Suchergebnisse

Replies to Isaiah Berlin & Bernard Williams's critique of the author's contention (for both, 1994 [see abstract 9500782]) that value pluralism does not automatically & necessarily lead to liberalism. It is argued that there is nothing in the concept of pluralism alone that predisposes support for liberalism. Value pluralism, defined as choosing from incommensurable virtues such as justice & loyalty, compels selection without guidance. The choice for liberalism is contextual, where particular situations are guided by individual priorities & circumstances. While pluralism does not automatically lead to liberalism, it does provide impetus for the liberal theorist to focus on the cultural & historical context of a particular society. D. Bajo

Meta-ethical pluralism, as developed in the work of writers like Isaiah Berlin, is the idea that ethical values cannot be reduced to a single hierarchy or system but are irreducibly multiple. It has often been argued that simply to recognize this fact is to have a reason to favour liberal institutions. On the contrary, the plurality of values in itself gives us no reason to support liberalism, indeed no reason to prefer any particular political arrangement to any other. If pluralism is true, the liberal's best defence may lie in appealing, in the manner of writers like Walzer and Rorty, to the de facto limitations on moral commitments imposed by the existing political culture.

Over the past twenty years, an influential body of conservative scholarship has focused on the alleged conflict between Islam and the West. Following widespread criticism of this scholarship, a number of commentators have revived its core assumptions to claim that the real conflict is between liberal democracy within Muslim societies and the political ideology of Islamism. In this article we trace the evolution of this scholarship, and suggest that recent empirical developments in the Muslim world suggest the potential for post‐Islamist parties to successfully adapt to the demands of democratic competition within Muslim societies. In this context, the emerging conflict is not between Islam and the West, or Islamism and the West, but between two very different discursive practices within the Muslim world that invoke Islam for radically different purposes.A traveler enters the world into which he travels, but a tourist brings his own world with him and never sees the one he's in.