Revisiting Cultural Rights: Plausibility and Efficacy of Differentiated Citizenship (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

This book reevaluates the ‘consensus’ liberal view on minority cultural rights from a new, empirically informed perspective to argue that its justificatory machinery is not very persuasive, and that the normative goals of the view caninstead be efficaciously reached from within the classic liberal framework of equal, universal rights. The consensus view commonly justifies the special rights of cultural minorities by three arguments: personal autonomy, wellbeing and shared civic identity.The problem with the first is that it sees autonomy as a function purely of ‘options’,overlooking the role ‘preferences’ play in choice-making: cultures might provide ‘meaningful’ options, but they can as well suppress good preferences.Also, while cultural rights over resources and policy might, and often do, improvethe wellbeing of Native cultures, economic data show such improvement may not be robust due to institutional limitations.Again, social data convincingly show that cultural rights do not enta