Alexander Set Radical Multiculturalism Holds That Cultural

Alexander Set

Radical multiculturalism holds that cultural groups should be the measure for considerations of justice as a group offers the individual the indispensable good of being rooted in a community. The problem is that groups always set-up unequal in-group out-group relations that are detrimental to society.

The problem is that conservatives claim it undermines cohesiveness, but cohesiveness is exactly what all social movements in the last hundred years have attempted to bring about.

In this context this means that the gains of one group are not balanced by losses of another group.

The civil sphere includes structures of feelings, symbols, psychological identifications, and sympathies determine how resources are allocated in society. The public sphere is more of how this publically stated (the two can be different).

Common identity is malleable depending on the times. The move for woman's voting rights and equal rights into the national identity is an example.

Incorporation is acceptance of others with their differences intact and including these differences in the broader identity; assimilation involves others taking on the values of dominant groups in order to be accepted.

7. In-groups are simply defined as those sharing a characteristic or set of characteristics upon which a group identity is formed, out-groups are those not in the in-group.

8. Alexander is addressing America and is advocating for a we-ness (solidarity) of people without sacrificing the integrity of differences.

1. Alexander claims that cultural power or the civil sphere has no counterpart in society. This is because all other spheres such as the family, the state, one's religion, and the economy are fueled by non-civil, non-democratic, and/or individual values. The civil sphere therefore provides a proper milieu for both an individual and collective identity of people.

2-3. Alexander seems to underemphasize the role that political, economic, and social power in democracies. He acknowledges their importance, but does not give them their just due in order to ascertain the importance of civil (cultural power). Thus, there does not appear to be a consideration of interactions across social spheres, but instead Alexander minimizes instrumental power welded by politics and economics and focuses on the softer power of civil society. Certainly there are interactions between Alexander's civil sphere and the public sphere and how these relate to each other; in fact Alexander's civil sphere may not actually exist without interactions with the public sphere. After reading this piece and thinking about the content it appears that the civil sphere is dependent on the public sphere and probably cannot exist independently from it.

Habermas set 1

1. The bourgeois public sphere consists of people who have come together as a public by engaging in a debate over the general rules in a privatized and yet public realm of the exchange of commodities and social labor. The means for this confrontation was the public use of reason. A parliamentary system did not work in a commercial economy as private property control became apolitical. Meetings between citizens and aristocrats, bourgeois, and intellectuals on an equal basis occurred in public places.

2. Private citizens became the head of a family and the owner of commodities. The subjectivity of the conjugal family created its own public before becoming political.

3. The conjugal family, private property ownership, and the literary public sphere that allow for the transition to political debate (via the press and public opinion).

4. Private individuals appropriated the state-governed public sphere using reason via the change of the literary public sphere. The public sphere started to critically debate political issues (and other things such as art) as opposed to merely discussing political outcomes.

5. The bourgeois public sphere developed as a society separated from the state but came under control of groups that were not concerned with society as a private sphere.

6. The separation of state and society.

7. The origins of the public sphere and the ownership of property created a class basis and unfair distribution power. Communism or State control would reverse this.

8. Yes it is, the idea of communism or socialism developing as a result of a bourgeois public sphere is counterintuitive.

1-3. The bourgeois public sphere was the sphere of private people who came together as a public sphere. Habermas explains the growth and decline of the bourgeois public sphere. Feudal societies were transformed into bourgeois public spheres due to the emphasis on reason and private ownership of property. Reason and the new role of the conjugal family head as a property owner and head of the family led to the ability of the private person to engage in debate and criticism allowing for a shift and for the bourgeois public sphere to reflect about itself and society. This bourgeois public sphere formed a new trend called "public opinion" and flourished within early free market economies. At the head of this change was the rise of a literary sphere that allowed the bourgeois public sphere to critically look at politics, art, itself and its position/function in society and the interaction between intellectuals, aristocrats, and citizens in public places. Eventually though mass consumerism there was transformation of society; industrialism led to the rise of consumerism and the bourgeois public sphere was marked by a series of re-defining of the relationship between the state and society. This eventually looks to be headed toward a welfare state with the role of the state and society totally redefined.

Habermas set 2

1. The dominant mode of thought that influences intellectual and cultural thinking in a particular period. The modern zeitgeist is the devaluation of important passive violence and the need to extract principles from one's own current experience and not rely on the past the point the way to the future.

2. There is a clash of competing ideas: historical thought (actual experience) and utopian thought (opens up new alternatives that push beyond historical thinking).

3. In the first section in the focus is on the new zeitgeist and affirmation of utopian thought; section 2 focuses on the breakdown of utopian thinking; section 3 focuses on the description of how the welfare state has come to exist and countered utopian thinking; section 4 focuses on describing the reactions to the failure of utopian thinking and the propagation of the welfare state; section 5 offers his assessment and compromise which is wordy and confused. Some of these conclusions seem almost contradictory. For instance, the idea that the disenfranchised groups are supporting the welfare state and not actually expressing a modern class struggle seems wrong to this reader; labor has been actually replaced by information technology. The real working class now is not unskilled laborers but skilled technicians and the real tool is education, which is a function of communication. Much of his logic is circular. Perhaps what is occurred is that "utopian thinking" has evolved into something else.

4. Those that legitimize the welfare state selectively obstruct the components that it took from utopian ideals (the stands fails to look at the shifts in social and labor and resistance to the welfare state); the rise of neoconservatism (however this just reignites class struggles and class conflict); and the protests of disenfranchised groups over the productive this visions of the other two groups and advocate for more state control (however they do not go beyond mere dissonance).