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Patchwork Multiculturalism
1. Introduction
In today’s cities, it is not rare to see different religious communities live close to
one another. Often, at workplaces, people from competing ethnic groups cooperate
peacefully. Sometimes, in a context of pressing anxiety and extreme poverty, proximity,
reciprocity and transparency have activated lively example of multicultural organization.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case. In recent time, there is so much hype about the
failures of multicultural policies in European countries. Since the Satanic verses
controversy, the harsh debates about French bans on face veils, the remarkable results of
some xenophobic movements in the last European elections, the Charlie Hebdo tragedy
and, now, the phenomenon of radicalization inside and outside Europe, politicians and
theorists have casted doubts on the destiny and desirability of the politics of
multiculturalism.
These examples place interest on two aspects. First, the dual dimension of
multiculturalism. On the one hand, the politics of multiculturalism: measures involving
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cultural recognition and accommodation, economic redistribution, access to political
participation and jobs opportunities, affirmative actions, etc. On the other hand, the real
character of multiculturalism, namely, the set of ordinary exchanges through which
cooperation, assimilation and radicalization are performed.1 So not everything is up to
politics. Besides the domain of policy-making, scholars should look at the multi-coloured
realm of everyday interactions. 2 For instance, in some cases, a partial reach of the state
has encouraged the development of local and micro dimensional mechanisms of positive
mutual control. There, evidence shows that the prospect of future interactions supports
cooperation, trust and equal deliberation. Such a focus may help to emphasize
constructive forms of multicultural coexistence and, possibly, to develop a positive
philosophical argument against increasing scepticism and radicalization. Vis-à-vis the
great mistrust, I argue in this paper, a persuasive normative response to multiculturalism
in today’s cities needs to bring together the politics of multiculturalism and the social
level, where cooperation is a more common result than resentment and violence.3
Moreover, many prominent theorists have been debating on the relationship
between the notion of culture and the very idea of multiculturalism.4 Multiculturalism,
not considering the several conceptions of the term, is concerned with cases including
cultural diversity where cultures, religious and ethnic groups constitute the body of
society. A too ready acceptance of essentialist notions of groups, as have been debated
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for long, is not a satisfactory approach. It does not fully describe how people negotiate
affiliations in their everyday lives and the relational element of multicultural societies
(Carens, 2004), it may be gender biased (Okin, 1999), it opens to the application of
double-standards for evaluating internal practices of cultural groups (Galeotti, 2014) and
it is likely to overlook multiple belongings (Bhabha, 2004). Nevertheless, we cannot
dismiss culture from multiculturalism. Culture is also a crucial attribute of
multiculturalism, which entails internal contestation, historical elaboration, action-
guidance, structures of meaning and expectations. In this article, in turn, I turn the
attention from culture as a collectivistic notion to the individual as an appropriator of
object of disagreement in cultural terms, or not, according to the circumstances.
By putting together the two aspects, this article will argue that a focus on the social
level offers a frame in which the practical importance of the idea of culture is mediated
by reflecting on individuals as active participants in disputes of their concern. In this way,
multiculturalism is taken to both a national and contextual matter. On the first level, the
one of recognition, every individual who is member of a certain community, qua
autonomous being, must be in the position to appropriate objects of his or her concern.
And, this demands top-down policy action so that every member is in principle in the
same position to appropriate objects of disagreement. On the second level, the one of
toleration, people should be involved in the discussion about policies of their interest in
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a peer-to-peer relationship. This implies a shift to a vision of multiculturalism as a
contextually situated deliberative practice. Such a move, as I will argue in the paper, by
favouring alternative and decentralized political spaces, justifies policy makers to
disperse the asymmetric relation of power inherent in the dichotomy minority/majority at
the local level.
In this sense, the study of Shaftesbury’s ideas of amicable collisions and sensus
communis makes available an important normative apparatus for contemporary defences
of small scale discursive spaces. In a series of essays between 1708 and 1710, he
addresses questions of toleration (A Letter concerning Enthusiasm), discursive
interactions and civility in public (Sensus Communis) and self-reflection (Soliloquy).5 By
reading these texts in the light of contemporary disputes about deliberation, we find a
distinctive articulation of a politics of sociability, equality and freedom that emphasises
the relevance of public discourse and participation, but also the significance of discursive
exchanges to encourage a feeling of mutuality among participant.
Together, these elements will inform the argument of this article. Here, I advance
a deliberative model to deal with multiculturalism: patchwork multiculturalism. This
account consists in the construction of small scale consultative groups where people can
take part in decisions of their concern. There are three moves from usual responses to
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multiculturalism. First, I do not consider group or collective identities. The focus turns
towards individuals, who want to appropriate some discursive objects in the light of their
worldview. Second, I put together the sphere of recognition and toleration. This means to
say that recognition encompasses all those policies that put the individual in the position
to express his or her discursive power, while toleration is a collectively (and temporary)
constructed feeling among participants in a discussion in which their equal status is
granted. Third, I focus on the actual practice of multiculturalism, as it is experienced in
context. In this way, I shall provide a normative model to push people in the discussion
of issues of their concern. The constellations of diverse consultative groups, with
distinctive performative experience of toleration, and duties among participants,
constitutes patchwork multiculturalism, as a system where these spaces are tied together
by a politics of recognition that is directed to individuals qua autonomous persons, and in
which much of decision-making power is left to the local level. If in a patchwork multiple
pieces are kept together by a single creative idea; here, in turn, a policy that aims at
empowering the discursive power of all members is the common denominator across
different consultative groups.
The purpose of this paper, indeed, is eminently speculative. Following an
investigation of the disputes about the idea of culture in today’s political theory, in section
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3, I shall reconstruct Shaftesbury’s notion of amicable collisions and his conception of
sensus communis. In section 4, I shall examine his suggestion and translate them into the
language of contemporary political theory. This account, I suggest, places in question
asymmetric power distributions - which informs much contemporary debate on
multiculturalism – and elaborates a distinctive conception of the relationship between
recognition and toleration. In section 4, I shall construct deliberative spaces – consultative
groups, which find roots in Shaftesbury and constitute the core of patchwork
multiculturalism. Eventually, in section 5, I shall conclude.
2. Multiculturalism and the place of culture
Multiculturalism has long been identified with the protection of certain minority
rights from the claims of collective authority. In this tradition, the most powerful claim
for special rights comes from Will Kymlicka, who articulated his account of
multiculturalism in a series of works covering more than fifteen years. In Liberalism,
Community and Culture, he emphasizes the special importance of societal cultures to
personal agency and development (1989: 176). Cultural structures, as he says, are
contexts of choice ascribing specific forms of lives with exceptional meaning. Access to
a viable societal culture is therefore a necessary precondition for our ability to choose
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good lives for ourselves. In one sense, a life within the norms, attitudes, and values of a
particular cultural group might be a necessary condition for people ability to make
choices. That is, wisdom, practices and narratives intrinsic in a societal culture shape the
actions of its members, designing “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” (1995: 76). Moreover, societal cultures
encourage a sense of self-respect. Here, culture is to be observed as “a source of emotional
security and personal strengths” (1989: 175-6). Likewise, only coming into terms with
the significance of their social environment and through a comparison among different
ways of life, people make an autonomous and informed choice regarding their
membership in the group. For Kymlicka, “it’s only through having a rich and secure
cultural structure that people can become aware, in a vivid way, of the options available
to them, and intelligently examine their values” (1989: 169). These claims inform his
conception of minority rights as supporting the individual’s ability to select between
significant forms of life. Specifically, once we acknowledge the importance of societal
cultures for the individuals, we also attest the connection between the respect we give to
the cultural group and the individual’s self-esteem. “What matters, from a liberal point of
view”, he writes, “is that people have access to a societal culture which provides them
with meaningful options encompassing the range of human activities” (1995: 101).
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Something of what is at stake, Kymlicka writes, can be captured from looking at
how Western states have been persistently perpetrated severe injustices on cultural
minorities. Economic discrimination, forced assimilation and the denial of political rights
as well as linguistic barriers, politicization of identities, the accent on religious and ethnic
differences demonstrate majority groups’ efforts to prevent minorities from the access to
social institutions and from the full exercise of their rights (1995: 2). Minority groups,
thus, Kymlicka argues, “are caught in contradictory position, unable either to fully
participate in the mainstream of society or to sustain their own distinct societal culture”
(1995: 101). At this stage, taking that 1) cultures provide contexts of choices and enable
individual autonomy, and that 2) inequality in fully accessing cultural membership stems
from luck (roughly, embryos cannot decide where they will be born); self-government
rights help secure access to a societal culture as well as the flourishing of liberal
autonomy. While, “failure to recognize these rights will create new tragic cases of groups
which are denied the sort of cultural context of choice that supports individual autonomy”
(1995: 101). Thus, Kymlicka argues, “within a liberal egalitarian theory…which
emphasizes the importance of rectifying unchosen inequalities” (1995: 109), members of
minority groups, disadvantaged in terms of fully accessing to their peculiar culture,
should be entitled to forms of special protections (i.e. rights of self-government, public
funding for supporting cultural practices; religious or cultural exemptions from laws).
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Taken together, this argument seems to lie on an ambivalent appeal to the idea of
culture. On the one hand, as Markell puts it, he treats culture as an external – primary –
good to which we are or are not denied to have access. On the other hand, since culture
is a source of meaningful options, “the idea of a particular culture as one’s own suggests
– it has to suggest - not just that I possess my culture but that it possesses me” (Markell,
2003: 159). Moreover, another problem confronting Kymlicka’s solution is that a too
ready acceptance of culture matters has encouraged cultural stereotypes. It has, Anne
Phillips writes, “enabled critics of multiculturalism to represent it as more intrinsically
separatists” (Phillips, 2007: 21). For Kymlicka, indeed, “the desire of national minority
to survive as a culturally distinct society is not necessarily a desire for cultural plurality,
but simply for the right to maintain one’s membership in a distinct culture” (Kymlicka,
1995: 104). In this way, a focus on special rights as a way to preserve cultural borders
may accentuate closure and radicalization of differences.
At first glance this seems to be an inescapable controversy for theorists of
multiculturalism. Charles Taylor demands people to be recognized for who they are, as
fixed set of facts, actions, beliefs, which they have performed in the past and that have
special relevance in the present.6 Specifically, Charles Taylor marks the distinction
between honour and modern recognition on the passage from the idea of a group-based
identity to individualization, a kind of recognition that affirm my particular identity and
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my being different from others. Nevertheless, Taylor sees cultural identity as a
fundamental aspect of my individualized identity (Taylor, 1989: 27-9) up to the point that
his theory of recognition becomes very much a theory of cultural recognition (Taylor,
1994: 59-64). Individual identities, indeed, find roots in specific cultural identities that
give legitimacy to claims for more cultural sensitivity.7
Then, representation and political participation may be another element that may
exacerbate essentialisation. De facto, being the voice of a collective presupposes a
minimal regularity across people as well as unity and consensus.8 To this point, if the idea
of cultural group as a political entity leaves itself open to serious criticisms, but the
existence of such a thing as multiculturalism shows the significance of some peculiar
features on people’s lives and the need for someone to make those elements politically
relevant; what is to be done? The search for an account of multiculturalism that weights
specific attachments and that explains their negotiation in practice is what characterizes
this essay.9 This means to be sensitive to the breaking and rethinking of agreement across
affiliations, but also to accept a minimal communality among people identified by others
as co-members of a group. 10
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One point is of importance for this essay. The idea of culture is theoretically
ambiguous and highly contested, but it may be self-evident for someone who sees in a
certain behaviour the close presence of other people, or for someone that interprets actions
by analogy with an already present communal world. From a philosophical perspective,
both looking at subjective elaboration of cultural affiliation (if any) and focusing on
commonality, culture in practice seems to be the result of a dialectical interplay between
some individually elaborated collective features and other locally mediated structures that
define people’s position in a given social group. As the individual, indeed, rarely is an
individual as such, but rather she is often an individual among others. Equally, the
inescapable intersubjective character of human life does not strictly connect communality
with a fixed point of view. Because a practice takes place in an atmosphere of generality,
I cannot overlook that my behaviour responds to a given situation. Like the perspective
of a painter, it evolves and changes continuously. While the painter shifts from the
original position or directs the gaze to a different point; historical accidents, casual
encounters and reasoned deliberation articulate the margins of commonality.
Moreover, belonging to a certain field, every social act is finite. Nevertheless, this
subordination of a certain field holds inherently the possibility of overcoming its borders
by opening to things that I did not consider before. The ways of approaching the shape of
this sort of changing identity and the evidence that sometime culture matters as a source
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of reasons, expectations, arguments and ideas, which a person can take up passively, but
also voluntarily, encourages a normative inquiry into the role of culture into the individual
experience of multiculturalism.
To sum up, a reified notion of culture has been certainly able to trigger the model
of a struggle for recognition and to enrich the claim for accommodation of collective
identity. At the same time, scepticism about a too-ready acceptance of these notions have
casted light upon the asymmetries of power that a justification in terms of culture can
engender and on the individual experience and negotiation of social structures. However,
it is possible to hold a middle way between the two poles. Such a perspective looks at the
experience of disagreement and to the ways through which individuals appropriate in their
worldviews certain objects of concern when other persons are doing the same. This means
to begin with the individual act of appropriation of certain objects.
With act of appropriation, I mean the individual effort to incorporate one object
into a public consideration that is informed aby a worldview that the person finds her
own. In this way, what we need to look at is the fundamental connection between one
person and the object of concern. This is a purely individual relation, one in which each
and every person negotiates his or her worldview in a specific argumentative context.
Whether she does so in cultural terms, or she does not, emerges only in the actualization
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of such an act of appropriation. In this way, the focus is on the individual that must be
able to discursively act upon certain objects. Culture matters at a second level of analysis:
that is, when we have to reconstruct the content of each act of appropriation and when
appropriators have to find a solution to that specific concern in their own terms.
This reading of culture as incorporated in an act of appropriation pushes us to
study the paradigm of conversation as a distinctive kind of communicative interaction,
one in which participants are peers. They have an equal entitlement to access the object
of disagreement and they construct a feeling of mutuality from their diverse
communicative exchanges.
3. The paradigm of conversation
So far, I have provided reasons for reflecting on the limitations of a too simplistic
account of culture, and gestured towards a defence of an approach to multiculturalism
that focus on individuals as agents that appropriate discursive objects in their own ways.
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Now, it is the suggestion of this paper that this indication can be illuminated by going
back to the modern idea of amicable collisions and sensus communis, as Anthony Ashley
Cooper (1671 – 1713), the third Earl of Shaftesbury, puts them. At first, it may seem
rather counterintuitive and anachronistic to connect the negotiation of cultural
commitments with common sense. Common sense, indeed, has been considered as the
ultimate limitation to philosophical speculation.11 This theoretical function apart,
common sense is often intended to play as a significant rationale in achieving objectives
that need particular emphasis in a certain community. In politics, appeals to common
sense often hide conservative stances. People use common sense to defend commitments
to a set of undisputable moral principles or as a reference to a minimal standard of moral
integrity. In other cases, common sense has been the very mark of communal identities:
that is, it justifies the discredit of unacceptable lines of conduct, it provides criteria of
general acceptability and it makes available a ready-made justification for decisions of
public interest. Sensus communis, however, is not common sense. In Shaftesbury, it is not
a conservative limitation to the range of good reason, but rather it is the sense of equality
that people mature towards other human beings.
Given so, to what extent sensus communis can be of any use for contemporary
theorists of multiculturalism? As if this were not enough, traditionally, scholars have
studied Lord Shaftesbury as a philosopher with very much to say in moral theory and
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aesthetics, but with a marginal interest and relevance in the political disputes of his time.
To see the normative significance of sensus communis let me illustrate and discuss,
without any ambition of historiographical originality, how this notion is connected with
some aspects of Shaftesbury’s philosophy, which, put one after the other, prove the
existence of foundational political demands in the thought of the English philosopher
Shaftesbury’s thought, indeed, was largely influenced by the consolidation of the
right to freedom of expression and press. The flourishing of independent press as well as
the growth of new social spaces, primitive public spaces such as coffee houses, theatres
and gardens, indeed, demanded new forms of communication, abstractions from
considerations of status and mutual politeness among actors equally involved in free
conversations (Klein, 1994: 13). The diffusion of these new centres encouraged the
democratisation of practices of discussion and enhanced the articulation of public spirit
as a social sense, a feeling of communality among people equally involved in the
dialectics of giving and receiving reasons (Habermas, 1989). These amicable collisions
stressed the opposition with palace etiquette, where manners led conversations to be a
perpetual reiteration of the existing power relations. These conversations, like orations,
Shaftesbury writes, made people unenthusiastic listeners and
are fit only to move the passions: and the power of declamation is to terrify, exalt,
ravish, or delight, rather than satisfy or instruct ... to be confined to hear orations on
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certain subjects must needs give us a distaste, and render the subjects so managed as
disagreeable as the Managers (Shaftesbury, 1999: 34)
Conversations between peers, in turn, instigated a reciprocal learning, a continual
refinement, but also, Shaftesbury says, a profound self-reflection. In these spaces, people
were not supposed to say only the first thing that came to mind. There was, in turn,
common awareness of the importance of expressing the right thing for the right reasons.
In this way, as Shaftesbury writes, conversation is firstly an occasion of encounter with
the self. What people present to the public fora should have first passed through a private
process of self-reflection.
This conception may be made clear by referring to a passage from the Soliloquy
where Shaftesbury, against secular memoirs, sanctified edifications and epistemological
philosophy, developed in rich detailed an analogy between polished writing and good
grooming (Gill, 2014). As if one has to make ready for a public appearance, a writer
makes judgments about expected achievements, notes the things that could be said better
and takes conscious refinement to make his points sharper. A perpetual movement back
and forth allows the individual to look at himself and to avoid the evil of hubris (Gill,
2014: 5-8). In this sense, the dialogue has a moral and cognitive relevance. First, contrary
to univocal monologue, by confronting and comparing ideas or by doubting and
approving others’ arguments, the dialogue makes easier to gain a better picture of the
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question at stake. Second, dialogue triggers an internal elaboration of one’s own self: it
helps to put the ego in contact with itself (Casalini, 2001). As if we are in front of the
mirror, speaking, engaging in public discussion and testing our opinions presuppose the
capacity to look at ourselves, to accept limits and to evaluate our lines of conduct. With
Shaftesbury’s words, defensible arguments must look like “correction by themselves, and
been well-formed and disciplined before they are brought into the field” (Shaftesbury,
1999: 76). Public discussions, thus, have maieutic force as well as resources for
discovering our moral qualities – they function both as valid and concrete passage to find
truth, and as a way to realise completely the goals of virtue - that ideal of moral self-
governance that has been a theoretical locus from Cambridge Platonists to the Scottish
sentimentalist (Gill, 2000: 12).
Amicable collisions, thus, turns out to be a moral context for public exchange,
since their conventions embodies the norms of freedom, equality, involvement and
pleasure. These elements are listed in an important passage of Sensus Communis, where
the narrator, by evoking a past episode, traces the contour of what can be considered as
an appropriate conversation. “A great many fine schemes”, he tells
were destroyed; many grave reasoning overturned: but this being done without
offence to the parties concerned, and with improvement to the good humour of the
company, it set the Appetite the keener to such Conversations. And I am persuaded, that
had Reason herself been to judge of her own interest, she would have thought she received
more advantage in the main from that easy and familiar way, than from the usual stiff
adherence to a particular opinion (Shaftesbury, 1999: 33).
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In this brief description, we see three distinctive attributes. The conversation,
indeed, was of a free kind, substantive but also diverting. It was free in as much as there
was “a Freedom of raillery, a liberty in Decent language to question everything, and an
allowance of unravelling or refuting any argument, without offence of the arguer”
(Shaftesbury 1999: 33). Freedom, as Klein rightly points out, is an intellectual freedom.
Among peers, it is freedom to question, to respond and to ridicule the others (Klein, 1994:
98). It is not a legal entitlement, but rather a contextually constructed condition
(convention) for making good use of conversations. Besides being free, the conversation
was diverting. Despite freedom to (fair) derision, it was without offence. Finally, the
contents were so diverse to cover many areas, to encourage further discussions and to
delight the reason of the participants (Klein, 1994: 97). Conversations, thus, are a model
to provide the best conditions for the advancement of reason. Productive discourses
presuppose active involvement of the participants, inclination towards the other agents,
but also equality. It is not equality of endowments, but rather it is more like symmetry.
Participants have equal access to advance their points and to enjoy the pleasure of sharing
their views (Klein, 1994: 98).
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Shaftesbury’s conception of sensus communis is the result of this dialogical
movement among equals, a continual self-refinement that he considers as part of the
nature of each human being as a being that turn to herself and elaborate what she sees.
Entering in dialogue implies a process of understanding and the effort of reaching an
agreement through this mutual learning. “To reach an understanding in a dialogue”, as
Gadamer writes, “is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully
asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we
do not remain what we were” (Gadamer, 1992: 379).12 Engaging in a dialogue involves
a temporal acquiescence to what the other says. This is not mere compliance, but it is a
sort of acceptance of our own fallibility. The interaction with the other makes us desist
from obstinately holding our views as well as casts doubts (or confirm) on the
expectations we had about others’ identity. Only in this openness, indeed, there is space
for new truths and for an authentic mediation of the two original positions. When
positively inclined, as casual observation can demonstrate, people commit to a position
that enable them to listen to what the other is saying. There, through questions and
answers, participants investigate arguments from the other and postulate a shared
participation in a common sense, which we expect to regulate, at least provisionally, what
to do between us. Common sense, indeed, implies positive inclination towards the others
and self-control. It is, like in its original Greek meaning (koinemosume), a “sense of public
weal, and of the common interest, love of the community or society, natural affection,
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humanity, obligingness, or that sort of civility which rises from a just sense of the
common rights or mankind, and the natural equality there is among those of the same
species” (Shaftesbury, 1999: 48). These ideas of affection, love, common interest and
civility put emphasis on the distinctive attribute of Shaftesbury’s notion of sensus
communis. It is the result of the mutuality of the living together, where people elaborate
their own reasons and, by confronting with the others, have a deeper understanding of
themselves as well as of those involved in the same dialogical process.13 It is, indeed, a
feeling for common good, a social disposition that aspires to be universal, and the key
condition for a profitable relationship with the other. In the experience of a dialogue,
people constitute a common ground, where thoughts, ideas, and doubts intertwine. Words,
actions and views are inserted into a shared operation. Perspectives merge into each other
and individuals collaborate in reciprocity.
To sum up, by suggesting that sensus communis consists in the commitment to
prefer a social feeling of partnership with all humankind, Shaftesbury not only places in
question the moral theory prevalent since Hobbes and the public practices of the Court,
he offers insights for the creation of peculiar forms of contextual discursive interaction.
The significant focus on amicable collisions suggests that Shaftesbury says that what
direct human beings towards a spirit of public civility is not abstract theorizing, but rather
a contextual universality identified by the group of participants in a public conversation.
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Here, what concerns us is a kind of moral knowledge that, as Duke has recently pointed
out concerning Gadamer’s reading of sensus communis, results from practical
(favourable) settings and which make available the basis to act towards the other (Duke,
2014: 29).
From this excursus, thus, the crucial insights for our purposes is the investigation
of the conditions of possibility for sharable forms of life made explicit in the lives of the
participants, who have the title to participate and, therefore, absorb communal patterns
through exchanges. What matters is not the actual worldview that activates a person in a
certain context, but rather how this worldview is translated into an act of appropriation
that is available to the others.
4. Recognition to Toleration
So, according to Shaftesbury, individuals, when allowed to participate equally,
transform simple exchanges of opinions and ideas into amicable collisions, where
reciprocal learning and self-reflection opens to a sense of public civility, the sensus
communis. If sensus communis and amicable collisions are of any value in political
theory, they can be understood in the framework of those contextual and informal
practices that contribute to the judgments of individual citizens on issues of their interest
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and, therefore, in the construction of mechanisms that make deliberative procedures
structured in a way that allow individuals to be part of a sense of mutuality, while ensuring
that those affected by its outcomes are also its authors.
In this way, there are two levels of normative action. First, we have a level of
recognition in which institutions must ensure that all members have adequate means to
appropriate certain objects, and to make the distinctive character of this appropriation
available to the others.14 Once this has been granted, a second level of informal normative
action among participants. This is the level of toleration. Here, by combining their diverse
acts of appropriation around the same issues of concern, parties are in the position to make
their culture relevant. At the same time, from these exchanges among peers with an equal
say and the same concern, a common sense of weal may arise.
Therefore, for institution, the primary normative task is to create conditions for
people to appropriate objects of concern. If participation is so central, the focus turns
toward the very moment in which the agent takes part in something. This means to direct
attention towards the original poietic moment in which the subject reconciles her
worldview in an action that aims at modelling collective action in the light of her
perspective. This act of appropriation epitomizes a connection of one’s needs and interests
with an object of concern. It is not primarily addressed to the others, but rather it is a
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spontaneous response to an external stimulus that triggers a generative occasion in which
individuals are pushed to interact with the others because they happen to have the same
concern.
The emphasis on the phase of access, rather than on the reciprocal exchange
between peers, falls within an expanded understanding of recognition, which functions as
category for scrutinizing constraints to the spontaneous act of appropriation. In this way,
recognition subsumes all those policies that make certain the prerequisite of whatever
conversation among peers: that is, the entitlement to grasp an object of concern. Here,
there is a substantial move from the canonical understanding of recognition in
multiculturalism (Taylor 1992). Unlike Taylor, the problem of recognition does not arise
in front of a demand that is advanced by a collective with the aims of equalizing different
forms of life. The recognition of marginalized traditions and forms of life turns out to be
encapsulated in the performative act to grasp an object of disagreement distinctively. The
preservation of collective identities (if any) is the result of a demand for equal treatment
that allows for the exercise of one’s diversity in public. This suggests a model in which
public policies and political programs must actively construct laws, political programs
and public policies that actively support one’s worldview and its manifestation in public.
A politics of recognition, in so doing, ensures the integrity of the individual only in
connection with the constitutive link with his or her act of appropriation of certain objects
of disagreement. At the same time, since identity is individually realized, such a politics
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does not act only in the direction of preserving the rights to flourish or to ensure
membership in a certain community, but rather it tries to ensure equal chances of
expressing one’s act of appropriation in a specific manner. By trying to equalize the
manifestation of one’s identity, such a politics of recognition must include in its agenda
also those actions that encourage persons not to leave those cultural links that they find
important and pervasive in their life. But this is functional to make certain that everyone
is in the same position to appropriate objects of their concern.
This idea implies a customization of recognition as a contextual and individual
socialization of moral autonomy. Recognition is not once for the all, but it is a temporary
and contextual achievement. It is not group-oriented, but it focuses on the person, as a
member who wants to be the author of his or her own laws. The same person can act
differently in each of these sites of disagreement. Vis-à-vis different objects of concern,
the subject not only declines his or her worldview differently, but also he or she
experiences a temporary and always different phase of initial crisis with other moral
agents who happen to have a claim upon the same object. Then it follows that the basic
demand that one’s act of appropriation is not ignored represents the essential constituent
for having proper discursive exchanges that can be propitious for better social
relationships outside discussion.
25
When the fundamental demand of appropriation is satisfied, the specific sub-
norms that are codified through contextualized episodes of disagreement are
interrogatives that could incorporate the specific character of participants’ worldviews.
This opens to the second normative domain; that of toleration. Toleration is neither seen
as a discourse (Brown 2014), nor as a practice of justification (Forst 2003, 2012), but
rather, in analogy with the idea of sensus communis, toleration is a sense of common weal
among participants. It comes up through discussion and it makes possible exchanges
between persons during discursive exchanges thanks to self-reflection and mutuality.
As noticed earlier, Shaftesbury lists a precise description of what makes
conversation the milieu for a prolific self-reflection and for justifying commitment to a
pubic weal. On the one hand, Shaftesbury says, individuals must be equals, not in terms
of endowments, but more like in their common status as participants holding the
opportunity to advance their ideas and to enjoy from what the others have to say. On the
other hand, during conversations, since the discrepancy in power are suspended,
individuals are also intellectually free: that is, in an oratorical situation, they are free to
question and even to ridicule the other. Only the combination of these two levels triggers
26
a movement back and forth, from the self to the public, that helps participants to polish
their arguments, to self-refine and, finally, to open to a sentiment of public civility. 15
While, in declamations and orations, there is a characteristically unequal relation
between the orator and auditor, conversation implies the activity of the participants. Since
the power of argumentation is a habit put into action in the practice of conversations,
conversers are equal in their capacity to deploy what they have of this power. What gives
individuals legitimacy in the public discourse is the fact that they, despite their being
differently endowed with reason or wit, are symmetrically involved in the emancipatory
effort to be more rational and autonomous by engaging in intellectually productive
discourses. Conversation distributed equally provides individuals, as Shaftesbury would
say, pleasure and disposition towards the other. Communality, thus, is less efficiently
served when criticism is resisted or in case the monopoly of discussion is not shared
among all the affected.
This performative equality applies the idea of mutual engagement to discuss
arbitrary relations of power and to defend the moral significance of a conversation
between equals. At the same time, intellectual freedom to question and even to ridicule
the other is not an entitlement to be free from interference during conversation; neither
27
can it be read only as the power to fulfil one’s potential as a converser. Intellectual
freedom might best be conceived as the result of an informal relationship that exists
between the conversers. Whether a converser offends the other is an occasional event –
maybe reiterated - that depends on her temperament and on the issues conversers are
dealing with. In turn, what is not contingent, according to Shaftesbury, is the broader aim
of conversations to amuse their participants. Of course, this implies a critical scrutinizing
of other ideas, questioning and rebutting what others are saying, nevertheless, as
Shaftesbury writes, “being done without offence to the parties concern’s, and with
Improvement to the good humour of the company” (Shaftesbury, 1999: 33). As Klein
notices, thus, this sort of intellectual freedom is not absolute license. Two conditions
qualifies this conception: avoiding offenses and improving the good humour of the
company. In this situation, being free entails decency: a self-control of unnecessary
offence and the possibility of refusing unnecessary offence for the sake of the common
weal (Klein, 1994: 98). Humour and irony, moreover, put emphasis on the contextual
character of conversations. When one meaning is put forward and an unusual
interpretation is presupposed, we expect other fellows to understand the intended
contradiction between facts and our description. This communal disposition is toleration.
Under this view, toleration involves the ability to raise oneself to a state of critical
understanding of what other conversers are disposed to bear or of the background
knowledge of a specific subject, but also a self-reflection on one’s role as participant in
28
the collective discussion. Toleration is not simply happily coexisting with one another
without interference. It is focused on a proper sense of mutuality that characterizes people
engaging in the same discursive enterprise as peers. They can ridicule one another, they
can fight, they can also challenge one’s discursive appropriation, but they are not in the
position to question one’s entitlement to participate and to symmetrically answer these
questions in his or her own terms. In other words, it is a momentary acceptance of
difference for the purpose of discursive exchange, which is made possible, as I have
argued earlier in this section, by a prior act of recognition of all members as potential
appropriators of objects of disagreement. Then, the main claim of this part and the
substantive normative terrain for the discourse to come is that toleration is a sense of
public weal that only a universal recognition can make possible.
4. Patchwork multiculturalism
In this paper, by drawing upon Lord Shaftesbury’s ideas of amicable collisions
and sensus communis, I have argued that the paradigm of conversation, where
participation and intellectual freedom among equals are essential elements, help to trace
a picture of multicultural interactions in which culture is not a label, but rather an account
that places attention on the act of appropriation that individuals direct upon certain objects
29
of concern and on the coordination among people that are equally entitled to access
objects in their own ways. These ideas allow for a substantial analysis of everyday
interactions as well as for careful investigations of asymmetric decisional structures,
decentralized institutional settings and social, political or cultural barriers that prevent
someone to access disputes he or she cares about. Sensus communis and amicable
collisions, I have argued, justify an overture to the social level and define a distinctive
normative apparatus that reads the possibility of toleration as a result of a prior
equalization through a proper politics of recognition, giving everyone the opportunity to
access object of his or her concern, regardless the content and the form of such an act of
appropriation. In this section, I shall lay out the distinctive elements of patchwork
multiculturalism as a collection of multiples sites of discussion brought together by a
holistic and comprehensive politics of recognition.
There are a number of responses to multiculturalism that argue for
decentralization (Modood 1998, Parekh 2000, Song 2007, Williams 1998), patchwork
multiculturalism has a distinctive normative ground and tries to describe how deliberative
spaces may be organized, their area of intervention and how representation should be
thought in those fora. Under this view, special rights and assistance, from translators to
logistic support, may be additional instruments to make each potential participant enjoy
the free and equal spirit of an open conversation as a peer. When translated into the debate
30
about multiculturalism and democratic deliberation, taken as an assumption that in a
certain multicultural community we have different worldviews coexisting all together, it
is important to make clear how contextual acts of appropriation can be mediated in a way
that allows community members to create a structure of social coordination informed by
toleration, a structure that, from discursive interaction, may give rise to positive
relationships outside disagreement.
Neighbourhoods turn out to be the focus of investigation for multiculturalism as
fieldwork. In order to identify the actual borders of this geographical space, the postal
code seems a reasonable solution. There, local resources and individual inter-personal
experiences may interact more easily. The emphasis on micro-communities does not
dismiss top-down political approaches definitively. Those are all actions that fall within
the dimension of recognition, which should apply upon individuals without the reference
to the place where they live but as potential appropriators of objects of disagreement.
National institutions must be structured in a way that people can live in a legal
environment that is respectful for differences. Moreover, they must be able to guarantee
social solidarity, to avoid the relevance of significant wealth disparities in the decision-
making system, to ensure equal access to service and to provide adequate scheme of
redistribution of public finances. Representatives from institutions, working together with
voluntaries from the local community, may be used to collect demands from the local
31
community and it may lobby for them at the national level as a preliminary part of a
politics of recognition.
While social standards should be valid equally across the communities, a
decentralized system that want to favour cohesive civic spaces, trust and reciprocity must
set context-sensitive standards of policy evaluations. The key to this strategy lies in
institutional mechanisms that disperse power in the social space to ensure collective
decisions that respond to the interests and values of those they affect. The focus on small-
scale political spaces aims, in turn, at clarifying a division of work among a formal politics
of recognition and an informal collective construction of norms and rules at the local
level.
Objects of disagreements are whatever discursive object, from the application of
non-local legislation to internal disputes and vituperation of some of the members, that is
incorporated in one’s act of appropriation and that get sufficient momentum to be
discussed by co-members in adequately structured consultative groups. Consultative
groups are contextually constructed informal structure of deliberation and decision
making, where under a scheme of direct participation or active delegation, affected
members, together with representative of associations, organizations and local politicians
elaborate policy proposals, monitor the implementation of governmental policies in their
32
context and deal with issues of their own local concern. Within different communities
there will be different organisations, associations, groups that are already well established
and that can be used to nurture community partnership. For example, institutions should
be able to encourage participation in the consultative groups by empowering young
people and women to bring their act of appropriation to the others. By expanding the
network of contacts, indeed, marginalized people may extend the political horizon and
find legitimate grounds to advance their cause through coalition-making across
differences. In this sense, unions, civil organizations, social movements, residential
community, NGOs, sport teams, public and private housing associations, voluntary
organizations working with the elderly and charitable organizations are potential vehicles,
parallel to the consultative groups, to strengthen transversal awareness and create a
tolerating environment. This sentiment will not raise alone. When this is not the case,
representatives must be able to collect these missing acts of appropriations and make
certain that they will count in the deliberation within the consultative groups.
There must also be some normative requirements for the composition of
consultative groups. In order to avoid gender biased representation or the reproduction of
structure of domination by educated and by influential elders, consultative groups must
guarantee by statue a one-to-one representation of the acts of appropriation. In order to
avoid the control of wealthy member of the community, consultative groups must have
an articulated financial structure where a certain degree of funds is guarantee by local
33
institutions for the services they subcontract with the consultative group (like policy
monitoring, policy evaluation and design), while the majority of the resources is provided
by membership fees, which must be equally accessible to all the members of the
neighbourhood. Private donations must not be allowed. The structure of co-financing and
a universal membership fees have twofold implications. On the one hand, they reduce
relevant wealth inequalities between the members of the community that participate in
the consultative group. On the other hand, they put financial constraints on the
consultative groups. In this way, people in the consultative group should be encouraged
to include a great number of people in the group, at the same time, they have incentive to
maximize their revenues, by being efficient in the administration of services within the
community and by providing reliable and detailed information concerning the community
to the national power.
This requires a significant change in the process of policy-making to allow
operational front-line actors greater autonomy to make decisions that implies enhanced
respect for their judgement as local experts. At the same time, this approach requires a
commitment on the part of institutional organization to mobilise and direct material and
human resources directly to the point of service delivery in a way that accepts direct
participation from the community and delegation of decision-making power at the local
level. This system of delegation and specialization should be actively exercised also
34
during divisive legal cases, which often are the source of scepticism about the entire
multicultural enterprise. Consultative groups should serve as mediators not only to
explain why some practices are so important for a certain member, but also they should
make clear whether, in that precise case, that practices is so significant for the person
under judgment, whether it is the result of an external imposition from within the
community or whether the sentence can have a threatening impact on the community as
a whole. All these aspects should be decided by deliberation within the consultative
group. Moreover, in one school in a certain neighbourhood, a tough policy against racist
language might fail, while in another one it might yield positive results. In one housing
estate, the enforcement of actions against rubbish dumping and night-time noise may
radicalize differences, while carefully managed resident meetings that are able to steer
discussion may avoid partial resolution and favour mutual control and cooperation.
This movement in register from purely top-down approaches or vacuous claims
for decentralization to that of integrated democratic deliberation, where national
institutions create opportunities (recognition) for local, formal and informal, actors, helps
to surpass fixed cultural assumptions and to sustain efforts for civic mobilisation and
mutual understanding through a sense of common weal (toleration).
35
5. Conclusion
In this paper, I have suggested a conception of multiculturalism called patchwork
multiculturalism. It is a highly decentralized mix of discursive interaction and the
traditional politics of recognition. In so doing, my argument have developed alongside
three trajectories. First, I have argued that culture matters for multiculturalism, but that
the politics of recognition should first make possible everyone’s appropriation of object
of concern. Here, members are interrogated as persons with something to say on a certain
issue under scrutiny. This conception needs not hold an essentialist notion of culture. It,
indeed, defines people through their agency as affected members in a process of public
deliberation. Second, I have argued that the focus should be contextual and local. Third,
by drawing upon the paradigm of conversation, I have tried to rethink the relationship
between recognition – as equalization of everyone’s potential as appropriator – and
toleration – as a sense of common weal among participants in the same discursive
exchange.
Ultimately, the successful political application of these ideas depends on the
deconstruction of asymmetric relation of power and on a contextual reconsideration of
the terms for an equal participation in the decision-making process. No person should be
the subject or object of a policy of assimilation, for such a policy only reproduces or
reinforces unequal relations of arbitrary power. At the same time, by looking at
36
deliberation at the social level, this position takes seriously the practical importance of
the idea of culture in multicultural contexts. Persons, indeed, as holders of specific values,
more or less rooted in strong cultural links, shape practical parameters within which
bargaining, negotiations and conversations are mutually accepted as equal and free.
Whether this idea is overwhelmingly optimistic or not, it largely depends on the very
possibility of constructing institutional mechanisms apt to favour the true contribution of
local actors and the genuine involvement of all the affected members in the decision
making process.
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1 I owe the expression “the character of multiculturalism” and its definition to Patchen
Markell (2003).
2 A contiguous analysis to the view that I take can be found in Parekh (2000) and Iris
Marion Young (2013).
3 This claim takes inspiration and evidence from James Fearon and David Laitin, (1996:
715-7). See also, Ashutosh Varshney (2001). Bhikhu Parekh grounds his idea of
interculturalism upon analogous assumptions. See Bhikhu Parekh (2000: 212). This is
also consistent with findings from Helena Karjalainen and Richard Soparnot (2012). In
the article, they suggest that intercultural cooperation in multicultural working contexts
is a dual process based on a political-dimension and on an identification-dimension,
where the political dimension is found not to be relevant in an intercultural context.
4 Among others, on this issue, see the debate between W. James Booth (2013) and Alan
Patten (2011).
5 These three essays are collected in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.
For this paper, I shall quote by making reference to Lawrence Klein’s edition of this text
(1999).
6 Taylor is not alone in exploring the connection between recognition and
individualization. Axel Honneth grounds his account of individualization in the sphere of
legal recognition. People experience disrespect when perceive that the general accepted
39
legal norms produce forms of exclusion. These forms prevent marginalized persons from
freely participate in public and from being recognized for who they actually are: that is,
autonomous human beings with a set of distinctive attributes (Honneth, 1995: 118-29).
For a critique to the ontological assumptions behind the politics of recognition, see
Patchen Markell (2003: 13-5). In this sense, read also Tully (2000).
7 On this point, Clifton Mark (2014).
8 For an extensive analysis of the notion of multicultural group and its essentialisation,
see Magali Bessone (2013).
9 Bhikhu Parekh and Joseph Carens have placed emphasis on the realm of intercultural
interactions and on the need to make people participate in a common dialogue beyond
difference. See. Bhikhu Parekh (2000: 210-9) and Joseph Carens (2000 2004).
10 In these regards, it is crucial Anna Elisabetta Galeotti’s focus on ascriptive identities.
Among others, see Anna Elisabetta Galeotti (1998).
11 Analogous remarks can be found in John Rawls’s Kantian Constructivism in Moral
Theory: “The admissible grounds for holding institutions just or unjust must be limited to
those allowed by forms of reasoning accepted by common sense, including the procedures
of science when generally accepted” (Rawls, 1999: 327).
12 See also Hans Georg Gadamer (1991). For a rich analysis of the dialogical character of
Gadamer’s hermeneutics, see Lauren Swayne Barthold (2010).
13 On this point, Gadamer (1992: 19).
14 With recognition, I understand the institutional actions that respect the agent’s
capacity to raise and defend claims discursively (Honneth 1995).
15 This reading draws upon Gill (2014).
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