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An examination is made of a genealogy of pluralist approaches to multiplicity and difference in the twentieth century, starting with William James (1976 [1912], 1977 [1909]), who began his study of pluralism with a ‘radical empiricism’ that is opposed to a more singular, monist position. James argued that our experiences of empirical events diverge, and one explanation could never encompass all of those experiences; other political pluralists (Arthur Bentley, Ernest Barker, Harold Laski, Mary Parker Follett) took James’s critique of absolutism and applied it to the state. Post-Second World War pluralists used the concept of heterogeneity in a much more constricted sense to defend and promote self-interested interest groups. However, more recently, there has been a return to multiplicities, and Donna Haraway’s (1988) description of ‘situated knowledges’ and ‘embodied objectivity’, in which she argues for ‘epistemologies of location’ where claims of knowledge can only be considered partial, resurrects James. The argument here is that a return to such original notions of pluralism helps validate the diversity of experiences and knowledges that grow out of the variety of ways we are all situated in any number of experiences, including environmental degradation.

This chapter examines the interplay of moral universalism and political pluralism as the foundation of a new global democracy by focusing on the arguments put forward by Jacques Maritain and Luigi Sturzo, who claimed that Christianity—and especially Catholicism—provided the theoretical toolkit for constructing a peaceful and prosperous post-war order for individuals and communities. Charting their interactions with other protagonists of the book, including Raymond Aron, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, and Reinhold Niebuhr, the chapter considers Maritain and Sturzo’s support of federalism as a shape-giving principle for the new world order and shows that their visions differed on a crucial point: the place of democracy in the globalist agenda. It suggests that Sturzo’s attachment to social Catholicism led his vision of global order away from the conservative stance that characterized Maritain’s proposals, towards a dialectical interpretation of politics.

This chapter discusses pluralism and liberalism in contemporary Islamic thought. The first section discusses the relationship between Islam and pluralism. The inception of cultural debates over liberalism and pluralism in the Arab world began in the 1960s. However, prior to that, debates over the issue of modernization and the relationship with the rest of the world were conducted in terms of secularism or secularism vis-à-vis Islam. This was unfortunate because this secularism associated with modernization was seen as the French version characterized by uncompromising separation between the state and religion. For Muslim thinkers, it is primarily due to this factor that debates on liberalism and Islam contain a great deal of negative residue from debates on secularism and Islam. The second section discusses the issue of political authority following the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate and the emergence of nation-states. The third section discusses citizenship and relationships with non-Muslims. The chapter concludes by discussing cultural and political pluralism.

This chapter expands the account of rural political life to detail how state involvement in the valley sustained political pluralism as a central feature of local politics and social mobilizations. The chapter tracks how the colonial history of indirect rule shaped contemporary state strategies for asserting authority in marginalized rural zones. These strategies buttressed land and communal identity as the basis for rural governance and collective action. Although implanting a territorializing modern state in Morocco certainly involved dismantling many aspects of communal governance, the chapter then argues that state actors often seemed as invested as many nonstate actors in preserving the political pluralism of the rural southeast, including nonstate forms of communal authority. Ultimately, the chapter details how after independence in 1956, the practice of cultivating heterogeneity continued to inform state strategies for control and shaped the quotidian political life.

The chapter argues that the artificiality of Oscar Wilde’s wit and style exemplifies the logic and method of genuine, undogmatic political pluralism in a deeply consistent and illuminating way. The chapter argues that while the most widely known current approaches to political pluralism suffer from the unacknowledged and unmanaged contradiction of definitively rejecting all nonpluralistic positions, Wilde acknowledges and manages that contradiction. His work presents the serious and unartificial possibility of things’ being essentially otherwise than they can be conceived to be in any given standpoint. Now, raising the possibility of thoroughly new meanings, entirely unrelated to all the familiar meanings we have access to in considering that possibility, is nonsensical: it undermines its own meanings in raising that possibility as something it aims to mean. But, as the book argues, this kind of nonsense is so thoroughgoing that it cancels itself in turn and restores the original sense whose conflicts produced it. As a result, this process both opens the possibility of essentially new standpoints and also validates incompatible, familiar standpoints exactly as they are. This validation, then, involves the self-canceling recognition, without simple mutual elimination, of essentially different and therefore mutually exclusive “spaces.”

This chapter presents a reading of Hannah Arendt’s constitutional thinking from the perspective of the paradox of constituent power. The paradox at issue here is that, on the one hand, in order to exercise its constituent power, ‘the people’ needs some kind of representation, but on the other hand, all forms of representation are determinations of collective existence and held, in a constitutional democracy, to derive their power from ‘the people’. At stake in constitutional democracy is the contingency of representations of ‘the people’ and the possibility of their modification in response to claims that exclusion from or inclusion within ‘the people’ is violent and alienating. This chapter argues that the paradox ‘glimmers’ in Arendt’s work: it almost crystallizes into an account of the tensions present in ‘the act of founding’, but the ambiguities are again obscured by her republican ideal of constitutio libertatis. The chapter also traces an implication of this ‘glimmering’ in Arendt’s work that is problematic from the perspective of political pluralism: her ‘civilisationalism’. 

We typically associate sovereignty with the modern state, and the coincidence of worldly powers of political rule, public authority, legitimacy, and jurisdiction with territorially delimited state authority. We are now also used to referencing liberal principles of justice, social-democratic ideals of fairness, republican conceptions of non-domination, and democratic ideas of popular sovereignty (democratic constitutionalism) for the standards that constitute, guide, limit, and legitimate the sovereign exercise of public power. This chapter addresses an important challenge to these principles: the re-emergence of theories and claims to jurisdictional/political pluralism on behalf of non-state ‘nomos groups’ within well-established liberal democratic polities. The purpose of this chapter is to preserve the key achievements of democratic constitutionalism and apply them to every level on which public power, rule, and/or domination is exercised.

Some pluralist critiques of state authority (as Harold Laski’s), while claiming to be pluralistic, leave little room for the exercise of authority by associations themselves. But the authority of an association may be explained along the lines of Joseph Raz’s account of the authority of law, namely if a member who accepts the authority of the association is more likely to comply with reasons that apply to them in any case. This allows two orders of authority for the state: first-order authority, which the state has by virtue of being an association of citizens; and second-order authority, which it has by virtue of providing the institutional context in which other associations can exercise their authority more effectively. The resulting image of the state better acknowledges the variety of authoritative claims made by the various associations that effectively hold the allegiance of individuals.

This chapter examines legal and political responses to the growing presence of Islam in Europe through the lens of Carl Schmitt’s thought. It points out how such responses draw on an essentialist and idealized notion of the people, and aim at artificially reinforcing the cultural and religious homogeneous character of the European public sphere, thus pursuing an ‘identitarian’ model of democracy. It concludes that the role attributed to the ‘Christian roots’ of Europe in contemporary discourses is analogous to the role that Schmitt ascribed to the Catholic Church in representing the values which were the essence of European civilization and separated it from ‘uncivilized’ others.

One-partyism refers to the capture of government institutions by a single political party. This chapter explores the institutions that may be available to promote the virtues of multipartyism in a budding democracy while combating the vices of one-partyism. Specifically it argues that the military may have an incentive to combat one-partyism and, in doing so, promote political pluralism. A dominant party can spell trouble for the military. If a political party becomes too strong, it can threaten the military, cut back the military’s powers, or slash the military’s economic and social privileges. In contrast, by curbing one-partyism, the military may achieve more autonomy. Like the judiciary, the military may find more comfort in the division of political powers that comes with political pluralism. The desire to bring down the dominant party a peg or two may serve as an incentive for the military to promote competition among political parties.

This chapter shares some thoughts and experiences on devolution of powers or, as referred to in Spain, decentralization and political pluralism. It begins by examining the Spanish constitution and the manner in which the ‘state of autonomies’ has been created since 1979. Significant political and law-making powers have devolved in the 17 ‘autonomous communities’ (comunidades autónomas) that now exist in the whole of Spain. It then considers the role of the constitutional court (Tribunal constitucional) in adjudicating disputes over the division of powers between general institutions and the autonomous communities.

This chapter takes a look at the West's ascent to global preeminence between 1500 and 1800. The discussion begins by focusing on how the weakness of Europe's political institutions combined with the middle class contributed to its economic development. It then considers how the Reformation altered the politics of Europe and gave rise to new alignments within and among strengthening states, while also fostering both religious tolerance and political pluralism. It then describes the West's trajectory toward its dramatic rise as the world's leading center of power, eclipsing Asia and the Middle East. Finally, it examines the role of the emerging bourgeoisie and the towns they founded in Europe's gradual ascent as the globe's center of gravity.

This chapter illustrates the suppression and reassertion of national values in socialist Romania. The Romania of the late 1970s and 1980s provides a classic example of a breed that was becoming rare during those years: a neo-Stalinist, highly centralized command economy conforming well to the bureaucratic allocative model. Almost none of the expanded market forces, decentralized economic decision making, or political pluralism emerging in Hungary, Poland, or the Soviet Union graced the Romanian landscape. The state persecuted independent entrepreneurship, increasingly raided peasants' “private” plots, militarized many enterprises so as to check sliding output, placed economic contracts under supervision by the General Prosecutor's Office, and chipped away at all enterprises' funds for paying workers. In addition to its unusually high centralization, Romania was unusual within the bloc for its mode of control. In its early days the Romanian regime controlled its population chiefly by force, which was later relaxed and briefly supplemented in the 1960s with a few economic incentives.

This book has examined the conditions that may facilitate the growth of what appears to be a distinctively Islamic variety of capitalist development, identifying self-consciously Islamist financiers and trying to discover the conditions under which they best thrive. It has found that distinctive financial practices seemed to mobilise the capital which would have otherwise stayed hidden in the mattresses of the MENA region. The processes of economic globalisation, coupled with the steady accumulation of Islamic capital, were deemed to eventually overcome the present barriers to the integration and promotion of a more political pluralism in the region. The studies in this book have identified Islamic capitalism as a natural evolution of gentle commerce. This chapter argues that if big international business can polish the manners of the Bush Administration sufficiently to avert a clash of globalisations, this will aid Islamic finance to promote the steady structural transformation of the region that the essays of this book have envisioned.

Morocco faces difficult foreign policy challenges. Saddled with serious security and territorial integrity concerns, it faces an uphill task to ensure that its existence is not threatened. However, Morocco's strong historical tradition as a monarchy is helpful in, and inextricably linked to, facing such policy challenges. Morocco can afford political pluralism and free competition because it has a monarchy that holds the political system together; the national integrity issue is the base on which the monarchy stands. Morocco can decree economic reform because the monarchy is the ultimate and unaccountable authority, but a failure in the returns on economic liberalization would suddenly make the monarchy dramatically accountable. More than in many countries, foreign policy and domestic stability are mutually dependent in Morocco.