Review article

Can a Popperean be a Multiculturalist?

Zoran Kurelić ; Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

Abstract

Author shows how the epistemological concept of incommensurability was turned into a key category in political theory and then evaluates the cogency of category as it is used in contemporary critiques of liberalism. After recounting the debate between Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend over the implications of incommensurability for the understanding of progress in science, the paper examines the multicultural attack on liberalism in which the concept of incommensurability plays an important role. The paper argues that incommensurability-based anti-liberal critiques pose a serious problem for a certain type of liberal theory, but not for liberalism in general. Feyerabend and others, each in their own way, demonstrate that liberal neutrality and universalism are not really neutral and universal, but derived from a certain tradition. However, even if we accept their insights, it does not follow that the essentially liberal culture of consensus-building political dialogues is undesirable, or impossible. The author believes that the political concept of incommensurability has a variety of implications. As a term used in philosophical attacks on liberal theory, its value is clear but limited. Karl Popper can not be accused of false neutrality, or a naive universalism. At the same time, when the concept of incommensurability is used to defend a multi-cultural relativism, it tends to subvert one of the foundations of contemporary liberal societies – the will to live together. In some contexts, the concept of incommensurability supports a right to remain different that paradoxically reinforces the most powerfully illiberal ideology of our time – nationalism. Can a Popperean be a multiculturalist? Of course, not.

Keywords

liberalism; multiculturalism; nation state; incommensurability; universalism; epistemology; nationalism; Karl Popper

Hrčak ID:

23424

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/23424

Publication date:

30.7.2003.

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