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- Title
Cosmopolitan Pluralism: Beyond the Cultural Turn.
- Authors
Lawson, Stephanie
- Abstract
The 'cultural turn' has had a profound influence across the humanities and social sciences in the last few decades, focusing on the extent to which specificity and particularity underpin what we can know, how we can know it, and how this affects our being-in-the world. It has been opposed, in particular, to universalist ideas, or at least those developed in European political and social thought. This has opened the way to a range of insights, from issues of pluralism and difference, both within political communities and between them, to the instability if not impossibility of foundations for knowledge. But because of the deep-seated opposition to virtually all forms of universalism implicit in the cultural turn, and which has therefore given it a strongly relativist dimension, it tends strongly to undermine cosmopolitan projects. This stems largely from the particular conceptualization of 'culture' that underpins projects associated with the cultural turn and which is derived mainly from the discipline of anthropology. Few studies embracing this 'cultural turn', however, have paid more than cursory attention to the culture concept itself, nor have its critics. This article suggests that conceptions of culture derived mainly from the discipline of anthropology have dominated overwhelmingly, while another important tradition of thought associated with the culture concept - namely the humanist tradition - has been either ignored or rejected. It argues further that we would do well to reconsider what humanist ideas can contribute to how 'culture' is both conceptualized and deployed in political thought and action, especially in countering the overparticularization of social and political phenomena that marks contemporary culturalist approaches and which have therefore tended to militate against cosmopolitan ideas. The article further suggests how we can shift from the strong relativist assumptions underpinning the cultural turn towards a conception of cosmopolitan pluralism that continues to value difference and particularity while remaining committed to a conception of humanity.
- Subjects
CULTURAL pluralism; COSMOPOLITANISM; HUMANITIES; SOCIAL sciences; UNIVERSALISTS; UNIVERSALISM (Political science)
- Publication
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2011, Vol 3, Issue 3, p27
- ISSN
1837-5391
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5130/ccs.v3i3.2288