Identity in Democracy

“Winner of the 2003 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Government and Political Science, Association of American Publishers” Amy Gutmann Amy Gutmann is President-elect of the University of Pennsylvania. Her many books include Democratic Education(Princeton); Why Deliberative Democracy? (forthcoming, Princeton) and Democracy and Disagreement (Harvard), both with Dennis Thompson; and Color Conscious (Princeton, with K. Anthony Appiah). Written by one of America’s leading political thinkers, this is a book about the good, the bad, and the ugly of identity politics.Amy Gutmann rises above the raging polemics that often characterize discussions of identity groups and offers a fair-minded assessment of the role they play in democracies. She addresses fundamental questions of timeless urgency while keeping in focus their relevance to contemporary debates: Do some identity groups undermine the greater democratic good and thus their own legitimacy in a democratic society? Even if so, how is a democracy to fairly distinguish between groups such as the KKK on the one hand and the NAACP on the other? Should democracies exempt members of some minorities from certain legitimate or widely accepted rules, such as Canada’s allowing Sikh members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to wear turbans instead of Stetsons? Do voluntary groups like the Boy Scouts have a right to discriminate on grounds of sexual preference, gender, or race? Identity-group politics, Gutmann shows, is not aberrant but inescapable in democracies because identity groups represent who people are, not only what they want–and who people are shapes what they demand from democratic politics. Rather than trying to abolish identity politics, Gutmann calls upon us to distinguish between those demands of identity groups that aid and those that impede justice. Her book does justice to identity groups, while recognizing that they cannot be counted upon to do likewise to others. Clear, engaging, and forcefully argued, Amy Gutmann’s Identity in Democracy provides the fractious world of multicultural and identity-group scholarship with a unifying work that will sustain it for years to come. “Typically, discussions of identity politics in American life are tinged with vitriol. Gutmann’s book, by contrast, calms the debate with an unflappably reasonable analysis. . . . She argues that, since humans are social creatures, identity politics is a permanent fixture of the political landscape.” “There is much to admire in this book. It is clearly written, deploys interesting and topical examples, and is accessible without losing important nuance and careful insight.”–Margaret Moore, Political Science Quarterly “Although Gutmann writes as a philosopher, her text is accessible to the nonspecialist interested in analyzing core issues of diversity, identity, and community. . . . Gutmann’s analysis of identity groups is instructive to those who seek a more complex understanding of the tensions between expressions of individual identities and the creation of an equitable community.”–Kristen A. Renn, Academe “Even though identity is a big subject these days, the role of identity in democratic politics has received far too little critical attention. It tends to get either indiscriminate praise as a route to self-realization and to group justice, or derogatory dismissal as a vehicle of prejudice and partiality, or radical neglect as a poor relation of group interest. Amy Gutmann’s book provides a splendid scrutiny of this rich and diverse terrain, ending with a coherent and integrated understanding of the role of identity groups in democratic politics. We have reasons to be grateful.”-Amartya Sen, Trinity College, 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics “For anyone who believes that identity politics is just identity politics, this timely book will be a revelation. Comprehensive and full of brilliant insight, it remains always accessible as it puts identity politics through i.