МУЛТИКУЛТУРАЛИЗЪМ И ЛИБЕРАЛНА ДЕМОКРАЦИЯ
MULTICULTURALISM AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Summary/Abstract: This essay offers an analysis of the compatibility between the philosophico-political premises of the multiculturalism, in its communitarian version (Charles Taylor), and the theoretical principles of the liberal democracy and its practices. After analyzing the way in which individual and society are understood, the author concludes that the meaning of the liberal democracy is in fact altered by the pretension this democracy to be enriched through making it more sensible to the cultural specificities and differences, what means through institutionalizing politically an intermediate unit, i. e. the cultural community, which should be inserted between individual and state. One can observe a displacing of the emphasis from individual to community when interpreting equality and pluralism, as well as in the attitude towards the concurrence and the conflicts, two problems which are less thematized in the multiculturalist discourse. This new emphasis makes doubtful the principal value of the liberalism ≠ the individual freedom. The argument and the conclusions of this essay concern communitarian multiculturalism as a political program, and do not affect its pedagogical pretensions.

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