Andrzej Szahaj
"The Ideology of Multiculturalism —
a Philosophical and Political Context"
The ideology of multiculturalism was born in the 1980's although its earliest traces go back to Horace Kallen's notion of cultural pluralism introduced in 1925. In the context of multiculturalism Szahaj explores Charles Taylor's views with particular emphasis on his notion of "the politics of recognition" — as well as Will Kymlicka's insistence on the necessity to respect and recognise other cultures. Also, Szahaj offers an overview of social, political and educational consequences of multiculturalism in the United States of the 1980's and 1990's. He sees the value of multiculturalism in its exposure of the illusions of assimilationism and its attendant mechanisms of political and economic oppression. However, Szahaj is wary of multiculturalism's pitfalls which include its problematic understanding of culture as such and its underlying assumption of the equality of all cultures (which leads to relativism). Thus he concludes, following Richard ]forty's position presented in his essay "The Unpatriotic Academy", that multiculturalism is acceptable only in its moderate version which assumes respect for other cultures and their differences, without antagonising particular social groups and reversing the already existing social hierarchies.
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No. 6 (2003)
Published:
10.31261/errgo
English
Język Polski