Identity in Democracy
-
- $29.99
-
- $29.99
Publisher Description
Written by one of America's leading political thinkers, this is a book about the good, the bad, and the ugly of identity politics.Amy Gutmann rises above the raging polemics that often characterize discussions of identity groups and offers a fair-minded assessment of the role they play in democracies. She addresses fundamental questions of timeless urgency while keeping in focus their relevance to contemporary debates: Do some identity groups undermine the greater democratic good and thus their own legitimacy in a democratic society? Even if so, how is a democracy to fairly distinguish between groups such as the KKK on the one hand and the NAACP on the other? Should democracies exempt members of some minorities from certain legitimate or widely accepted rules, such as Canada's allowing Sikh members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to wear turbans instead of Stetsons? Do voluntary groups like the Boy Scouts have a right to discriminate on grounds of sexual preference, gender, or race?
Identity-group politics, Gutmann shows, is not aberrant but inescapable in democracies because identity groups represent who people are, not only what they want--and who people are shapes what they demand from democratic politics. Rather than trying to abolish identity politics, Gutmann calls upon us to distinguish between those demands of identity groups that aid and those that impede justice. Her book does justice to identity groups, while recognizing that they cannot be counted upon to do likewise to others.
Clear, engaging, and forcefully argued, Amy Gutmann's Identity in Democracy provides the fractious world of multicultural and identity-group scholarship with a unifying work that will sustain it for years to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Are identity politics a needed defense against the tyranny of the majority, or a divisive impediment to the realization of individual rights and the common good? A little of both, and much more, according to this probing volume of political theory. Gutmann, a political philosopher, examines a wide variety of"identity groups" including religions, embattled cultural groups like French-Canadians, socially formative voluntary groups like the Boy Scouts; and"ascriptive groups" who bear an involuntary marker of difference, like racial minorities, homosexuals and the disabled. She argues that overlapping group identities are an inescapable part of every individual's political makeup, for good and ill. Identity groups have been in the forefront of efforts to expand individual rights and opportunity, she notes, and America's excessive economic inequality is in part due to the absence of a working-class identity politics that might bolster unions and demand more redistribution of wealth. On the other hand, identity groups like the Ku Klux Klan and orthodox religious groups that seek to curtail the rights of women pose a serious problem for democratic polities. Rather than being scapegoated or lumped in with other interest groups, identity groups must be carefully assessed to discern their alignment with fundamental democratic values of freedom, equality and opportunity. Gutmann's is a serious attempt to reconcile classical liberalism with contemporary multiculturalism. While it will not please ideologues on any side, her clear, nuanced and humane approach brings many valuable insights to this contentious debate.
