On Culture, Public Reason, and Deliberation: Response to Pensky and Peritz

Seyla Benhabib

On February 10, 2004 the French National Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority of 494 for to 36 against, with 31 abstentions, to ban the wearing of religious symbols from public schools. Although the new law applies to all ostentatiously displayed religious symbols such as Christian crosses, the yarmulkes of Orthodox Jewish students, as well as the headscarves worn by Muslim girls, its main target was Muslim religious attire. With the passing of this legislation yet another chapter was added to the tumultuous events which began in 1989 with the expulsion from school in Creil (Oise) of three scarf-wearing Muslim girls and continued until the mass exclusion of 26 others in November 1996 upon the decision of the Conseil dEtat. In The Claims of Culture1 I wrote that laffaire du foulard [the scarf affair] eventually came to stand for all dilemmas of French national identity in the age of globalization and multiculturalism (99) and predicted that this affair is by no means over. As European integration and multiculturalist pressures continue, France, just like India and the United States, will have to discover new models of legal, pedagogical, social, and cultural institutions to deal with the dual imperatives of liberal democracies to preserve freedom of religious expression and the principles of secularism (100). The new law will not end the French, and by now international, controversy surrounding this matter; if anything, it will exacerbate it. I begin my response to Penskys and Peritzs penetrating comments and criticisms on The Claims of Culture with a recollection of this episode because it illustrates very well the depth and intensity still generated by cultural identity/difference conflicts in contemporary democracies. My discussion of the scarf affair should also serve to underscore an aspect of my approach to the claims of culture within contemporary liberal democracies which Pensky and Peritz ignore. They both believe that my social-constructivist account of culture privileges a post-conventional, secular, and reflexive identity which minimizes the loss and the pain suffered through the mass extinction of traditional culture, in Penskys words. This is not accurate. My view of cultures as defined through contested narratives is not committed to a unidirectional secularization thesis as Pensky claims (I). Unlike Peritz, I believe that social-scientific assumptions inevitably play a role in the construction of critical as well as democratic theory, but that it is important to provide a self-standing philosophical argument in justifying models of deliberative democracy (II). Finally,
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I conclude with some remarks on the state of contemporary critical theory and the challenges posed by cultural identity/difference struggles (III). I. Yoders Dilemma and Cultural Resignification We owe to Max Penksy the phrase Yoders dilemma. Commenting on the conceptual and moral dilemmas involved in appealing for the protection and recognition of ones traditional cultural identity on the basis of secular and universalistic norms which register the freedom and equality of all persons and their equal entitlement to a democratic schedule of rights entails, according to Pensky, that one is trapped in the Yoders dilemma: either one must abandon the claim to the holistic and totalizing aspects of ones identity, recognizing now that it is one among many such identities competing for equal recognition in the public space of democracies; or one must adopt a purely strategic attitude towards legal norms and make ones culture a good which, just like money and power, can be pursued strategically. It would then appear that the price of democratic protections for cultural difference is either Weberian disenchantment or strategic cynicism. There is a third alternative. This is the narrative resignification and reappropriation of ones culture from within a more reflexive framework. While acknowledging the possibility of disenchantment as well as cynicism, I believe that contentious multicultural dialogues in the public spheres of democracies may result in narrative resignifications and reappropriations of their culture by minority groups. Precisely because multiculturalism, in so many of its manifestations, challenges key assumptions of liberal democracies, it needs to release its potential in the public sphere through the dialogue, confrontation, and give-and-take of ordinary citizens. As I wrote: Culture matters; cultural evaluations are deeply bound up with interpretations of our needs, our visions of the good life, and our dreams for the future (129). This is not a plea for jettisoning traditional cultural identities. Let us examine more closely the epistemic and moral options that are made available through processes of societal modernization and cultural rationalization. Building upon Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and Jrgen Habermas, I will suggest that the cultural rationalization of worldviews and belief-systems results in at least three cognitive options: decentering, reflexivity, and pluralization. Decentering means the separation from one another of the objective, subjective, and intersubjective worlds qua referential objects of our claims. Reflexivity means a heightened awareness of thresholds of justification in part generated by the differentiation of the world picture and an awareness of ones position as one among many others. Pluralization entails that as a consequence of decentering and the growth of reflexivity, the range of cognitive, moral, and aesthetic options which a worldview, a culture, or a tradition can appeal to in order to justify itself increases as well. This multiplication of options can lead to fragmentation and antagonism but it can also lead to liberalization, without nevertheless tearing apart the fabric of
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core commitments which sustain the worldviews, cultures, and traditions in question. Pensky attributes to me the assumption that decentering and reflexivity must result in pluralization as fragmentation and loss, whereas I believe that pluralization as regeneration is also an option. I defend the right of Muslim girls to wear the scarf precisely because I consider their continuing engagement with the public sphere of secular liberal democracies, through which they are challenged to give an account of the meaning of their actions to others, to be a healthy process of multicultural and multifaith discourse, in the course of which meanings are negotiated, articulated, and sifted through (94100). Such processes do not mean abandoning ones core beliefs at all if these entail observing womens modesty through veiling their hair; rather, through the heightened pressure for justification which subjects all religious beliefs, and not just Islamic ones, to the practice of reason-giving in democratic publics, a more reflexive relation to ones faith and identity claims can develop. Some therefore refer to a Protestanization of Islam or to the emergence of Euro-Islam as a consequence. I personally see this as a gain, equivalent to the impact of the Enlightenment on Christianity and of the Haskalah on traditional Jewish thought. Beginning in late eighteenth-century Europe, thinkers such as Moses Mendelsohn, for example, sought to adopt Judaism to the cognitive challenges of decentering, reflexivity, and pluralization. Penskys comment that these core commitments are simply off-limits for democratic contests between the majority and minority cultures, while remaining fair game within the membership boundaries of minority cultures themselves, leads to a strategy of privatization, silencing, and disengagement. While not denying the necessity for keeping some core commitments off the agenda through their protection by freedom of religious expression clauses, the separation of church and state, and state-neutrality vis--vis competing moral and religious worldviews, I envisage a more dynamic and conflictual process of multicultural discourse as a consequence of which the two horns of Yoders dilemma either loss of faith and fragmentation of identity or strategic cynicism can be transcended via a third: reflexive and pluralist resignification of cultural and even religious beliefs and meanings through contestations in civil society. I would even venture to suggest that traditions, worldviews, and belief-systems can only continue as hermeneutically plausible strands of meaning for their members insofar as they can engage in such creative resignification and renegotiation of their own core commitments. Surely there will be losses in this process, but there will also be vital, new, and interesting configurations: the Aborigines of Australia may have become somewhat cynical in their use of the Australian legal system to further their own ends, but they have thereby succeeded in sheltering many aspects of their culture from devestation. Certainly, the global art market is full of conspicuous consumption, but it has also revitalized Maori art by creating a hitherto unimaginable audience and constituency for it. Likewise, the current conflicts within the Catholic Church over child molestation and sexual abuse as well as over gay marriages and the
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ordainment of gay priests very well show that core commitments are never really off the agenda in the discourse of civil society. In many cases, these struggles are precisely over what constitutes those core commitments: is celibacy essential to the priesthood? Why is the culture of the Church based upon such silence toward, and the repression and manipulation of, human sexuality? The view of cultures as constituted through contested narratives permits one to appreciate these struggles, which are undoubtedly heart-wrenching for believers, and to imagine alternatives to the Yoders dilemma. Precisely because he underestimates the degree to which struggles over contested cultural narratives are central to my account of the reproduction of cultures over time, Pensky also thinks that my three mid-range conditions for cultural politics egalitarian reciprocity, voluntary self-ascription, freedom of exit and association (19) succeed only by putting the meaning of cultural membership in question. Rather, I see these conditions as normative guidelines to help us navigate the validity of identity/difference claims from an observers point of view; but in many cases, the conflicts which make it necessary for us to resort to such criteria, such as the unequal treatment of womens and childrens rights by Native American peoples and First Nations, by Orthodox Jewish communities, or under the Indian Muslim Family Act, give rise to contentious debates and struggles within these communities and from the standpoint of the participants themselves. It is at such junctures of crisis and contention that the asymmetry between the participant and observer perspectives breaks down, and the meaning of cultural membership must be reappropriated by struggling individuals themselves. II. Discourses of Culture in a Post-Rawlsian Deliberative Democracy Whereas Pensky questions my constructivist account in terms of its consequences for the relationship of minority and majority cultures against the background of extensive agreement with my views, Peritz is skeptical that premises drawn from social theory, cultural anthropology, feminism, and psychoanalysis have a role to play in the construction of public reasons and reasonable acceptability in liberal democracies at all. Presenting a powerful vision of a post-Rawlsian deliberative democracy, Peritz challenges the logic as well as elements of my theory construction. Peritz denies that assessing the legitimacy of cultural[ly] based claims to differential treatment democracy requires a general, critical theory of culture, and believes that my account of culture, whether social-scientifically accurate or not, does not have direct implications for policies and legal measures. According to Peritz, the idea of public reason requires that major institutions and policies be justified in terms that no free and equal citizens can reasonably reject. On the whole, Peritz wants to mark more sharply the distinction between critique and democratic theory.
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Let me respond to these important objections with the following question: is it reasonable to want to restrict the enlightenment function of all theoretical work, including post-Rawlsian democratic theory, to the construction of public reasons which will serve reasonable acceptability? I personally do not see a firewall between different strategies of theory construction and believe that democratic theory, whether Rawlsian or post-Rawlsian, itself rests on controversial premises, drawn from theories of rationality, moral philosophy, economic analysis, and decision theory. One need only recall here the early controversies around John Rawlss work, initiated by Michael Sandels critique of Rawlss ontological assumptions concerning unencumbered selves.2 Whether justice can be just political without being metaphysical is certainly still an open question. The very phrase reasonable acceptability entails commitments with regards logics of justification in science in contradistinction from politics, in theology in contradistinction from philosophy, etc. Surely Peritz cannot undertake to spell out his full construction of public reasons and reasonable acceptability in this limited contribution, so I cannot analyze the nature of the controversial philosophical premises he would have to rely upon to do so. Yet further considerations of ideals of agency, identity, autonomy, community, belonging, and the like, which Peritz considers essential to judge the claims of cultural politics, are themselves hardly any less controversial than the premises I have relied upon, drawn from sociology, cultural anthropology, literary and cultural criticism, feminism, and psychoanalytic theory. In short, neither the critical theorist nor the democratic theorist, whether Rawlsian or not, can avoid working with strong theoretical premises in developing a defensible and cogent perspective. So the issue seems to be less whether we rely on divergent theoretical traditions but, rather, which ones we rely upon. Nevertheless, I agree with Peritz that in the public space of liberal democracies the public reasons which will get mobilized by various groups on behalf of their identity/difference claims will need to pass the test of reasonable acceptability. For me this means in the first place that reasons will have a certain syntactic structure. Reasons would count as reasons because they could be defended as being in the best interest of all considered as equal moral and political beingsand we can justify this claim because we have established [it] through processes of public deliberation in which all affected by these norms and policies took part as participants in a discourse (140). Precisely because just like Peritz I am committed to a normative ideal of public justification, I move away from a theory of natural kinds, to use Penskys felicitous phrase, in evaluating the political logic of cultural movements. My critique of natural kinds theory of group identities leads Pensky to assume, however, that for me group identity is nothing other than discursively structured performances within a democratic public sphere. Peritz, by contrast, minimizes precisely this aspect of democratic contention in my account of cultural politics. However, neither interpretation is quite accurate. I do not believe that group identity is nothing
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other than a discursively structured performance a view which would be more appropriately identified with Judith Butler than with my position. Group identities are formed through institutional and structural positionings and constraints as well as through the experiences of the lifeworld. Unlike Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, and Iris Young, however, I do not see a direct line of mobilization leading from lifeworld-based group experiences to political and discursive agency. And like Peritz, I think that a democratic theory of cultural politics must focus on the logic of public claim-making (6881). Peritzs claim that simply conceiving of ones interests in a way that is rooted in a misunderstanding of culture seems a poor ground for disqualifying interests as publicly or politically relevant in a deliberative democracy is beside the point, for this was never a claim I made. What I focus on is how such interests get rearticulated in the public spheres of reason-giving in pluralistic societies such as to win the assent not only of the members of those cultures but of all others who share this public sphere. In many cases, such consensus will not be forthcoming and we will rely upon the human rights instruments, constitutional guarantees, and rule of law in liberal democracies. In many other cases, some of which I consider in my book, overlapping consensus will be hard to generate and a process of public contestation and resignification will unfold. Perhaps the real fault-line between the kind of critical intervention I advocate and the post-Rawlsian model Peritz (and to some extent Pensky) defends is this: I welcome the circulation of meaning among the political and legal institutions of liberal democracies, their civil societies, and the national as well as transnational public spheres of late democracies. Both Pensky and Peritz seem to want to draw more clearly a cordon sanitaire around the core commitments of cultural identities and to shelter them from such challenges. For me this is neither sociologically nor philosophically plausible. In the second half of his contribution, Peritz raises some fundamental objections less to the structure of my theory construction than to my reliance on a discursive theory of ethics in the justification of deliberative democracy. Peritz correctly observes that among the many contemporary adherents of deliberative democracy Dennis Thompson and Amy Gutmann, John Dryzek, and Iris Young3 there is no consensus around the philosophical foundations of this model. In The Claims of Culture I took as a stepping stone strategies for justifying discourse ethics which I had developed in works such as Situating the Self.4 Peritzs presentation of the linkages between my understanding of discourse theory, the three intermediate normative conditions of egalitarian reciprocity, self-ascription, and freedom of exit and association, and the dual-track of democratic legitimation are unobjectionable. I think it is perfectly fair and appropriate to ask whether all deliberative democracy models must share the same philosophical foundational commitments. Clearly they do not need to. However, as a contender in these debates, one will attempt to show that ones foundational commitments have institutional consequences and implications for political practice and vice versa, in a process much like a Rawlsian reflective equilibrium.
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It therefore puzzles me that Peritz sidesteps such foundational questions with the observation that the presence of a deliberative disposition (Dryzeks phrase) is a basic prerequisite for its political legitimacy. This then leads him to conclude that since such dispositions are not culturally invariant, deliberative democracys claim to intercultural validity must be questioned. This is a confusion of the conditions of applicability or contextualization of norms with the conditions of justification. The presence or absence of such a deliberative disposition is a historically and culturally contingent matter which certainly affects the capacity of cultures and societies to engage in such practices, but the argument for the justification of deliberative democracy must be free-standing. At times it seems that Peritz is marshalling the old chestnut of cultural relativism and accusing my deliberative democracy model of ethnocentrism; at other points his concern is that the discourse theory of democracy requires a defense of the cross-cultural validity of a particular account of practical justification as well as the comprehensive value of moral autonomy. This is correct. Even as a post-Rawlsian, Peritz is committed to separating the values of moral from those of political autonomy more sharply than I am. I have argued in many different contexts, and particularly as a feminist, that this separation would serve to shield in problematic fashion the private sphere and womens position within ethnocultural groups and minority cultures from scrutiny and that I was unwilling to accept this. The question is one of transformative moral and political practice: how to respect different understandings of the good life and individual autonomy among diverse groups while encouraging practices of womens equal citizenship and moral self-determination? How can we initiate transformative discourses in the public sphere of late-modern democracies which will transcend the disciplining, policing, and silencing of minority communities on the one hand, and the practices of an overly legalistic liberalism which encourages moral indifference in the name of moral tolerance, on the other hand? I am not sure that Peritz shares this transformative vision. In conclusion, Peritz suggests that to avoid the ethnocentric dilemma which, in his view, plagues the mutual acceptability standards in political justification, one must turn to substantive deliberative democracy. This view of substantive deliberative democracy is supposed to resolve the dilemma of the cross-cultural justification of standards of democratic legitimacy. But how exactly? Substantive deliberative democrats defend a body of values and ideals that shows them both to be widely acceptable in complex and diverse societies and capable of supporting a practice of democratic deliberation. But this strategy is circular: in the public-political culture of complex and diverse societies we find many values and beliefs, including xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiments, homophobia, ethnocentrism, etc. How do we know which values and principles to focus on and why? We can do so only because we bring to bear upon such complex realities normative standards which we have developed on independent grounds through philosophical justification and argumentation. The body of values and ideals which are widely acceptable in complex and diverse societies are themselves
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selected as being pertinent to the construction of ideals of reasonable acceptability on the basis of standards which are free-standing. These values and ideals do not justify these standards; at the most they illustrate their contextualization. Such normative standards are developed in conversations with and against moral, political, constitutional traditions and debates as well as philosophical conceptions of agency, autonomy, and equality. An interculturally constituted common culture, which Peritz appeals to, is a sociological variable, which is of course very desirable if it provides a lifeworld receptivity to the ideals of deliberative democracy; but by itself, it is not a philosophical principle which ought to lead to the justification or rejection of deliberative democracy. Peritzs model of substantive deliberative democracy is an odd mixture of philosophical desiderata and sociological wishful-thinking. Certainly, how, when, where, or why deliberative democracy can become the practice of a lifeworld is an important question, but this question must not be confused with the independent work of philosophical justification. III. Reclaiming Universalism In conclusion let me express my gratitude to Max Pensky and David Peritz for the depth and seriousness with which they have evaluated The Claims of Culture and its place within the evolution of my own work as well as contemporary critical social theory. For some time now, the universalistic assumptions of the discourse theory of ethics and of communicative action have been under attack from a variety of philosophical perspectives: whether it is from quarters deemed postmodernist or poststructuralist, feminist and postcolonial theory, or even a contextual neopragmatism, Habermasian critical theory has been deeply challenged. A major factor contributing to this skepticism against strong universalism has been precisely the lack of significant engagement in Habermass work with the claims of identity/difference movements. Although in recent years with the publication of The Inclusion of the Other5 Habermas has begun to address these questions, a reworking either of the discourse theory of democracy or of the program of communicative ethics in view of these developments has been lacking. The aim of The Claims of Culture was to address precisely this lacuna in the program of contemporary critical theory. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth have worked on these issues through the categories of redistribution and recognition; Rainer Forst has recently completed a work on toleration to engage with matters of identity/difference, whether culturally or religiously rooted.6 It is clear that with the challenges posed to the nation-state by identity/difference-driven movements within and globalization and transnationalization without, the normative and sociological questions of postnational identities will occupy us for some time to come. The institutional options which this new constellation gives rise to include: envisaging consociational or federalist models of power-sharing for dealing with intractable conflicts around the claims
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of territorially-based cultural identity groups; legal pluralization and the coexistence of distinct private and public law codes for distinct groups; and finally rethinking cultural pluralism in immigration and citizenship policies, both at the points of entry and along the movement toward integration and incorporation. Along with social theory, moral philosophy, and psychology, critical theory today needs to focus on these macro-questions of institutional design. This is an aspect of my argument which neither Pensky nor Peritz have chosen to comment upon but which, from my point of view, will also be central to the project of reclaiming universalism in critical theory in the future.7
NOTES 1. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). All page references in the text are to this edition. 2. Michael Sandel, The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self, Political Theory 12, no. 1 (1984): 81ff; John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 3. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Iris Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 4. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York and London: Routledge and Polity, 1992). 5. Jrgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. and tr. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 6. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? (New York and London: Verso, 2003); Rainer Forst, Toleranz im Konflikt. Geschichte, Gehalt und Gegenwart eines umstrittenen Begriffs (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). See also James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 7. I have pursued the discourse-theoretical justification of immigration and naturalization policies in The Rights of Others: Aliens, Citizens and Residents, John Seeley Memorial Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Melissa Williams has focused on these institutional matters in her review of The Claims of Culture in Ethics (forthcoming).

Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University. She is the author of The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996) and The Claims of Culture (2003).

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