Recent consideration of the politics of culture and identity has failed to capture an emergent trend in political practice that raises important philosophical questions for normative political theory. To rectify this, identity politics is examined in terms of two distinctions. Examining that politics in terms of the distinction between left and right, as well in terms of the distinction between normative discourse and the policies that discourse justifies, enables us to do more than account for three standard accounts of the politics of cultural turn: multiculturalism, conservative nationalism, and liberal nationalism. It also captures the newly emergent position of identity liberalism. This is a perspective that employs a progressive identity-based normative discourse typically considered to be the preserve of the multicultural left to defend a right-wing politics of assimilation.
Iris Marion Young's most recent book, Inclusion and Democracy, is specifically concerned with the elaboration of democracy as the institutional framework that best satisfies the ethical and instrumental requirements of difference. 1 In this way, the new book builds on both Justice and the Politics of Difference and some of the papers that followed it. 2 One implication of this narrower focus is that the broader philosophical presuppositions and ambitions of the earlier book remain unchanged, unless explicitly reconsidered. Nonetheless, Inclusion and Democracy does offer three significant changes. First, continuing on from the epilogue to Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young is especially concerned to widen the domain of enforcement of the democratic, heterogeneous public from the municipal, regional, and nation-state levels to the global level. 3 This can be said to be the "cosmopolitanist turn" of the politics of difference. Second, of significant interest in the new book is Young's self-described "rediscovery" of civil society as at least partly satisfying at the level of institutions the aspirations of the politics of difference and the implications this has for the earlier emphasis on what I have discussed elsewhere as the "wall-to-wall" democratic theory of communicative democracy. 4 Finally, 259
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