Democracy and Difference (PDF)

A new emphasis on diversity and difference is displacing older
myths of nation or community. A new attention to gender, race,
language or religion is disrupting earlier preoccupations with
class. But the welcome extended to heterogeneity can bring with it
a disturbing fragmentation and closure. Can we develop a vision of
democracy through difference: a politics that neither denies group
identities nor capitulates to them?

In this volume, Anne Phillips develops the feminist challenge to
exclusionary versions of democracy, citizenship and equality.
Relating this to the crisis in socialist theory, the growing unease
with the pretensions of Enlightenment rationality, and the recent
recuperation of liberal democracy as the only viable politics, she
builds on debates within feminism to address general questions of
difference. When democracies try to wish away group difference and
inequality, they fail to meet their egalitarian promise. When
yearnings towards an undifferentiated unity become the basis for
radical politics and change, too many groups drop out of the
picture.

Through her critical discussions of recent feminist and
socialist theory Anne Phillips rejects this democracy of denial.
She also warns, however, of the dangers on the other side. The
simpler celebrations of diversity risk freezing group differences
as they are, encouraging a patchwork of local identities from which
people can speak only to themselves. Her arguments then combine in
a powerful restatement of the case for a more active and
participatory democracy. It is only through enhanced communication
and discussion that people can respect and learn from their
differences.