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SOURCE: “On Pluralism,” in Raritan: A Quarterly Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, Summer, 1997, pp. 83-95.
In the following critique, Furbank argues that Berlin's concept of pluralism is politically invalid.
We have heard a great deal about “pluralism” in the last decade or two, and it would be easy to gain the impression that pluralism was not only an ethical concept but a political one—that, politically speaking, it has something of value to add to democracy and is, indeed, a rival to it. I want to argue that this is a fallacy.
Of course, it is not instantly clear what people mean by pluralism. Isaiah Berlin, who claims Herder to have been in a sense the inventor of pluralism as a doctrine, defines it as
the belief not merely in the multiplicity, but in the incommensurability, of the values of different cultures and societies and, in addition, in the incompatibility...
This section contains 4,582 words (approx. 16 pages at 300 words per page) |
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