Why a Feminist Volume on Pluralism?

Plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life.

—Hannah Arendt¹

Why a feminist Philosophical Topics volume on pluralism? Narrowly speaking, as the pluralism debates roil the discipline of philosophy anew, and efforts to diversify the faculty, curricula, and conceptions of what counts as philosophy multiply, feminists as well as philosophers of race and sexuality find these issues so compelling because it is really the conception of philosophy as a whole that’s at stake. More broadly speaking, the answer to the question seems both obvious and obscure. It seems obvious because feminists have played a major historical role in prying open the sovereign singular universal—in undoing the notion that human inquiry will eventually result in one metaphysics, or one epistemology, one ethics, or one politics forever and for all. Obscure because “pluralism” is too often a rather pale term, connoting an affirmation of the friendly coexistence of different things—whether they be different branches of government, different ways of knowing, different fundamental moral values, or more mundanely, different genders, cultures, religions, or sexualities.

What could feminism possibly have to do with such abstract fantasies of harmonious difference, or at least tolerance, absent any analysis of power or privilege? Donna Haraway said it explicitly, the feminist conversation, she asserted, “is power sensitive, not pluralist.”² Nancy Fraser made essentially the same point when she claimed that pluralist multiculturalism fails to take material power differences seriously or provide a way into a politics of redistribution.³ Offering “precari-ousness” as a better starting point for politics, Judith Butler noted that pluralism requires an ontology of discreteness, going against the grain of much feminist thought, whereas precariousness recognizes an ontology of relation.⁴

Prior to these more recent feminist suspicions about pluralism, Simone de Beauvoir railed against pluralism in her 1955 essay, “Right-Wing Thought Today.”⁵ She took “pluralism” to be one arm of an incoherent body of thought, the incoherence of which was to be explained by its unified objective, the legitimation of the privileges of the privileged. When called on by circumstances, such as those under which “the Western-bourgeois is forced to admit that he is no longer the only consciousness, the absolute subject; there are other men,” she writes, the bourgeoisie must “reconcile the idea of justice and the reality of its interests.”⁶ An affirmation of pluralism is one mode of this reconciliation. The version of pluralism embraced by the privileged ignores the salience of the material reality of injustice in favor of a subjectivist account of difference,⁷ in which the moral and affective dimensions of difference are understood to be multiple and complex. “There is a black soul, a Jewish character, a yellow wisdom, a feminine sensitivity, a peasant common sense, etc. The nature of his essence defines the area of being that is accessible to each one.”⁸ This sort of affirmation of irreducible differences between different kinds of people obscures the fact that the differences themselves are historically embedded in relations of power. In fact claims for pluralism as horizontal difference mystify and justify privilege over and against the demands of the dispossessed. “To Marx’s ‘simplistic’ schema opposing exploiters and exploited, one substitutes a design so complex that the oppressors differ among themselves as much as they differ from the oppressed, with the result that this last distinction loses its importance.”⁹ The privileged switch strategies, essentially, from claiming transcendence and universality to claiming their own finitude, which they defend enthusiastically, “my duty as a Western bourgeois is to want Western bourgeois civilization unconditionally.”¹⁰ Inequality is justified, since “to attribute to all men the dignity of a person would be to posit their equality; it would be leveling, standardization, and socialism.”¹¹ Claiming his own difference, the privileged “Western bourgeois” understands this difference to manifest in certain material realities. “The entire trick consists in making privilege into the manifestation of a value whose presence would bestow on the privileged the right to privilege. He must have economic power in order to defend...