Liberal multiculturalism fails because individual choice cannot supply the bonds of recognition and reciprocity

Evidence

Thus, we cannot simply reaffirm individual liberty and formal equality (what New Labour disarmingly calls “equality of worth”), because we can see both their inadequacy to the complexities of attachment, belongingness, and identity which multicultural society introduces, and the deep injustices of inequality, social exclusion, and injustice which continue to be perpetrated in their name. Individual choice, however tarted up with a thin veneer of communitarianism, cannot supply the bonds of recognition, reciprocity, and connection which give meaning to our lives as social beings. This is the cultural or communitarian limit on liberal (including “market-liberal”) forms of multiculturalism. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 377

Categorization

• DEFINE: Identifies the ‘cultural or communitarian limit’ as a structural weakness in liberal forms of multiculturalism, a concept to carry forward into later Islamophobia readings.
• XREF: connects to: Multicultural affirmation alone does not achieve collective liberation. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 1272; World courts are useless without prior bonds of reciprocity and shared aims among peoples — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 720