Pluralism

The Pluralist Tradition

In political philosophy, the most influential spokesperson for pluralism was Russian-English-Jewish Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), who labeled his version “value pluralism.” Berlin championed pluralist respect and tolerance as countermeasures to the often coercive dogmatism of movements such as totalitarianism, fascism, [Page 1080]and certain forms of utopianism. He noted that conflicts of value are inevitable, not just between and within communities, but also in an individual's own breast.

A Buddhist pagoda and a Christian church on the same street in Seoul, Korea, in 2002.

Karen Christensen; used with permission.

Controversially, Berlin tended to associate monism—the privileging of unity, harmony, consistency, and consensus in moral and political thought—with the most extreme forms of tyranny and fanaticism. He traced the monist impulse back to Plato's belief in the unity of the virtues—the assumption that diverse values such as courage, humility, moderation, justice, and piety must all cohere because they are all consistent with a single vision of the good. In Berlin's view, monists assume that, with the help of rationality and an ideal arrangement of law and the community, it is possible to avoid the difficult and costly trade-offs that tend to occur when values conflict. But he notes that this desire to avoid the pluralist conditions of moral and political life ultimately produces more harm than good:

• The belief that some single formula can in principle be found whereby all the diverse ends of men can be harmoniously realised is demonstrably false. If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict—and of tragedy—can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. (Berlin 1997, p. 239)

Berlin justified this pluralist stance by noting that human development always outstrips the ability to control and engineer it according to some single criterion of the good. What utopian social engineers typically want, he ominously suggested, is a “final solution.”

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