Emblems of Pluralism: Cultural Differences and the State.

• Author: Rosen, Mark D.
• Position: Book Review

EMBLEMS OF PLURALISM: CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AND THE STATE. By Carol Weisbrod. (1) Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. ix, 222. $45.00.

The Amish community disciplines its members through the meidung (shunning), under which community members are required to avoid business and social contact with the ostracized individual unless and until she is restored to the church fellowship (p. 65). If the shunned person brings a lawsuit for alienation of affections, defamation, or tortious interference with contract, what if anything should the court do (pp. 65-68)?

Polygamy was integral to early Mormon religious life. The United States prosecuted Brigham Young's secretary, George Reynolds, for violating an Act of Congress that banned polygamy in federal territories. (3) The Supreme Court famously upheld the conviction against Reynolds's claim that the First Amendment's free exercise clause guaranteed him the right to practice his religion in accordance with his church's beliefs. (4) Was this appropriate?

In Emblems of Pluralism: Cultural Differences and the State, Carol Weisbrod suggests that such questions are best approached structurally by taking account of the relationships among three entities: the individual, the group, and government. Weisbrod invokes visual metaphors to describe two possible relationships: verticality, which suggests hierarchy (p. 13), and horizontalness, which she associates with coequality and "pluralism" (p. 97). Her main thesis is that there is no single or a priori relationship among the three (pp. 204-05). For example, the state could be viewed as just one group among many that provides rules and sanctions to guide people (a horizontal relationship between groups and the state) or, alternatively, the state could be the entity that authoritatively determines the powers enjoyed by all other groups. There is no fixed relationship, Weisbrod suggests, because, among other reasons, none of these three entities has a fixed character that is independent of the other two (p. 3). For instance, "[w]e can perhaps say both" that "individuals create groups and groups create individuals" (p. 202). Similarly, sovereignty can be said to inhere in the state, groups, or individuals (pp. 30-31).

Weisbrod's stated concern is not to describe the doctrinal status quo, or to argue for a change. Instead, the book more modestly intends to show the "complexities of the problems" (p. 202) and to "illuminate certain interactions to the end of complicating a political conversation of pluralism" (p. 209). (5) Consistent with these stated aims, the book studiously avoids taking positions. (6) Methodologically, it collects many interesting historical examples, legal cases, theoreticians, as well as literary and art works, which it then uses to illustrate competing approaches that can be taken to the relations among individuals, groups, and the state. (7)

Open-endedness is the book's sine qua non, and Weisbrod is mercilessly noncommital even with respect to herself. Consider, for instance, the aforementioned visual metaphors that Weisbrod uses to both title and structure the book. Emblems is divided into two parts, one which is represented by the "emblem" of Erastus Field's painting Historical Monument of the American Republic, the "hierarchical understanding of American federalism" (p. 13), and the second which is represented by Edward Hicks's painting The Peaceable Kingdom, which represents for Weisbrod a "horizontal, pluralist" vision of federalism (p. 97). (8) Emblems also dedicates five pages to discussing the two paintings and the ideas they conjure (pp. 13-15, 97-98). Notwithstanding these metaphors' centrality, Weisbrod states that "[i]t is possible that the division of the book into part 1 and part 2 suggests a false dichotomy" (p. 100). Similarly, the concluding chapter submits that "[i]t is possible that the visual images used in this book, the emblems, are inadequate for the future we want, in part because they are too static" and that "[m]usical metaphors may go deeper" (p. 208). Acknowledging that the emblems that provide the book's title and structure are possibly so misleading and inadequate (9) well represents the book's uncompromising commitment to open-endedness.

Although Emblems does "not attempt[] to propose a solution to the questions it has raised" (p. 202), Weisbrod clearly has strong views on many of them. Most importantly, she is an enthusiastic proponent of pluralism, and writes as if the reader is also. (10) The book's final paragraph advances an epistemological claim that could validate the absence of a justification for pluralism: he feeling for pluralism reduces itself more to a stance, or a mind-set, than it does to an agenda or an answer. It becomes a preoccupation more than a thesis, relating to horizontal rather than vertical relations" (p. 209). This is an intriguing idea, but surely more is needed than such ipse dixit to answer the sustained philosophical justifications for pluralism that have been formulated by such contemporary thinkers as Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, and Jeremy Waldron. (11)

For this reason alone Weisbrod's book could not be the last word on the subject. Fortuitously, this in no way undermines Emblems' ambition of only "join[ing]" and "complicating" the "conversation on pluralism" (pp. 202, 209). Such an argument is not readily summarized (though I tried to do so in the first pages of this review). In any event, the strength of the book lies in the very interesting and wide-ranging materials that it assembles. The first part of this review accordingly examines some of these enlightening materials so as to give the reader a sense of what the book offers. While Emblems readily succeeds in its declared aim of complicating the reader's understanding of pluralism, the seemingly unending progression of potential perspectives the book offers can be dizzying. To this reader, Emblems in this way underscores the need for some guiding theory to help resolve the very real questions regarding group autonomy that arise with some frequency in the United States. (12) Though Emblems does not purport to provide a theoretical framework for resolving the dilemmas that are raised by claims for group autonomy, the second part of this review builds on materials discussed in the book that hold out promise for developing an analytical framework for analyzing pluralism and group autonomy.

I

As mentioned above, Emblems' ten chapters are divided in two parts, "Monumental Federalism" (representing verticality) and "The Peaceable Kingdom" (representing horizontality). The first chapter tells the curious story of Robert Owen's trip to the United States in 1824-25. Today, Owen typically is remembered as a utopian thinker who established the small experimental community of New Harmony with the expectation that it would be the model that would be universally adopted in the future. His vision was that small communities were to be the basic unit of society, with each community voluntarily linking with others to create a decentralized federation. New Harmony died out after a few years, and today the appellation "utopian" that is attached to Owen ordinarily brings to mind images of naivety and failed social experiments.

Weisbrod reminds the reader that Owen met with virtually all the top American officials when he first came to this country: he spoke to both Houses of Congress, addressed the Supreme Court, and personally met with Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams (pp. 19, 23). Weisbrod then asks why someone like Owen received the audience he did. Her two related answers are illuminating. First, she suggests that there was less distance between the United States and Owen than it appears in our current historical moment; Owen was more mainstream, and the United States was more self-consciously experimental, than people today typically think (pp. 19-28). Second, there was important substantive overlap in their interests; both were interested in small political units that were linked through a federation (pp. 19-28).

Emblems' first chapter is an absorbing way to unsettle contemporary sensibilities some might have that a "monumental federalism" of a rigidly vertical hierarchy with the federal government at the apex is American federalism's intrinsic and necessary form. Such an image of American federalism may be a straw man, however, particularly in light of the Supreme Court's new federalism jurisprudence of the last decade. More fundamentally, one might ask: Of what contemporary relevance is it that foundational questions regarding the structure of American federalism were unanswered in the 1820s? It seems to me, though, that Weisbrod's point facilitates the imagination of alternatives to the status quo. Of course, the possibility of alternatives alone does not indict the status quo; normative analysis of the sort that Emblems does not provide is necessary to do that. The Owen narrative nonetheless is a useful first step to the argument for a greater accommodation of pluralism that Emblems implicitly champions. (13)

Chapter 2, "Indians and Individualists: A Multiplicity of Sovereignties," makes several noteworthy points. First and foremost is that a commitment to political decentralization is not necessarily a commitment to pluralism. For instance, though Owen thought that society was best organized on the basis of small communities, he thought that there was one way that all such small political units should be structured (p. 31). (14) By contrast, Native American aspirations of tribal sovereignty and John Calhoun's concept of "concurrent majorities" (more on this later)--a somewhat surprising grouping, to say the least--exemplify the commitment to enduring diversity across groups that qualifies as pluralism (pp. 31, 39).

The bulk of Chapter 2 comprises a discussion of several loosely connected ideas concerning sovereignty and groups. One is that "sovereignty" can be said...