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Culture and Diversity in John Stuart Mill's Civic Nation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2013

JASON TYNDAL
JASON TYNDAL*
Affiliation:
Tulane [email protected]
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Abstract

In this article, I develop a conception of multiculturalism that is compatible with Mill's liberal framework. I argue, drawing from Mill's conception of the nation-state, that he would expect cultural minorities to assimilate fully into the political sphere of the dominant culture, but to assimilate only minimally, if at all, into the cultural sphere. I also argue that while Mill cannot permit cultural accommodations in the form of self-government rights, he would allow for certain accommodation rights (construed as individual rights) which assist cultural minorities in preserving their cultural particularity. While this is indeed a modest multiculturalism, it helps to demonstrate that Mill was not as hostile towards custom or minority groups as certain passages may appear to suggest.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 96 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

1 Waldron, Jeremy, ‘Mill and Multiculturalism’, Mill's On Liberty: A Critical Guide, ed. Ten, C. L. (New York, 2008), pp. 165–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Waldron, ‘Mill’, p. 183.

3 Waldron, ‘Mill’, p. 183.

4 Waldron, ‘Mill’, pp. 179–81. While Waldron speaks simply of harm, I will use the term ‘wrongful harm’ to refer to a perceptible loss or damage that was not voluntarily consented to. While harm may include things such as physical damage, financial loss or damage to reputation, I am primarily concerned with the infringement of basic rights and liberties.

5 Mill, John Stuart, Considerations on Representative Government, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 19, ed. Robson, J. M. (Toronto, 1977), p. 546Google Scholar.

6 Mill, Considerations, p. 546.

7 Mill, Considerations, p. 546.

8 Mill, Considerations, p. 547.

9 Mill, Considerations, p. 547. This is Mill's key assumption: the idea that a multi-national state could never (or at least almost never) promote the coalescing of individuals needed to establish a free and transparent public domain through which opinions can be shared. For the purpose of this article, however, I wish to set aside this issue in order to determine how such assumptions impact a multiculturalism that can be drawn out of Mill's political theory.

10 Mill, Considerations, p. 548.

11 Mill, Considerations, p. 547.

12 Mill, Considerations, p. 547.

13 Mill, Considerations, p. 547.

14 Mill, Considerations, p. 548.

15 Mill, Considerations, p. 548.

16 Nenad Miscevic, ‘Nationalism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nationalism/> (2010).

17 Mill notes the strong sense of nationality among the subjects of the cantons of Switzerland which do not share a common race, language or religion; see Mill, Considerations, p. 546.

18 The term ‘social’ is used here in a narrow sense to denote groups that may not be regarded as cultural, but whose members share commonalities with respect to practices or life pursuits. Political life is indeed social, but in a broader sense of the term.

19 Ten, C. L., Multiculturalism and the Value of Diversity (Singapore, 2004), p. 3Google Scholar.

20 Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 18, ed. Robson, J. M. (Toronto, 1977), p. 273Google Scholar.

21 Mill, Considerations, p. 547.

22 Mill, John Stuart, Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 20, ed. Robson, J. M. (Toronto, 1985), p. 347Google Scholar, emphasis added.

23 Cultural minorities could certainly choose to become bilingual rather than entirely dispense with the language of their culture.

24 Mill, On Liberty, p. 262.

25 Mill, On Liberty, p. 262.

26 Mill, On Liberty, p. 262.

27 It might be thought that Mill would like us to give zero weight to custom in decision-making. This, I believe, is mistaken. For Mill is clear that custom should ‘have a claim to [one's] deference’. But while one can give some weight to custom, one should never adhere to ‘custom merely as custom’. See Mill, On Liberty, p. 262.

28 Mill, On Liberty, p. 262.

29 Mill, On Liberty, p. 277.

30 Riley, Jonathan, Mill on Liberty (Abingdon, 1998), p. 44Google Scholar.

31 Mill, On Liberty, pp. 260–1.

32 Waldron, ‘Mill’, p. 179.

33 Deveaux, Monique, Cultural Pluralism and Dilemmas of Justice (Ithaca, 2000), p. 30Google Scholar.

34 This is in contrast to Bhikhu Parekh, who believes that Mill's emphasis on individual diversity prevents him from appreciating cultural diversity. See Parekh, Bhikhu, Rethinking Multiculturalism (Cambridge, 2000), p. 44Google Scholar. This, however, overlooks the fact that an appreciation for cultural diversity can be built into an appreciation for individual diversity.

35 As Leti Volpp points out, the tendency to take up a static view of culture often applies only in discourse about minority cultures. Those inclined to such a view often drop it once they move to discussing the culture of dominant (especially western) groups. Volpp, Leti, ‘Feminism versus Multiculturalism’, Columbia Law Review 101 (2001), pp. 1181–1218, at 1191CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 See Doriane Lambelet Coleman, ‘Individualizing Justice through Multiculturalism: The Liberal's Dilemma’, 96 (1996), pp. 1093–1167, at 1162–7; Deveaux, Monique, Gender and Justice in Multicultural Liberal States (New York, 2006), p. 184CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘Introduction: Inventing Tradition’, The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 1–14, at 2Google Scholar; Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Odysseys (Oxford, 2007), pp. 100–1Google Scholar; Phillips, Anne, Multiculturalism without Culture (Princeton, 2007), p. 45Google Scholar; Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, pp. 76–9.

37 See the passage cited in n. 26.

38 Mill, On Liberty, pp. 267–70. See also Riley, Mill on Liberty, pp. 83–90.

39 Mill, John Stuart, Principles of Political Economy, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 3, ed. Robson, J. M. (Toronto, 1965), pp. 705–9Google Scholar. Because economic development might be thought to be an important aspect of social progress, it should be noted that Mill regards improvements in industry to be one effect of improvements in knowledge. See Mill, John Stuart, A System of Logic, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 8, ed. Robson, J. M. (Toronto, 1974), p. 926Google Scholar.

40 Mill, On Liberty, p. 266.

41 Mill, On Liberty, p. 266.

42 Mill, On Liberty, p. 223.

43 Mill, On Liberty, p. 292.

44 Mill, On Liberty, p. 225.

45 Mill, On Liberty, pp. 225–6.

46 Mill, On Liberty, p. 226.

47 Admittedly, this may not amount to a large set of cultural particularities. However, it demonstrates that it would be false to claim that Mill could expect or demand complete cultural assimilation. Later, I explain how multicultural policies could be instituted to preserve a wider set of cultural particularities.

48 Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship (New York, 1995), p. 24Google Scholar.

49 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 10.

50 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 31.

51 Kymlicka, Will, Politics in the Vernacular (New York, 2001), p. 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In his earlier work, Kymlicka refers to these sorts of rights as ‘polyethnic rights’. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 31.

52 For a listing of the most common types of accommodations granted to immigrants, national minorities and indigenous peoples, see Banting, Keith, Johnston, Richard, Kymlicka, Will and Soroka, Stuart, ‘Do Multiculturalism Policies Erode the Welfare State? An Empirical Analysis’, Multiculturalism and the Welfare State, ed. Banting, K. and Kymlicka, W. (New York 2006), pp. 49–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While it is difficult to tell exactly what sorts of rights Mill might have been sympathetic to in his time, it is interesting to consider whether a Millian multiculturalism is robust enough to accommodate recent concerns and sensibilities.

53 For statistical evidence in favour of this claim, see Kymlicka, Will, Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada (New York, 1998), ch. 1Google Scholar.

54 This, of course, is not to suggest that it is not possible for cultural minorities to assimilate politically without benefiting from such rights.

55 Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, p. 223.

56 This is in contrast to self-government rights, which often serve further to isolate groups.

57 To say that accommodation rights can help to preserve a group's cultural particularity while also bringing that group into the cultural marketplace – a form of exposure – may seem problematic. But this is only so if one construes culture as static.

58 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 126.

59 Mill, On Liberty, p. 226.

60 This is not to suggest that individuals cannot join groups which restrict their basic liberties. As long as these associations are voluntary, and remain voluntary, such restrictions would not constitute wrongful harm. Although the Mormons are not an ethnic group, Mill's remarks on them may be helpful here. In the case of Mormons in the nineteenth century, Mill (On Liberty, p. 291) advocated non-interference as long as (1) the Mormons did not act aggressively towards other communities; (2) their individual members retained a right to exit; and (3) individual members did not reach out to other communities for protection against the Mormon doctrine. While conditions (2) and (3) appear jointly to establish voluntariness for Mill, it is debatable whether a right to exit is anything but merely formal (rather than substantial) with regard to groups which people are born into or raised in. For this reason, cultural groups – which individuals are often born into – typically deserve more scrutiny than social groups.

61 While one might argue that certain cultural groups should have a claim to self-government rights, there is no reason to think that the maintenance of cultural diversity requires self-government rights. If this were the case, then we would expect all immigrant groups in Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States to be unsuccessful at maintaining their cultures. But this has not been the case. That said, we can certainly distinguish between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ accounts of multiculturalism. So, while there is no reason to think that a multiculturalism that rejects self-government rights cannot maintain cultural diversity, it can properly be labelled a ‘thin’ account of multiculturalism – and this may be unappealing to some advocates of multiculturalism.

62 It may be more difficult to construe self-government rights in the form of individual rights. But, as I have argued, Mill must reject any claims to self-government rights in the first place.

63 Rejecting the extension of group-exercised rights does not prevent individuals from choosing to subject their individual rights to collective exercise as they see fit.

64 In such instances, each individual in the community would possess a right to compete for reserved seats (e.g. through culture-specific elections).

65 See, for example, the U.S. Bilingual Education Act of 1968.

66 Mill, On Liberty, p. 302.

67 Mill, Considerations, pp. 549–50.

68 Once more, Mill's general principle of nationality says that government boundaries should coincide with single nationalities.

69 Varouxakis, Georgios, Mill on Nationality (London, 2002), pp. 10–11Google Scholar.

70 Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 10, ed. Robson, J. M. (Toronto, 1969), p. 210Google Scholar.

71 Mill, John Stuart, Remarks on Bentham's Philosophy, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 10, ed. Robson, J. M. (Toronto, 1969), p. 7Google Scholar.

72 Mill, Remarks, p. 9.

73 Mill, On Liberty, p. 224. I am setting aside the issue of what precisely the ‘permanent interests’ are – an issue which is the subject of much debate. For two discussions of the issue see Gray, John, Mill on Liberty: A Defence (London, 1983), ch. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Riley, Jonathan, Liberal Utilitarianism (Cambridge, 1988), ch. 9Google Scholar.

74 It may be the case that Mill does not fit neatly into either an act-utilitarian or rule-utilitarian camp.

75 Waldron, ‘Mill’, p. 183.

76 For criticisms of diversity-based arguments for multiculturalism, see Wall, Steven, ‘Collective Rights and Individual Autonomy’, Ethics 117 (2007), pp. 234–64, at 239–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 121–3.

77 I am especially grateful to Eric Mack and Jonathan Riley for their many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank one anonymous referee for this journal for providing helpful comments.