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502 Book reviews / History of European Ideas 29 (2003) 475512

The contestability of culture. The claims of culture equality and diversity in the global era
Seyla Benhabib; Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002

The rights of strangers theories of international hospitality, the global community and
political justice since Vitoria
Georg Cavallar; Ashgate, Hampshire, 2002

Can liberal pluralism be exported? western political theory and ethnic relations in
Eastern Europe
Will Kymlicka and Opalski Magda; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001

Theory in recent times has been marked with a concern for issues of cultural
hybridity, managing increasing diversity, and the impact of both on questions of
identity. In a world where global integration is seen to be taking place alongside
sociocultural disintegration and one of the prominent issues framing contemporary
debates on justice and equality is that of migration, both legal and illegal, the focus
of the above books on such issues is not surprising. This review article looks briey
at the arguments set out by the various authors and focuses its attention on the
underlying theses that inform those arguments believing that the uncritical use of
concepts limits the efcacy of the overall arguments regardless of what exactly is
being argued.
Cavallar sets out a study of the ways in which ideas of political justice, the global
community and international hospitality have been thought about by European
authors from Vitoria to Kant framing his analysis of these authors in terms of their
relevance to contemporary debates on human rights, state sovereignty and the
problems of immigration. He starts by outlining the pertinent issues of international
ethics and law and then focuses on issues such as ethical relativism and pluralism and
the search for minimal transcultural moral standards. The main body of the book
addresses how the selected authors dealt with ideas of justice and international
hospitality and Cavallar is concerned, in particular, with how ideas of natural law
gradually transformed in the works of Hume, Smith and Kant to become the basis
for the modern doctrine of human rights. In conclusion, he suggests that whilst these
past texts do not solve our immediate problems y they may be a key to our self-
awareness (p. 393): implying support for his overall thesis that claims the existence
of a universal standard of justice supplemented with contextual and relative concrete
judgements. Whilst indicating minimal awareness of his own hopeless eurocentrism
(p. 400) and briey referencing debates on the overemphasis of difference that creates
the myth of the Other, Cavallars underpinning assumptions and explicit focus on
particular texts do not go any way to exonerating him of replicating those very same
ideas.
With this, Cavallar intersects with Will Kymlicka whose book is an edited
collection that purports to explore issues of pluralism and minority rights in the
context of understanding and evaluating ethnic conicts in Eastern Europe. The
volume contains a theoretical exposition of Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe by
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Book reviews / History of European Ideas 29 (2003) 475512 503

Kymlicka at the outset, followed by a number of commentaries by academics for

whom Eastern Europe is their site of expertise and ends with a reply by Kymlicka to
the preceding authors. The intention of the volume is to examine the feasibility of
exporting Western minority rights standards to the rest of the world and to
promote a dialogue with intellectuals and leaders from other parts of the world
about issues of minority rights (p. 5). Kymlickas paper examines the types of
ethnocultural groups found in Western democracies and focuses on the difference
between the rights of immigrants and those of national minorities. He then addresses
the objections to applying models of liberal pluralism within Eastern Europe and
concludes that despite the limitations of these models the alternatives may be even
worse (p. 7). The commentaries raise specic issues about the exportability of such
ideas to newly democratising countries and the dilemma of whether to prioritise the
consolidation of democracy over the advancement of minority rights, or vice versa;
these issues are taken up again by Kymlicka in his nal response.
The problematic assumptions underlying the main article by Kymlicka will be
highlighted and addressed later in the review with reference to the third of the books
under review: Seyla Benhabibs Claims of Culture. As with the two preceding
authors Benhabib is concerned with issues of equality and diversity in the global era,
as the subtitle to her book clearly indicates, and she examines these issues through
the rubric of culture. She sees the emergence of culture as the primary arena of
intense political controversy as one of the dening features of our current time and
seeks to challenge the faulty epistemic premises of the predominant view of culture
which sees it as a delineable whole. The rst two chapters set out her philosophical
considerations on culture and identity whilst the following two are much more
political looking at identity and difference in the global context. The nal chapters
assess the potential for democratic citizenship in the context of the forces of
multiculturalism, immigration and cultural separatism that appear to dene our
global civilisation.
Having given a brief synopsis of the books under review I now wish to draw out
some of the more problematic issues that dene the rst two in particular and discuss
them with reference to the arguments made in the third. Firstly, there is the issue of
how the world is implicitly understood and its problems explicitly dened. Cavallar
assumes that the past helps us to understand the present and thus tries to relate past
thinking to present problems; the primary difculty with this, however, is that if your
understanding of the past is inadequate then the help that this provides in dealing
with contemporary problems is itself less than adequate. After a lengthy chapter
detailing the theoretical considerations in undertaking a study of the past, the
present, and the relationship between the two (p. 27), with all the necessary
postmodern caveats, Cavallar begins his study with an exposition of Vitorias
comments on the conditions of the Amerindians. His analysis of the various authors
remains embedded within what they said and is referenced within a very narrow
body of scholars. Despite an explicit claim to contextualise their thought, he does not
relate what they said to the plausibility of what happened; that is, Cavallar does
not examine the claims made by the scholars in terms of their validity in the context
of the general climate but simply examines them in relation to the dominant
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504 Book reviews / History of European Ideas 29 (2003) 475512

discourses of the time without even acknowledging them as dominant but as existent.
The histories upon which such theories have been constructed are themselves based
on particular considerations which frame both what is looked at and how it is then
interpreted. Not acknowledging this makes for a rather incestuous analysis that
never steps outside of itself to ask what else was possible or even why it was that
particular interpretations were dominant. This may not have been Cavallars
intention but without acknowledging the socio-historic conditions within which
theory is produced and relating to what was said simply in its own terms theoretical
analysis is impoverished. It is not a question of disentangling what was said from the
conditions in which it was produced but to recognise the mutually constitutive
character of what was said and the terms in which it was saidand seeing both as
equally relevant.
Cavaller wants to look at international hospitality and does so by focussing on a
small number of theorists within a particular tradition in a specic geographical
locationEurope. That one must start somewhere, is acknowledged, and that time
and effort always delimit what is looked at and analysed, is further accepted: the
question remains, however, that when ones avowed intention is to examine the
notion of international hospitality and ones organising principle is migration does
it really serve ones study to focus so narrowly? In a world in which there are in
excess of 12 million people classed as refugees and in which developing countries
provide asylum to over 70% of the global refugee population, would it not also make
sense to look at the traditions and thought of peoples who continually, consistently
and largely unquestioningly harbour strangers in their midst? By hoping to make
his work relevant to the global issues of justice and equality, and focusing solely on
the theoretical undertakings of a few European scholars, without further asking the
question of why it is their work that is looked at but taking that as read, Cavallar
perpetuates that tradition of thought by which generations of European scholars
have produced universalist, and universalising, theories in conditions of relative or
absolute ignorance about the lives and traditions of thought of the majority of
humanity.1
Whilst Cavallar purports to discuss the rights of strangers in an international
context, albeit with a theoretical focus on European scholars, Kymlicka clearly
delimits his study to Western European theoretical production and Eastern Europe
as the site of its implementation/practice. Here there are no nods to postmodern
scepticism and the question, that is the title of the volumeCan Liberal Pluralism be
Exported?explicitly frames its theoretical orientation. Liberal pluralism is taken
as a doctrine of the West to which there are few viable alternatives and whatever the
limits of this model other options may be even worse. With such underlying
assumptions there is no room for the examination of how other countries may or
may not have managed ethnocultural diversity and if things are not done the way
the West has done them then we may as well wash our hands of the whole situation
as the alternatives may be even worse. It is precisely this type of theoretical

1
D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 2000 p. 29.
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arrogance that undermines the validity of projects with seemingly laudable

intentions. With an assumption, as with Cavallar, that all that there is to be learnt
is that which occurs in the West, scholars like Kymlicka disregard and belittle the
attempts made by the majority of the worlds population to deal with the very
questions he purports to be interested in. Despite my disagreement with the framing
of the problem in terms of managing ethnocultural diversity, which I will expand
on later in the review, I am surprised that if this is the intended purpose there is no
systematic examination of the case of India which for the last 50 years has been
doing just that. This arrogance is further underlined in Kymlickas belief that there is
a need to start a transnational and intercultural dialogue on minority rights y [as]
many intellectuals and policy-makers in Eastern Europe have no clear idea of the
principles underlying these Western standards. They are told that respect for
minorities is an essential part of democratisation, but are not told why minority
rights are linked to democracy, or how these rights relate to principles of justice or
freedom (p. 5). I would hope that the outrageous assumptions implicit and explicit
in these two sentences would require no further explanation(but just in case, two
of the most obvious gaffes: respect for minority rights is a Western standard; many
intellectuals in Eastern Europe have no idea about these and hence we must educate
them).
My main point of contention with Kymlickas article is that ethnocultural
diversity is something to be managed. In arguing that justice requires the public
recognition and accommodation of diversity Kymlicka sets up a contemporary
condition of migration and hybridity that is in need of understanding and resolution.
This then exists in implicit contrast to a pure and coherent past where ethnocultural
neutrality was posited as the principle of the rst order. Whilst Kymlicka accurately
deconstructs the idea of ethnocultural neutrality as ever having existed in practice his
solutions to current problems are misguided in the very fact that he sees them as
current problems. To discuss the accommodation of diversity today implies the
existence of an alternative past in which diversity was unknown. Ethnocultural
diversity is not something to be managed as if it exists as a condition outside of what
is the norm, generally regarded in terms of purity and stasis, ethnocultural diversity
is the human condition. If we start from the premise of a world that is originally
separate and culturally distinct and one that has become multicultural over time then
liberal pluralism with its attempts to manage diversity can be seen as a progressive
intervention in the current climate of rapid, unsettling change, mistrust and
strangeness. If, however, it is acknowledged that cultural difference is produced and
maintained in a world always already spatially interconnected then attempts to
manage ethnocultural diversity can be seen for what they really are: one of the
main means through which the disempowered are kept that way.2
When discussing the ethnocultural groups found in Western democracies
Kymlicka distinguishes six groups, none of which cover the dominant, hegemonic
group. Thus, whilst others are ethnocultural minorities, those who are in the

2
A. Gupta, J. Ferguson, Beyond Culture: space, identity, and the politics of difference, Cultural
Anthropology 7 (1) (1992) p. 17.
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506 Book reviews / History of European Ideas 29 (2003) 475512

dominant position simply arethey are not different in any way as they are that
against which everybody else is measured. They are universalised as the norm and
everybody else exists in a peripheral, marginal existence forever to be patronised with
special minority rights that only ever serve to exacerbate their distance from the
centre. This perpetuates a difference between Us and Them that rests, ultimately, on
what Benhabib has argued as false generalisations about the West itself, about the
homogeneity of its identity, the uniformity of its developmental processes, and the
cohesion of its value systems (p. 24). Further, in distinguishing these six types,
Kymlicka argues that each type has specic needs that require distinct rights;
focusing in particular on the difference between the rights of immigrants and those of
national minorities and indigenous groups. With this he is positing a difference
between people who have always lived in an area (implying some notion of blood
ties even if it is not stated in such terms) and more recent arrivals and arguing that
this difference is signicant in terms of how people are dealt with. In making this
distinction not simply a descriptive one but ascribing it normative status as well,
Kymlicka reinforces an essentialist view of culture that reies it as an objective entity
and fails to acknowledge the dynamism constitutive of it.
Benhabibs central thesis, in contrast to the authors discussed earlier, is a plea for
a recognition of the radical hybridity and polyvocality of all cultures (p. 25) where
cultural practices and traditions have grown out of a complex global dialogue across
cultures and civilisations (p. 25). She argues against a holistic view of cultures that
sees them as internally coherent, seamless wholes and suggests instead that human
cultures should be understood in terms of being constant creations, recreations, and
negotiations of imaginary boundaries (p. 8). This approach draws on Homi
Bhabhas disclosure of the narrative strategies of representation present in
nationalist accounts of the construction of a people and provides a coherently
articulated philosophical basis from which to then articulate a politics of
multiculturalism. Benhabib decries any supposed overlap between solidarity and
ethnocentrism, arguing that any such overlap is more contingent than necessary, and
suggests that true nations, pure linguistic groups, and unsullied ethnicities
are truly imagined communities: what is important today is for us to understand
who we consider ourselves to be and how we constitute our imagined communities
(pp. 323). Understanding culture in these terms takes us beyond the reductionist
essentialism that is prevalent in the work of so many other theorists and provides a
valuable alternative with which to begin thinking through this contentious concept in
a more useful way.
As well working towards a more useful understanding of culture Benhabib further
argues for a reading of the past that goes beyond mere discourse analysis. She
examines the ways in which seminal texts positioned and repositioned the we and
the others leading to the current situation both in terms of the way it is and the
way in which we think about it. The dispossession of the Amerindians, for example,
was not merely an historical act; in Lockes hands it also became sanctied as a
moral act (p. 46) which, by situating them in the early stages of our history,
legitimised the institution of a better, modernised system of governance under the
auspices of colonialism (p. 46). The dispossession of the Amerindians was not
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Book reviews / History of European Ideas 29 (2003) 475512 507

something which simply happened; it was made a central part of Europes story
about itself which in turn legitimised the actions which had taken place and paved
the way for future actions. Not in the sense that it made what subsequently took
place inevitable but rather it laid particular tracks that made certain events more
likely. By examining the consequences of these rhetorical moves (p. 45) Benhabib
believes that it is possible to uncover their social, political and cultural legacies and
work towards reconstructing processes of understanding and communication within
civil society that are truly democratic (p. 81).
Benhabib distinguishes herself from the previous authors by arguing for the
displacement of culture as the central value by which intercultural justice between
human groups should be defended; arguing instead that this should be done in the
name of freedom and justice and not of an elusive preservation of cultures (p. 8). By
arguing for the social construction of cultures Benhabib posits understanding the
other not simply as a cognitive act but as a moral and political deed (p. 31): one that
is increasingly necessary in a world that thinks itself as originally separate and seeks
to act to maintain itself as thus whilst refusing to acknowledge the reality of its inter/
intracultural history and present. Whilst Cavallar and Kymlicka seek to put forward
theories for managing contemporary conditions of hybridity their hopeless
eurocentrism and faulty epistemic premises limit the efcacy of their critiques
and the usefulness of their ideas. For as long as we see the contemporary conditions
of hybridity as contemporary and thus posit a pure(r) past we lose the rst battle by
starting from a point of having to justify our present realities. Ideas of purity are
retrospective constructions undertaken for the purposes of controlwhether of
history, or of peoples, or both.

Gurminder K. Bhambra
Graduate School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies,
Arts D, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK

doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.07.002

Il Gran Vico. Presenza, immagini e suggestioni vichiane nei testi della cultura
italiana pre-risorgimentale (17991839)
Giuseppe Cospito; Name, Genova, 2002, pp. 9259, price Euros 20.00, ISBN 88-
87298-34-3

Giuseppe Cospitos Il Gran Vico. Presenza, immagini e suggestioni vichiane nei

testi della cultura italiana pre-risorgimentale (17991839) sets out to illuminate
Giambattista Vicos pivotal presence throughout the pre-Resurgence (pre-Risorgi-
mento) phase in Italian history; it achieves this goal by focusing on some otherwise
little-studied scholars of Vicos work. The dominant gure among them is Carlo
Cattaneo, one of the ercest opponents of the Habsburg government, and a major