Resurrecting the Pluralist Universe

Pluralism has seen a major revival in the recent theoretical literature. After years of thorough critique, a purge of sorts, and, finally, relative obscurity, political and social theorists have begun to resurrect pluralist themes, even if they often do not acknowledge the term. The argument here is that much within this resurrection-conscious or unconsciousowes something to an articulation of pluralism that existed before the postwar, liberal variant that is so often seen as the whole of political pluralism. Theorists such as William James and Mary Parker Follett initiated an examination of pluralist themes before being interrupted, and ignored, by the postwar generation. This essay focuses first on the contemporary resurrection of the epistemological foundation of pluralist thought, what James called "radical empiricism." It then goes on to examine two key issues, central to early pluralists, that have been revived and expanded upon by recent theorists: the tension in reconciling pluralist difference with political unity, and the difficulties in designing ethics and practices of communication across the diversity endemic to pluralism. At a recent regional political science conference, a roundtable was scheduled with a single word as the subject: pluralism. The room was packed, but the atmosphere was very different than one might have expected from such a forum three decades ago. Back then, pluralism was being attacked for its narrow notion of interest, the limited understanding of political action, the exclusion of various groups, the dismissal of the political power and the economic resources of elites, and its flawed concept of tolerance, among other things (see, for example, the collections edited by Connolly 1969, and Wolff, Moore, and Marcuse 1965). This time, however, the subject was, in essence, the resurrection of the term. In summing up her sense of the meaning of the gathering around pluralism, Kathy Ferguson argued that it might actually be one of those concepts once considered lost that could be retrievable-rescued from the limitations of the postwar generation and the scourge of later critics. By that point, however, as demonstrated by both the turnout of the gathering and, I will argue, the contemporary literature, that process of resurrection was already well underway. After years of thorough critique, a purge of sorts, and, finally, relative obscurity, political and social theorists have begun to return to the term "pluralism." Various notions of critical pluralism, radical pluralism, postmodern pluralism, cultural pluralism, reciprocal pluralism, pluralist democracy, and, my favorite, "post-modern pluralism in a post-Marxist form" (McClure 1992: 113) are flourishing. William Connolly, one of the earliest critics of the limits and "bias" of pluralism, has returned to reclaim the meaning of pluralism-a more critical pluralism, he argues-and its focus on difference and multiplicity (Connolly 1991). Chantal Mouffe has been cross-pollinating postmarxism with a revived pluralism. And there has been a renewed interest in the decision-making mechanisms necessary for these revived and revised pluralisms to function (see, for example, Bohman 1995; Cohen 1993). The point here, however, is not just that the term has been resurrected by various theorists in a number of different forms and incarnations. It is often the case that the concepts of an earlier form of pluralism appear without an acknowledgment of either the term pluralism or the origins of the thought. As Gregor McLennan (1995: 78) notes in his examination of contemporary pluralism, pluralist themes are central to a number of critical discourses. Pluralism, for example, "lies at the heart of much of what is tangible and valuable in postmodernist social theory" (p. 5). There is a greater discursive continuity between the first generation of pluralism1 (and recent theories than is either acknowledged or realized by contemporary proponents-either those who explicitly call themselves pluralist or those that prefer terms like difference democrat, discursive democrat, cyborg feminist, or others. …