 89n138 labor, 117–19, 120, 122–23, 149, 160; child, 130, 196; division of, 64, 118, 128, 162n15; Marcuse on, 126–27, 165n63; and property, 160 Laden, Anthony Simon, 12n23, 112n50 Larson, James, 172n165 Lasson, Kenneth, 85n75 “learning by doing,” 179 Lebenswelt. See lifeworld Le Corbusier, 118, 162n15 Leitkultur. See guiding culture Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 119 Levinson, Meira, 101 liberal culturalism, 53n119 liberal egalitarianism, 62–63, 138 liberal theory of culture, ix–xi, 39, 43

liberalism, ix–x, 1, 3, 10n3, 27, 32, 44, 57, 62, 98, 168n110; comprehensive, 24, 99, 157; deliberative, 112n50; political, 38, 75, 99, 136, 157 liberties: civil, 67, 145; equal basic, 22, 23, 25, 27, 38, 99, 141, 159; political, 43, 134–35, 145. See also freedom of expression liberty, individual, 1, 20, 23, 36, 44, 68, 168n112, 184; Mill on, 68, 182–83; and nonrepresentable skills, 182; and pluralistic communitarianism, 20; Rawls’s principle of, 23; and social exclusion, 71, 99 Librett, Jeffrey S., 85n80 life, as a central capability, 148, 168n102 lifeworld (Lebenswelt), x, 32–34, 39, 50n76, 53n117, 131, 172n173 literacy, 96, 110n22, 135, 145, 185–86, 199n32 local knowledge, 92, 99, 158, 189, 200n48 machine technology, 117–22, 125–27, 131, 144–45, 163n28, 163n30, 197 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 50n62 Macquarrie, John, 113n82 MAI. See Multilateral Agreement on Investment Marcuse, Herbert, 125–27, 165n55, 165n63 Margalit, Avishai, 74, 88n105, 89n130 Marx, Karl, 118–19, 134, 143 McCarthy, Thomas, 52n89 media, mass, xiii, 6–7, 19, 12n17, 15n56, 16n58, 18, 119, 151 Mill, John Stuart, 24, 99, 189, 200nn53–54; on freedom of expression, 68–69, 107; on individuality 18, 172n174, 182–83, 198n26 Mitchell, Basil, 46n8 Mitchell, Candace, 110n22 modern management, techniques of, 118

INDEX modernity, cultural, x, 17, 33 moral development, 103–4 Mulhall, Stephen, 47n20, 49n54 multiculturalism, 4, 20, 54n124, 71 Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), 8, 15n50 multinational corporations. See corporations, multinational National Curriculum Handbook for Teachers (1999), 164n37 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 4, 13n30 Native Title Act (Australia), 73 natural world, xi, 40, 156–58, 176 nature. See natural world. NEA. See National Endowment for the Arts network of skills, 177, 190 Neurath, Otto, 31, 50n72 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22, 66, 83n60, 108, 198n25 numeracy, 186, 199n38 Nussbaum, Martha C. xiii, 98, 99, 133–39, 143–44, 146–48, 155, 167n96, 189, 191–92, OECD. See Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development On Liberty (Mill), 99 Organisation for Economic Co–operation and Development (OECD), 8 original position, the, x, 20–22, 23, 26–27, 34–35, 36, 37, 62–63, 99 ornamentation, 120 overlapping consensus. See consensus, overlapping Pankratz, David B., 11n10 participatory parity, xii, 64–65, 71, 72, 142 Passmore, John, 97–98, 188–89 patient autonomy, 149 penalty enhancement measures, 67 Penner, J. E., 174n205 Penrose, Edith T., 201n61

231

perception: and human–machine relation, 163n30; interpersonal, 155–56, 176 perfectionism, ix, x, xiii, 2, 4, 6, 9, 22–25, 27, 37, 38 44, 59, 76, 102, 132 ; and the capability approach, 133, 135–37, 146; democratic, 48n39; in general education, 91–93; and Mill’s view of liberty, 182–83; Rawls’s rejection of, 22–23; and skill, 175–77 person, political conception of, xiii, 29–30, 133, 142, 144, 160n1 perspectival dualism, 64, 141–42 plan of life (rational), 28, 29, 30, 77–78, 122, 133, 153–54, 182–184 Plato, 2, 4, 22, 93 play, 126–27, 134, 143, 151–52, 168n102 pluralism, x, 3, 4, 20, 94, 108; fact of, 1, 19, 37, 46n11; fact of reasonable, 47n25, 99 pluralistic communitarianism. See communitarianism, pluralistic Pogge, Thomas W. 47n27, 137–38, 139, 169n123, 169n128, 170nn129–30, 171n146 political culture, x–xi, 43–4, 63, 77; nonpublic (Rawls) 49n45; public, 25, 44 Political Liberalism (Rawls), 29, 99 political participation, 37, 43–44, 71, 77, 158–59, 177, 187, 196 political psychology, x, 147, 191–92 political theory, ix, xiii, 3, 36, 40, 41, 58, 191–92 politics of hate, 66. See also hate crime; hate speech politics of identity, 7, 37, 57, 60–62, 81nn8–9, 81n24, 84n62 politics of recognition, xii, 57–60 politics of respect, 62 politics of skill, xii–xiii, 179 popular culture, 5 positive interdependence, 98–99, 102, 143–44, 178, 195, 196 postmodernism, ix, 1, 5, 6–7, 31, 125

232

INDEX

poststructuralism, 92, 108 posture, 150 powers of moral personality, 22, 29, 168n110 practical reason, 126, 133, 142, 143, 153–53 practical relation-to-self, 59 preference, 11n16, 25, 28–29, 48n40, 50n61, 59, 75, 92, 133, 192–93; and cultural policy, 2–3, 5; and individuality, 182; and skill, 147–48 prejudice, 66, 93, 98, 105–7, 109 primary goods. See goods, primary social principle of each person’s capability (Nussbaum). See capability principle prioritarianism, 138, 170n130 private autonomy. See autonomy, private proceduralism, 36, 65, 83n57 proficiencies, 106, 184–88; core, 185–87 psychologism, 191–92 public reason, 34, 37–38, 65, 108 public space, 101, 141, 150, 159 purposive rationality, 37, 39, 196 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 50n72 Rae, John B., 166nn75–76 Ramsey, Maureen, 82n40 rational choice, 28–30, 63 Rawls, John, x, xii, xiii, 1, 20–21, 26–29, 37–38, 44, 45, 47n21, 47n24, 53n115, 62–63,65, 133, 134, 138, 140, 192; on autonomy 23–24; on culture, 24–25, 31, 40–41; and expert culture, 35–36; on liberal education, 99; on moral development, 103–4; on perfectionism, 22–23; as a proceduralist, 36, 83n57; on reasonableness, 99–100; as a resourcist, 21–22 Raz, Joseph, 24, 74 realized citizenship, 44, 45, 65 reasonableness, xii, 21, 35–38, 44, 63, 132, 137, 179, 191, 193, 197; and

critical thinking, 102–3, 105–6; and dialog, 105–9; and moral development, 103–5; and multicultural education, 97–100 recognition, xii, 6, 9, 57–65, 71, 72, 192; and capability-constrained resourcism, 141–42; and dialog, 106–8; of indigenous peoples, 73; and the politics of hate, 66–68; and skill, 121, 122, 156 redistribution versus recognition, 64 Rehg, William, 51n83 Rektoratsrede. See Heidegger, Martin relation to the natural world, as a central capability, 156–57 resourcism, 140–42, 145, 184; and capability approach, 135, 171n146; and Rawls as a resourcist, 21–22, 47n27. See also capability-constrained resourcism Rescher, Nicholas, 113n86 Resnick, Daniel P., 199n36 Resnick, Lauren B., 199n36 respect, 18–20, 190, 193, 196, 197; for other species and nature, 142; and recognition, 58–60, 62, 63; role in education of, 97, 101 responsibility, 18, 20, 65, 121, 149, 187, 191, 197 ressentiment, xii, 66–67, 69, 83n60, 84n62 Richards, David A., J. 84n68 Richardson, Henry S., 52n109, 169n122 rights, xii, xiii, 1, 20, 58, 60, 62, 65, 67, 99; as capabilities, 133–35; of corporations, 195; cultural, 3–4, 12nn20–21, 40–41, 73–74, 76, 87n100; group, 73–75; language, 73–74, 76; to property, 135, 159–60; “second-generation,” 3, 12n21; and skill, 158–60, 177 Robinson, Edward, 113n82 Rogoff, Barbara, 181 Ross, Robert J. S., 201n60

INDEX rules, skillful understanding of, 152, 154, 193, Sandel, Michael, 43, 50n61 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 66, 83n60, 84n61 Scanlon, Thomas, xvn10, Scatamburlo, Valerie L. 82n25 Scheler, Max, 83n60 Schiller, Friedrich, 127 scientific management, 117–18, 162n9 Searle, Jean, 199n32 self-esteem, 59, 148, self-realization, 58–59 self-respect, 59–60, 65, 74–75 133, 142, 160 Sen, Amartya, xiii, 133, 135, 138, 140 Sennett, Richard, 160n2, 172n167 senses, imagination, and thought (as central capabilities), 150–51 sensitivity training, xii, 67, 96 Shenhav, Yehouda, 162n9 skill, 30, 36–37, 39–42, 44–45, 79–80, 94–95, 97, 100, 106, 115–24; and capability, xiii, 143–60, 179, 184; and choice, 147, 154; and culture, xi, xiv, 4, 25, 39, 42, 53n121, 127, 132, 144, 177; and desire, 147, 148; and perfectionism, 175–77; and proficiencies, 184–87; and reasonableness, 100, 193, 197; and technology, 127–33 skillful activity: in contexts of purposes in use, 116–17, 120–21, 140, 147, 149–60, 183, 192; in human complexes, 117, 121–22, 134, 151–52, 190; in instrumental complexes, 116–17, 149, 152, 190, 194; in technological complexes, 128, 130–31, 132, 147, 179; transparency of, 95, 97, 115 skill principle, 177, 178, 184, 193, 196 skillful self, the, xiii–xiv, 45, 116, 118–22, 127–28, 132; central capabilities as functions of, 146,

233

148–60, 179, 191; as “operator,” 151, 152, 159; and political participation, 159; and political institutions, 192–93; tendency of to overlook nature, 156–57 skills: basic, xiv, 123, 185–86; key, 122, 123; linguistic, 185; mathematical, 142, 186; nonrepresentable, xiv, 177–79, 181–82, 184–91, 194, 196; of political participation, 159, 177, 187; productive, 175, 176, 177; relational, 176, 177, 178; representable, 177; secondary, 176–77 social cooperation, 36–37, 138, 193–94, 196 societal culture, 41, 89n138 Socrates, 83n60 soulcraft, 44 Stanford University, 85n79, 93 status subordination, 64 Strodtbeck, Fred L., 111n35 struggle for recognition, 57–58, 62 subjective welfarism, 147, 148, 171n161, 184, 191, 192 subversive advocacy, 70 sufficientarianism, 138, 170nn130–131 Sunstein, Cass, 147, 171n161 Swift, Adam, 47n20, 49n54 Tamir, Yael (Yuri), 87n104 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 117, 118, 162n8; Taylorian management, 123 Taylor, Charles, 25, 40, 58, technical code, xiv, 130, 131, 196 techno-science, 125, 126 technological rationality, 130, 131 technological situation, 129, 131, 145, 196 technology, xiv, 8, 14, 39, 150, 157, 183, 194; as a cultural force, xiv, 123–24; and the device paradigm, 123–24; Heidegger on, 125, 127; instrumental theory of, 124–25; Marcuse on 125–27; normative conditions of

234

INDEX

critique of, 132; responsibility for, 197; and scientific management, 117–19; substantive theory of, 125, 127; and technological complexes, 128, 130, 131, 132, 147, 179; usability of, 130–31, 145 technology assessment, 124–25 thematization, 161n7 A Theory of Justice (Rawls), 25 Tibi, Bassam 13n25 topic-associating and topic-centered narrative styles, 96 Trachte, Kent C., 201n60 transformative strategies, 71–72 Triandis, Harry C., 53n120 Tylor E. B., 11n12

usability, xiii, 45, 130–31, 139, 141, 144–46, 159, 176, 193–94; balance of, 131; and utility, xiii, 144, 193 utilitarianism, 23, 191 veil of ignorance, 20, 22, 35, 63 Vygotsky, L. S., 181 Waldron, Jeremy, 89n137, 99 Weithman, Paul J., 44, 45, 55n145 welfare economics, 3, 124, 133 world citizenship, 99, 189 World Trade Organization (WTO), 8 Woodward, Susan L., 82n35 WTO. See World Trade Organization Young, Iris Marion, 64

UDHR. See Universal Declaration of Human Rights Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 3, 12n20

zone of proximal development, 181 Zweckrationalität. See purposive rationality

08_673_z3AA.qxd

1/29/09

6:28 AM

Page 235

About the Author

John Stopford was born and educated in England. He studied philosophy and psychology at Oxford University and at the University of Hamburg in Germany, where he was awarded his doctorate in philosophy in 1985 for a dissertation on art and inquiry. He has taught philosophy in the United States at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in Germany, where he has also worked in the music business and now lives. His publications include papers on semiotics and epistemology, politics and culture, and the philosophy of music.

235

08_673_z3AA.qxd

1/29/09

6:28 AM

Page 236