Diversity, Otherness and the Politics of Recognition

Abstract

Baroncelli’s essay “Recognition and its sophistry” shows how communitarians’ ethical and political theories are based on a rhetoric that can be traced back to two strategies: to accredit the poverty of the image of the liberal adversary; to present oneself as a champion of cultural minorities that the adversary cannot and does not want to defend. Starting from the discussion of the relationship between the whole and the part and its ethical and political implications, the article analyzes and develops Baroncelli’s theses focusing on the reflection about otherness, the incommensurability of cultures, their translatability and their being open systems. The result is a critique of communitarians’ positions based on the idea of plural and mobile individual and cultural identities. The recognition should, therefore, primarily concern what unites us, that is, as our belonging to the same species and inhabitants of the Planet, and, at the same time, in taking on the challenge of cultural otherness. On this basis, which poses the need for a planetary ethics, the social imaginary of Western modernity can be reconsidered in the light of globalization, keeping one of its greatest legacies firm: the non-reducibility of the part to the whole and, therefore, of the individual to the community.

Keywords

• Baroncelli
• communitarianism
• liberalism
• minorities
• globalization