• Age: 18
• Grade: 12

How should democratic societies define justice for cultural minority groups, and how might such justice be secured? This book is a nuanced and judicious response to a critical issue in political theory?the challenge of according equal respect and recognition to minority groups and accommodating their claims for special cultural rights and arrangements.

Monique Deveaux contends that liberal theorists fail to grant enough importance to identity and the content of cultural life in their attempts to conceive of political institutions for plural societies. She takes to task the spectrum of theories on pluralism, from weak and strong theories of tolerance through neutralist liberalism to comprehensive liberalism, and finally to arguments for deliberative politics that build on Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics. The solution proposed here is "deliberative liberalism," which incorporates both critically reconceived principles of deliberative democracy and central liberal norms of consent and respect.
Cultural conflicts in democratic societies include clashes involving Aboriginal peoples, ethnic and linguistic minorities, and recent immigrant groups in Europe, North America, and Australia. Drawing on examples from several countries, Deveaux concludes that genuine respect and recognition for cultural minorities requires full inclusion in existing institutions and the right to help shape the political culture of their own societies through democratic dialogue and deliberation.

Monique Deveaux's profile page

Monique Deveaux is Associate Professor of Political Science at Williams College.

This is a pithy little book, and Deveaux's analysis of how existing models of liberalism and democracy fail to secure rich cultural pluralism is enlightening.

The Law and Politics Book Review

Debates about cultural pluralism have dominated democratic theory in the last decades.... Monique Deveaux offers us a comprehensive assessment of these debates, considering proponents of liberal toleration, liberal perectionists such as Kymlicka and Raz, deliberative democrats such as Young and Benhabib, as well as offering her own deliberative brand of liberalism. Her discussion of these arguments is judicious and subtle.... One of the merits of Deveaux's reconstruction of the debates about cultural pluralism is to show that a tolerant, respectful and multiperspectival polity needs to develop institutions that express robust normative commitments to respect and equality.

Philosophy in Review

The writing style is very sophisicated.... The text appears to have been well edited and contains a large and useful bibliography. Recommended for graduate and faculty collections.

Choice

Monique Deveaux's principal claims in this extremely clear and well-written book is that if modern liberal democracies are to do justice to the claims of minority cultural groups in their midst, they are going to have to be much more democratic, and perhaps somewhat less liberal, than they have heretofore been.

Ethics

Based on her own experiences as a citizen of Canada, a country in which cultural minorities play an important role in social and political issues, Monique Deveaux's Cultural Pluralism and Dilemmas of Justice stands as a relevent work in the field of political science.... Deveaux's ideas seem to be fair and well-argued, positing deliberative liberalism as a viable alternative to traditional liberal theories.

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