Book Review The Claims of Culture- Equality, and Diversity in a Global Era Seyla Benhabib

The world in 2020 is one of the contradictions. On one hand, we are experiencing a global pandemic, whose rapid and dangerous spread can be attributed to a single phenomenon- globalization. And yet, the socio-political context of the world today can be distinctly characterized by an increasing phobia between groups and communities to preserve their ‘culture’, an ever-increasing need to secure boundaries, xenophobia, and intolerance, in national and international politics. Indeed, the need for greatest interaction juxtaposed with the need for maximum preservation has never been more heightened as it is seen in global society today and while much of the conflict around us today is rooted in identity politics and culture, we rarely question the idea of ‘culture’, rather using culture as the beginning and the end of all conversations, discourses, conflict, and policy, be it national and international.  This makes Seyla Benhabib’s book “The Claims of Culture- Equality and Diversity in a Global Age” extremely relevant and important for political science scholarship today.

Originally published in 2002, Benhabib, the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University explores the world, specifically identity politics, in a global age with the core ideas of postmodernism and postcolonialism in place, drawing mainly from Jurgen Habermas’s idea of culture, who she quotes and contests extensively in the book. Benhabib takes her time with the first two chapters exploring the normative and philosophical differences when it comes to defining and characterizing ‘culture’. While the entire book thematically runs on a postmodern and postcolonial vein, as it acknowledges the differences in democracies and the different interpretations of equality and justice in the Western liberal world and the postcolonial nations like Israel, Turkey, and India, Benhabib goes a step further with her exploration as she firstly challenges the perception of ‘Western Liberal Democracy’ as a homogeneous whole and of Europe and the United States as its bastions. Using multiple examples, such as immigration policy, the issue of Aboriginal people in Canada, Islamic scarf controversy in France (l’ affaire du foulard), and the case of Cultural Defense in the United States, Benhabib points out the flaws and internal contradictions, and the stark differences within Western countries and their treatment of democracy.

Furthermore, Benhabib takes this idea forward on a more micro-level analysis as she delves into the question of culture, its meaning, borders, and interactions, as she successfully deconstructs the idea of culture itself using the ‘sociological constructivist’ account of culture. She begins with a historical tracing of the etymological and normative roots of culture, specifically beginning with the emergence of Western modernity, capitalism, rationalism, and the rise of bureaucratic administration. The author cites Johann Gotliebb Herder, who interpreted ‘Kultur’ as ‘the shared values, meanings, linguistic signs and symbols of people, itself considered a unified and homogeneous entity’; moving on to the idea of  “mass culture” that emerged as a discourse by scholars such as Hannah Arendt and the Frankfurt School during the period of the World Wars in Europe. Finally, Benhabib arrives at the present notion of culture which is ‘an egalitarian understanding of culture’ drawn from social anthropologist critical of Eurocentric assumptions and cultural presumptions such as Claude Levi-Strauss, who viewed culture as “the totality of social systems and practices of signification, representation, and symbolism that have an autonomous logic of their own, a logic separated from and not reducible to the intentions of those through whose actions and doings it emerges and is reproduced”. She further adds that in contemporary times, culture has been democratized by British social and anthropology and French structuralism and that the notion of ‘autonomous culture’ is intrinsically linked to the notion of identity.

Today, in institutional politics, civil society, and political society, each human group having some kind of identity is something that is naturally assumed, and rather it is considered important for culture and cultural differences to be preserved and propagated by both conservatives and liberals in democracies. And yet, Benhabib deconstructs the historically evolved concept of culture by pointing out fundamental flaws in its premises- one, that cultures are clear and distinguishable wholes; two, that cultures correspond with population groups; and three, that even if culture and population do not correspond, this poses no problems for politics and policy. Benhabib calls this the ‘reductionist sociology of culture’ that threatens to essentialize the idea of culture as ‘belonging’ to an ethnic group or race with distinct boundaries. Throughout the book, Benhabib challenges this essentialization of culture that manifests from normative theory to larger public policy with her defense of ‘sociological constructivism’ as an explanation of cultural differences. She does this by the ‘narrative view of action and culture’ which separates and distinguishes the standpoint of the social observer, and the social agent. Benhabib asserts that similar to the many ways an observer can describe a culture, there are also many ways that a participant or a member can experience that culture. Thus minority groups in human society end up taking multiple political positions such as Christian gay males, conservative-libertarian lesbians, and Black Muslims. Cultural differences within a cultural group are real and they run very deep and thus strong multiculturalism or mosaic multiculturalism is wrong as it demands inter-cultural justice based on the preservation of cultures that have identifiable boundaries. Rather ‘sociological constructivism’ follows Habermas’s idea that only those normative and institutional arrangements are valid where all those affected by its consequences can be part of a practical discourse within it.

With these ideas in mind, Benhabib showcases the flaws in both democratic theorists who support the public manifestation of cultural identities and multiculturalist theorists who want to classify and name groups, and thus both engaging in some form of essentialization of culture; and thus Benhabib goes on to defend her own model of a ‘universalist deliberative democracy model’ that can work with the demands and arguments for legal pluralism in societies with strong ethnic and cultural cleavages, as long as they do no violate three normative conditions:

1. Egalitarian reciprocity, the idea that members of minority cultural and ethnic groups must not be entitled to a lesser degree of rights due to their membership
2. Voluntary self-ascription, the idea that in a multicultural society an individual must not be assigned membership to a group by virtue of birth, and that self-ascription and self-identification be allowed to the maximum degree
3. Freedom of exit and association, the idea that an individual’s freedom to exit an ascriptive group must be unrestricted, and that an individual’s wish to remain part of the group even while outmarrying must be respected.

Following Habermas, Benhabib defends a dual-track approach to multiculturalism with her deliberative democracy model, where contrary to political liberalism, the official or institutional sphere of representative democracy is not the only site of political contestations and of opinion or will formation, rather deliberative democracy focuses on social movements and the civil. Cultural and political associations of the unofficial public sphere as well. Finally, at the end of the first two chapters, Benhabib also explores another important theme that becomes very relevant in the succeeding chapters, that of universalism and ethnocentrism. Benhabib calls upon the important recognition of the ‘radical hybridity and polyvocality of all cultures’ and that right to cultural self-expression needs to be based upon, rather than seen as an alternative to universally recognized citizenship rights. Benhabib departs from the traditional idea of ‘universalism’ and rather associates it with the principle that all human beings regardless of differences are moral beings, are equally entitled to moral respect, and entitled to certain basic rights, thus advocating a model of “complex cultural dialogue”.

In the third and fourth chapters, Benhabib explores the popular theories surrounding the rise of identity politics, specifically, Charles Taylor’s idea of the “politics of recognition”, a phrase widely used in contemporary debates, and the many ambiguities of the word ‘recognition’, which according to the author leaves a gap between different levels of analysis and evaluation, since “individual claims to authentic self-expression need not run in tandem with collective aspirations to cultural recognition” and the gendered perspective of identity politics and citizenship. Moreover, Benhabib contexts that different struggles for recognition impose competing claims upon an individual, for example, almost all nationalist movements give lesser priorities to the needs and recognition of women’s movements within it. The politics of recognition of collectives thus almost always subjugate an individual’s search for authentic selfhood, and historically the pursuit of collective goals or nationalism has come at the cost of sexual, cultural, and ethnic minorities. Thus Benhabib endorses Will Kymlicka’s argument of endorsement of minority rights in so far as them being consistent with respect and freedom of the individual. Rather, Benhabib uses Nancy Fraser’s conception of redistribution, focusing on injustices defined as socioeconomic and recognition, focusing on cultural injustices, as ‘paradigms of justice’ as a better alternative, that also lies in tandem with her own model of complex cultural dialogue.

A feminist scholar herself, Benhabib elaborately delves into the multi-faceted contestations of gender and citizenship, taking three prime case studies; the Islamic scarf controversy in France where two schoolgirls were expelled from school for wearing the hijab, and thus according to the school, having violated the secular principle of ‘laicite’; the Shah Bano case in India where a divorced Muslim woman, Shah Bano reached the doorsteps of the judiciary for her legal right of alimony and financial support by her ex-husband, thus exposing the contradiction between personal and civil laws in India; and finally the case of ‘cultural defense’ in the United States, extended to people convicted of crimes who belong to minority communities (racial and immigrant) for lesser sentences or even acquittal. Through an analysis of these cases in three very different democratic nations, Benhabib displayed artfully how in the negotiations and trade-offs between demands for cultural self-determination and preserving egalitarian democratic structures, it is often the rights and lives of women that have to be compromised.

In France, an individual’s right to self-expression, in this case, the Muslim schoolgirls who chose to wear their hijabs) was compromised to uphold and maintain the national principle of secularism in the public sphere. In India, although the Madhya Pradesh High Court and the Supreme Court recognized Shah Bano’s right to maintenance under the Code of Criminal Procedure, the Indian parliament, under immense pressure from the All India Muslim Personal Law Board who perceived of the judgment as a threat to community’s ownership of personal laws, later overruled the judgment by passing the Muslims Women’s Act of 1986 that only provided for maintenance of a divorced Muslim woman for a period of 90 days after the divorce. Finally, in the United States, the Federal Court recognized the ‘cultural defense’ of a Vietnamese man who abducted and raped a Laotian-American student and claimed that such violence was an accepted custom in his culture for choosing a bride. The man was sentenced to 120 days in prison while the victim was given a monetary reparation. As Benhabib writes, “women and their bodies are the symbolical-cultural site upon which human societies inscript their moral order. In virtue of their capacity for sexual reproduction, women mediate between nature and culture, between the animal species to which we all belong and the symbolic order that makes us into cultural beings”.

In the final two chapters and the conclusion, Benhabib discusses and elaborates upon her deliberative democracy model based upon the principle of ‘discourse ethics’, comparing it with the Rawlsian model of ‘public reason’ and Barry’s model of multicultural justice, and how it can be applied to real-world situations for a better and more equitable balance between cultural rights and democracy and the many ways democracy has been questioned in a globalized world. While Rawls specifically differentiated the public and the private sphere, deeming the public sphere as one of ‘reason’ where discussions of equality and justice were most feasible, Barry advances a model of group-based rights for minorities in the form of affirmative action. In contrast, the deliberative democracy model is a two-track model that accepts legal interventions by the state and also endorses ‘discourses’, normative dialogue and contestation in the civil public sphere as essential for a multicultural democratic polity. There is no guarantee that moral and political dialogues will provide normative consensus, and thus it is assumed that if it does fail one can always seek the help of the law. Benhabib ultimately maintains that the deliberative democratic model must follow the conditions of ‘egalitarian reciprocity’, ‘voluntary self-ascription’, and ‘freedom of exit and association’.

Finally, in the last chapter, Benhabib talks about the clashes of globalization, identity politics, and democracy in Europe, especially after the formation of the European Union, and with the phenomenon of ‘reverse-globalization’, where ‘the periphery migrates to the center’ and as a result weakening residency, cultural identity, and citizenship claims. Europe has always been perceived as an idea, a concept, and a myth that represented liberal values and democracy. Today the sense of borderlessness in Europe has expanded rapidly as the number of immigrants has increased multi-fold since the end of the Cold War. With the establishment of the European Union, citizenship has been two-tiered; citizenship to a particular member-state of the EU and the Union Citizenship, i.e. citizenship to the EU itself which grants immigrants and foreigners membership, rights and benefits. However, Benhabib brings into light the absence of political rights, especially the right to run for and hold office that is often not extended to foreigners who are granted citizenship and the complex sociology of citizenship. In the European context, a foreigner’s claim to citizenship is established not only through hierarchical decisions but by becoming a part of the civil society. Finally, Benhabib acknowledges that the ‘state-centric’ system of the 19th and 20th century is undergoing a deep reconfiguration, where the lines between the concepts of nationality and citizenship are increasingly getting blurred- ‘a disaggregation effect’. At the same time, globalization has created discourses compatible with democratic citizenship- worldwide discourses on human rights, transnational networks of solidarity on issues like the environment, women’s and children’s rights, spread of global youth culture. Benhabib ends the book taking into consideration the rise of the rise of fundamentalism in a globalized world and that the greatest challenge for contemporary democracies will be to retain the civil liberties, political freedoms, and representative deliberative institutions through negotiations of ‘complex cultural dialogues’.

My main point of contention of the arguments provided in the book was the fact that Benhabib’s model of ‘deliberative democracy’ through ‘complex cultural dialogues’, seemed suited for a western democratic framework, where the ‘discourse’ between different groups in the civil society can be realized in a country such as Switzerland, where owing to the low population, great democratic participation and high levels of literacy, citizens and groups can engage in such a dialogue. Moreover, Benhabib does not take into consideration the power dynamics between various groups and communities in a society that prevent such dialogues and discourses to be truly democratic. Finally, Benhabib seemed to not acknowledge the bias of governments, when it comes to national discourses, where for example, a Republican government may never accept to hear the demands of Islamic/immigrant/LGBTQ+ groups. The model of deliberative democracy where discourses in the civil society translate to public policy seem plausible in a state where representatives, politicians, institutions such as the Senate or a Parliament do not possess any predisposed bias towards the groups that seek recognition in an unequal society.

Shromona Jana

Intern AGA