Equal Recognition

by Alan Patten

Conflicting claims about culture are a familiar refrain of political life in the contemporary world. On one side, majorities seek to fashion the state in their own image, while on the other, cultural minorities press for greater recognition and accommodation. Theories of liberal democracy are at odds about the merits of these competing claims. Multicultural liberals hold that particular minority rights are a requirement of justice conceived of in a broadly liberal fashion. Critics, in turn, have questioned the motivations, coherence, and normative validity of such defenses of multiculturalism. In "Equal Recognition," Alan Patten reasserts the case in favor of liberal multiculturalism by developing a new ethical defense of minority rights.Patten seeks to restate the case for liberal multiculturalism in a form that is responsive to the major concerns of critics. He describes a new, nonessentialist account of culture, and he rehabilitates and reconceptualizes the idea of liberal neutrality and uses this idea to develop a distinctive normative argument for minority rights. The book elaborates and applies its core theoretical framework by exploring several important contexts in which minority rights have been considered, including debates about language rights, secession, and immigrant integration.Demonstrating that traditional, nonmulticultural versions of liberalism are unsatisfactory, "Equal Recognition" will engage readers interested in connections among liberal democracy, nationalism, and current multicultural issues.

Genres: Philosophy

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Alan Patten is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. A citizen of Canada and the United States, he obtained his B.A. from McGill University in 1988, and went on to do an M.A. at the University of Toronto and an M. Phil. and D. Phil. (1996) at the University of Oxford. He previously taught at McGill University and the University of Exeter, and spent the spring of 2004 teaching two graduate seminars at the State Islamic University of Indonesia in Jakarta.

He is the author of Hegel’s Idea of Freedom (Oxford, 1999), which won the APSA First Book Prize in Political Theory and the C.B. Macpherson Prize awarded by the Canadian Political Science Association. He is the co-editor, with Will Kymlicka, of Language Rights and Political Theory (Oxford, 2003). His articles include “Political Theory and Language Policy”, Political Theory (2001), “Democratic Secession from a Multinational State”, Ethics (2002), “Liberal Neutrality and Language Policy” Philosophy & Public Affairs (2003), and "Humanist Roots of Linguistic Nationalism", History of Political Thought (2006). He is currently completing a book entitled Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Cultural Rights. He has a longer-term project underway on nationalism and the history of political thought.

Professor Patten currently serves as Associate Chair, Department of Politics, and as member of the Executive Committee of the University Center for Human Values. He is the editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs.