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Review: Multicultural Odysseys Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.1177/002070201006500118
AuthorDaniel Weinstock
Published date01 March 2010
Date01 March 2010
Subject MatterComing AttractionsReview
/tmp/tmp-17rCy9uLBjAiY9/input | Reviews |
detract from this collection and could have further distinguished it from the
earlier volume.
Ryan Touhey/St. Jerome’s University, University of Waterloo
MULTICULTURAL ODYSSEYS
Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity
Will Kymlicka
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 384pp, US$27.95 paper
ISBN 978-0199562558
In Multicultural Odysseys, Will Kymlicka has written a magisterial closing
chapter to one of the most significant projects in the political philosophy of
the postwar period. Kymlicka has been the main architect in the elaboration
of what has come to be known as “liberal multiculturalism,” which revolves
around the idea that the legal protection of minority cultural rights, far from
being incompatible with the liberal rights agenda, in fact flows from the
same underlying moral rationale as do individual rights. As presented in
Kymlicka’s earlier work, the basic idea is that belonging to a viable “societal
culture” is a condition for the development of individual traits of which
liberals have always been enamoured, such as individual autonomy. Some
people belong to majority societal cultures that do not need any kind of
protection in order to survive. Others, however, are members of minority
cultures that are in unitary states vulnerable to the will of the majority.
Respect for the autonomy of members of minority cultures therefore implies
support for the legal protection of those minority cultures against majority
encroachment.
The nuts and bolts of the philosophical project were worked out by
Kymlicka in books and articles that he published in the late 1980s and early
1990s. Since then, he has chiefly been concerned with “road-testing” the
theory, that is, in trying to see whether the theory, attractive as it may be in
purely philosophical terms, could actually be applied to the world as it is. He
has led projects bringing together empirical social scientists and political
philosophers that have sought to determine...

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