During the past century, thinkers have explored “pluralism” under at least five different rubrics. Political pluralism emerged in Britain, and then migrated to America, as a reaction to doctrines of plenipotentiary state power. William James counterposed metaphysical pluralism to philosophies that claimed the ability to comprehend all truth in single, unified doctrines. Isaiah Berlin drew a distinction between monism and value pluralism—the thesis that worthy goods and principles are heterogeneous and cannot be combined into a single best way of living, for individuals or communities. James Madison enjoyed a midcentury revival in the theory of interest group pluralism. Most recently, John Rawls has cited the fact of pluralism—the diversity characteristic of modern societies under circumstances of liberty—as a challenge that legitimate liberal societies must address.
William Connolly and Richard Flathman are two well-known contemporary theorists who have endorsed pluralism, variously understood, as the best basis for both understanding and practicing politics. Their pluralism is more than a Rawlsian “fact”; diversity is to be prized as a positive good, not merely accepted as a (perhaps regrettable) necessity. Connolly is more drawn to what I have called metaphysical pluralism, Flathman to the idea of each individual as singular. Both invoke James in support of the view that the reality of the world exceeds the reach of any single perspective or view (Connolly, p. 71; Flathman, p. 24 and 188–89, n. 8).
This is not to suggest that our authors agree on everything, or even on essentials. Connolly describes himself as a “Deleuzian with a liberal streak” (p. 155), while Gilles Deleuze makes no appearance in Richard Flathman's book. This makes a difference. Connolly faithfully engages Deleuze's touchstones, especially Spinoza and Bergson, and appropriates their metaphysical insights on immanence and time for his own purposes. By contrast, Spinoza and Henri Bergson make only cameo appearances (and play no structural role) in Flathman's book, which addresses traditional themes of moral and political philosophy through analytical exegeses of Hannah Arendt, Stuart Hampshire, and Michael Oakeshott. Not surprisingly, James is the principal point of overlap.
The titles of the two books point to other differences. Connolly characterizes his book as an attempt to consolidate and extend ideas about pluralism that he has been developing over two decades (p. 5). Flathman seeks to contribute to “pluralist and liberal theory” (p. 17) and sees pluralism as both enriching and buttressing the “kind of liberalism” he hopes to defend. Flathman opposes both antiliberal pluralism and weakly pluralist liberalism in the name of a robust liberal pluralism (or pluralist liberalism). Whichever permutation of noun and adjective he might prefer, I doubt that he would be tempted to characterize his liberalism as a “streak.”
One may wonder whether someone who describes his relation to liberalism in Connolly's terms can adhere to it seriously. (To say that someone has a “wild streak,” after all, is to suggest that wildness is a subordinate and perhaps fugitive element of a character that tends in a different direction overall.) Connolly shares the belief of sober (realistic rather than utopian) liberals that decent social order, national or transnational, is a fragile achievement not to be taken for granted, and he therefore rejects as potentially “disastrous” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's call for the radical transformation of “Empire” (p. 155). Although he prefers Spinoza's account of evil to Augustine's (he calls himself a “neo-Spinozist of sorts” [p. 45]), he is determined to preserve what he calls the “language of evil” to identify the “most horrible and devastating actions taken by some human beings against others” (p. 22). He rejects what he calls “unitarianism” (also known as monism) as the basis of decent politics under modern circumstances: The attempt to impose a single creed, overtly religious or ostensibly secular, on the diverse populace of a territory is bound to spawn evil, in the form of “persecution, forced conversions, refugees, boat people, ethnic cleansing, and worse” (p. 29). On this view, he argues, the most basic problem of political ethics is not how to “get participants to obey a universal moral source that they … profess in common” but, rather, how to “negotiate honorable public settlements in settings where interdependent partisans confess different existential faiths and final sources of morality” (pp. 33–34).
Connolly's goal, or norm, is thus a version of modus vivendi in which citizens arrive at common actions on the basis of diverse motives and reasons (p. 9). What makes it “honorable,” I take it, is that no group is compelled to give up its creed in the name of another's. It is when a group refuses to accept this settlement—resorts to violence although others seek neither to silence nor colonize them—that a political order based on modus vivendi can use force in legitimate self-defense.
It is a bit harder to say what makes Connolly's form of modus vivendi politics liberal. As far as I can tell, he does not invoke the idea of individual rights. Indeed, he would seem to have no argument against (and perhaps no objection to) the contention that groups within a liberal order may organize themselves illiberally, so long as they do not prevent or disable dissenting members from leaving. He insists, however, that pluralism is not the same as relativism. While pluralists practice, and celebrate, a form of tolerance, they must also “set limits to tolerance” (p. 42).
Connolly's main connection with the liberal tradition, however, comes not through endorsing its principles but rather appealing to a specific “sensibility.” One is or is not a liberal more on the basis of how one believes than what one believes. Liberals acknowledge that their beliefs, however well supported and deeply held, lack self-evidence for others and resist definitive demonstration. Liberals understand that what seems certain to them, from the inside, inevitably appears contestable from the outside. This acceptance helps nurture a distinctive stance toward difference, one of “forbearance and presumptive generosity” (p. 64). By contrast, beliefs held ungenerously generate what Connolly calls “evil within faith”—the tendency to define one's faith as “absolutely authoritative for others” and to use violence “until it is professed by everyone” (p. 18).
This distinction invites a further question: What is it about holding belief that supports the sensibility of generosity or its opposite? Connolly's answer runs as follows. Each of us is inhabited by an “existential faith” that defines our identity (p. 26). Confrontation with others' faith can evoke doubts about the adequacy of our own, destabilizing the secure sense of our identity. The ensuing internal disturbance can lead to the demand for “revenge” against the source of the disturbance (p. 27). The best antidote to this spirit of repression is the ability to accept some risk to the stability of one's own identity (p. 31). Connolly does not quite tell us what makes possible the capacity to accept such a risk. We may speculate that it has something to do with fortitude, or perhaps an inner strength that is secure because it is flexible rather than brittle.
However this may be, the stance of receptive generosity helps define the central civic virtues needed to sustain a pluralist political order, virtues that the pluralist regime may legitimately single out for reinforcement through “education and discipline.” Indeed, Connolly insists, the “expansive pluralism” he endorses “supports the dissemination of general virtues across diverse faiths” (p. 48; his italics). This is a key respect in which pluralism and relativism part company, and it may well involve greater modification of the internal character of many faiths—a more substantial regime-driven homogenization and domestication—than Connolly acknowledges.
It would be an exaggeration to say that this emphasis on pluralist civic virtue marks a divide between Connolly and Flathman, who acknowledges that the pluralist thinkers he investigates (James, Arendt, Hampshire, and Oakeshott) all underscore the importance of certain qualities of character for a viable and worthy pluralist order (p. 180). While the endorsement of “vigorous individualities” is “pluralism at its most inspiring” and should be the “centerpiece of liberalism,” each individuality must be “tempered” in response to being “situated” among diverse others (p. 185). In Flathman's view, however, this tempering must be undertaken with caution and even reluctance. In particular, there is insufficient reason for liberals to emphasize rationality and deliberation at the expense of the passions, emotions, and diverse sensibilities that define so much of the plurality we actually encounter (pp. 178–79).
Flathman is too good a reader of Oakeshott to reduce liberalism to an ethos, sensibility, or canon of civic virtues. Rules, laws, and institutions matter, all the more so as liberal societies seek to secure the coexistence of individuals and associations with competing purposes. Flathman wrestles with Oakeshott's central distinction between civil and enterprise associations, ultimately concluding that Oakeshott's theory of obligation as “adverbial” (roughly, pertaining to the way we act rather than the end we seek) is incomplete at best (p. 175). Flathman does not say how much this conclusion complicates the basic thrust of Oakeshott's account (quite a bit, in my view). Nor does he go into detail concerning the balance to be struck among institutions, virtues, and sensibilities in sustaining the pluralist liberalism he prizes. Simply contrasting the outlook of pluralist thinkers with liberals who emphasize the role of “mechanical devices and arrangements” (p. 181) hardly settles the matter.
It is striking that neither of these books engages the other major scene of pluralist contestation today—whether Berlinian value pluralism supports, undermines, or is neutral with respect to liberal democracy. But it would be churlish to conclude my review on that note; each helps us understand the complex ways in which the pluralist sensibility opens the path to a richer and more psychologically realistic liberalism.
