Kymlicka
Herder was a student of Kant, who argued that he did not considering the differences in cognition inflicted by culture.
Herder is the father of nationalism: he’s an anti-colonialist by extension, as colonialism creates a multi-national state. One state, one nation, one language, one country.
Kymlicka is a multiculturalist, so he disagrees with Herder, but there is a similar way of thinking about why cultures and language matter.
To be a free and autonomous human being, you need to possess a language and culture which serve as the spectacles (glasses) through which you see the world.
Cultural communities provide a way of life; access to a way of life is mediated through access to culture.
If Canada were to obliterate language rights given to the Quebecois, the French Canadians would experience a loss of access to their opportunities, that would be a moral problem, and a violation of their right to cultural autonomy. ← Kymlicka
Herder, the father of nationalism and romanticism, disagrees with Kymlicka a lot, but agrees with him on the above.
Kymlicka’s main book is Multicultural Citizenship,
[Does Kymlicka’s view of the vernacular draw on Anderson’s Imagined Communities?]
[In how far does Kymlicka’s Societal Culture and Berger and Luckmann’s ‘social sediment’ resemble each other?]
Kymlicka starts with the Rawlsian premise of linguistic and cultural unity. ‘I don’t talk about migration, and I don’t talk about multilingualism. ’
“My hope is that if you begin in this way, we can work out political principles that will, in due course, enable us to deal with more difficult cases where all the citizens are not united by a common language and shared historical memories.” ← Rawls
Kymlicka endorses Rawlsian liberalism, but criticizes him for not paying proper attention to the importance of cultural membership.
In contrast to communitarians, Kymlicka doesn’t think this is due to unattractive atomism at the heart of liberalism.
Communitarians said that there is no way we can be humans without our qualities. No core of human being.
[Communitarians and sedimentation?]
Thus, everyone will argue from their own standpoint for a consensus.
Kymlicka may be expected to side with communitarians. But no, he stands true to liberalism.
The answer lies not in a deep foundational flaw in liberalism, but simply in the fact that Rawls and Dworkin work with a very simplified model of the nation state.
[Could Berger and Luckmann inform the distinction Kymlicka draws, wherein the sedimentation they describe can be viewed as the hard core of a member of a given society for the formation of a social group; unlike Rawls who simplifies everything down to one.]
Kymlicka has an honorary doctorate from the HIW.
Kymlicka wants a liberal argument for federalism.
Kymlicka argues that liberalism forces you to become a multiculturalist: liberalism properly understood must go beyond pure individual rights, and endorse group-differentiated rights as an extension thereof.
He argues as follows:
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Liberalism is committed to safeguarding individual autonomy
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Individual autonomy presupposes a range of options passed down to us by our language and culture (= a societal culture)
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Justice requires compensation for undeserved disadvantages
[The spectacles we look at the world through are plural; your national identity, your ethnic identity, your workplace, your city, ……; cultural constitution is not the highest determinant of our being. To that end, shouldn’t he ]
You can’t just ‘get rid of an official language:’ you can replace religious oaths with secular oaths, but you can’t replace English with no language in court.
[Is the voting ‘external protections’ effectively arguing for a form of subsidiarity? If so, why not go further than ‘national’ groups. Practically speaking, there are many fields where this view of minorities could and should be extended to. For instance, the capacity to decide norms regarding one’s own workplace, city, …; The groups one belongs to are not limited to nationhood.]
National minorities are entitled to minority rights, specifically: self-government rights (not necessarily independent states). These should enable minority members to sustain/preserve their own societal culture.
There is a difference between internal restrictions and external protections.
Kymlicka is a liberal nationalist: national units are the central sites of democracy and justice in the world today. John Rawls quotes Yael Tamir at the end of his life: in The Law of Peoples he meant nations(=peoples) as states, rather than cultures. He connects this to Tamir, but liberal nationalists mean nations and culture, not simply population.
Margaret Canovan: nations are batteries that make the state run.
Philippe Van Parijs (a friend of the professor) asks Rawls: do you understand that what you wrote will feed the hands of Flemish nationalists. You using ‘peoples’ rather than states, makes it easy for people to argue for the separation of Flanders and Wallonia, because the peoples are different.