Iris Marion Young isn’t necessarily a friend of liberalism. Her political philosophy is critical of and to the left of liberalism. In Justice and the Politics of Difference, she repeatedly uses liberalism as the foil against which her politics of difference is elaborated upon. To her, the politics of difference accepts and embraces positive differences between groups, as opposed to the homogeneity of liberalism.
This hasn’t stopped liberals from using her work, and it isn’t going to stop me either. In an article for Vox, Zack Beauchamp argued that identity politics in the vein of Iris Marion Young is the best path forward for liberalism’s practical survival. I want to elaborate further on the merits of a liberal politics of difference.
A probably criticism of a liberal politics of difference is that the definition of liberalism rules out the possibility. Regardless of what I call it, some would say that a liberal politics of difference is not actually liberal. Iris Marion Young explains that the politics of difference stands distinctly against the unity of liberalism. Liberalism is conceived of as having a unified citizenry, unified either in their reason, moral capacities, or both. At the end of the day, liberalism says, the political sphere is about what we all share in common. Young responds: Each one of us shares something in common with someone else, but there is no single thing which we all share. The politics of difference is found in accepting and embracing that we can do politics, but it will be on many fronts, instead of in one unified place.
Charles Wade Mills, a major contemporary left-liberal theorist, might offer a similar concern. In his essay “Occupy Liberalism!” he cites John Gray in a definition of liberalism which includes it being universalist, “affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms.” He explains that liberalism’s diversity is in part explained by more or less inclusive readings of universalism (liberalism has a long history of institutional sexism and racism), but it is universalism nonetheless. How can a politics of difference be liberal?
I believe both Young and Mills underestimate how liberalism has already shown itself to be amenable politics of difference in practice. Liberalism largely arose as rich white men trumpeting the equality and freedom they had amongst each other. As groups pointed out that a lot of the human species still was not free or equal, odd concessions were made. These concessions were frequently far from enough, but they often represented the specific perspectives of the groups seeking a say in the political sphere. As it turns out, the supposed practice of moral unity never represented any actual unity at all.
It might be tempting to say that with full inclusion we could reach one real moral unity of the human species. That would be what Iris Marion Young calls transformational assimilation: Institutions represent the perspectives of dominant groups, and so in the process of assimilating subordinate groups into the mainstream, institutions have to be modified. This is still assimilation as group difference dissolves into unity once institutions are adequately changed. However, as Young points out, this is not what has happened. Modern society continues to feature groups of people organized around a positive identity. In practice, assimilation has only functioned ideologically, covering up the reality that liberalism has been quite conducive to a politics of difference.
It’s still possible to object that this is calling for something other than liberalism. Maybe it is better, maybe it is the most realistic, but it is not liberal. I do not think this is true. Liberalism’s core ideals are freedom and equality. Much has been said about freedom’s limits and contradictions. John Rawls was quite upfront about the fact that illiberal ideas have to be treated like war or disease in order to maintain justice in a liberal society. This is related to the “paradox of tolerance,” which states that if a society is to remain very tolerant, it has to be intolerant to intolerance. The fact is that the freedom can not be maintained if people let it be used to undermine freedom. The same is true of equality. As the aforementioned Vox article pointed out, maximal equality seems to require identity politics. An obsession with an assimilationist, unitary political sphere undermines equality. Just as liberalism has embraced the contradictions and limits of freedom, so can it embrace the contradictions and limits of equality.