Book ReviewsDavid Ingram, . Rights, Democracy, and Fulfillment in the Area of Identity Politics: Principled Compromises in a Compromised World. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld, 2004. Pp. 280. $75.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper)
Ethics, Oct 1, 2005
In recent years, much philosophical discussion of identity politics has focused on two questions.... more In recent years, much philosophical discussion of identity politics has focused on two questions. First, what, if any, is the relationship between a politics of identity, recognition, or difference and a politics of equality or redistribution? Philosophers such as Brian Barry and Nancy Fraser have worried that the focus on questions of recognition in much contemporary political philosophy distracts attention from what they see as the more important questions of material inequality. Second, what, if any, is the relationship between identity politics and democracy? Much work on the politics of identity aims to show that the claims of particular cultural, ethnic, and religious minorities to preserve their ways of life in the face of threats from a modern, liberal, and plural world have merit. The worry is that such claims to preservation fly in the face of a basic fact about engagement in democratic politics: it is transformative. In his intriguing new book, David Ingram suggests a novel approach to these two problems. As with any philosophical reconstruction of identity politics, the heart of Ingram’s arguments turns on its characterization of the injustice created by a denial of identity-based claims. Ingram argues that we should understand this injustice in terms of Lyotard’s notion of a “differend.” As Ingram presents Lyotard’s idea, a differend occurs when the language in which justice claims are made in a given institution, culture, or society prevents raising certain sorts of claims as claims of injustice. Thus, for instance, in a society with a more or less Lockean conception of property and property rights, the claims made by aboriginals to a particular parcel of land not because they have mixed their labor with it but because of its spiritual place in the lives of their people will find no purchase in the language of property law. The result is that such claims do not receive adequate hearing or must be translated into terms which fail to give them their full strength. Similarly, within many rights-based and welfarebased theories of justice, there is no room for making claims based on a group’s attachment to certain cultural, linguistic, or religious practices when these go beyond demands for freedom of conscience or assembly or individual claims to material support. What makes this analysis of identity politics particularly interesting in Ingram’s hands is that it provides solutions to the two questions mentioned above. In what is perhaps the most novel part of the argument, Ingram suggests that we see the effects of capitalism in terms of differends as well. This has the effect of answering the redistributivist charge in a manner different than many defenders of identity politics have done. The most common reply to the arguments of Fraser and Barry has been to point out the distributive effects of the politics
Uploads
Papers by Anthony Laden