Home > Positioning > Subjects > Political philosophy > The one and the many

The one and the many

How do people who do not agree about how to live nonetheless live together under common arrangements? The question is among the oldest in political thought — the relation of the one and the many, the unity of the city and the diversity of those in it — and it has only sharpened as societies have grown more plural. A single polity must somehow be one: it has borders, laws, a public authority that binds everyone within. Yet the people it binds are many: divided by religion, culture, language, and incompatible conceptions of the good, none of which the polity can simply abolish. This branch gathers the field’s answers — the arrangements, principles and accommodations by which the many are held together without being made the same.

Toleration and its limits

The earliest modern answer is toleration. Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) argued that civil authority has no business coercing religious belief — belief cannot be compelled, and the magistrate’s sword reaches actions, not souls — drawing a line between the public order the state secures and the private conviction it must leave alone. The history of toleration is the widening of that line: from a grudging permission granted by a dominant power to a minority it could suppress, toward a mutual recognition of equal standing among citizens who simply differ.

The concept carries a famous strain. Toleration means putting up with what one holds to be wrong — if one approved, no toleration would be needed; if one were indifferent, nothing would be tolerated. So it always marks a disapproval it declines to act on, and that raises the paradox of toleration: must a tolerant order tolerate the intolerant? To extend toleration to those who would destroy it seems suicidal; to deny it seems to break the very principle. The standard resolutions distinguish the attitude from the practice, or draw the limit at action rather than belief — but the boundary of the tolerable is a live question wherever a society must decide which differences it can absorb and which it cannot.

Multiculturalism and recognition

Toleration leaves the difference alone; multiculturalism asks whether leaving alone is enough. Charles Taylor’s “The Politics of Recognition” (1992) argued that identity is formed dialogically, so that withholding recognition — or projecting a demeaning image — is a form of harm, and a politics adequate to diversity must do more than not interfere: it must recognize groups in their distinctness. Will Kymlicka (Multicultural Citizenship, 1995) gave the liberal-egalitarian case for group-differentiated rights — cultural membership is a primary good, the context within which individuals make meaningful choices, so minorities disadvantaged in sustaining their culture may be owed special protections to put them on equal footing.

The accommodations draw their own objections, kept here intact. Group rights can essentialize — freezing a living culture into a fixed identity, and privileging its self-appointed spokesmen. They can collide with the rights of internal minorities: protecting a community’s traditional practices may entrench the subordination of women or dissenters within it, the tension Susan Moller Okin pressed in asking whether multiculturalism is bad for women. And the recognition axis can crowd out the redistribution axis — a politics absorbed in cultural identity may lose sight of material inequality, a worry from the left that runs through the recognition-versus-redistribution debate.

Modus vivendi against overlapping consensus

How deep must agreement go for coexistence to hold? Two answers mark the poles. Rawls’s overlapping consensus asks a good deal: a stable just society rests on the divergent comprehensive doctrines within it each endorsing the same political conception, for their own internal reasons — Kantian, utilitarian and religious citizens converging on shared principles from different foundations. The settlement is more than a truce because each party affirms it as right, not merely accepts it as expedient.

John Gray (Two Faces of Liberalism, 2000) takes the other pole: a modus vivendi. On this view the hope of consensus is misplaced — value-pluralism runs too deep for divergent ways of life to converge on shared principles — and the realistic aim is peaceful coexistence itself, an accommodation that lets antagonistic communities share a political order without sharing its grounds. Where Rawls wants agreement that goes all the way down, the modus vivendi tradition settles for a stable peace that does not, and counts that not as second-best but as the honest maximum for a genuinely plural world. Which is the firmer ground for coexistence — principled consensus or pragmatic accommodation — is unsettled.

Agonism: conflict as constitutive

A further line denies that coexistence should aim at agreement at all. Agonistic democrats hold that conflict is constitutive of the political, not a defect to be engineered out of it, and that the deliberative dream of rational consensus suppresses the very contestation democracy lives by. Chantal Mouffe (The Democratic Paradox, 2000) distinguishes antagonism, the friend–enemy struggle that destroys a shared order, from agonism, in which opponents confront each other as legitimate adversaries rather than enemies — contesting within a shared symbolic space they do not seek to eliminate. The task is not to overcome conflict but to tame it into adversarial form. William Connolly presses a generous “pluralization,” an ethos that affirms the ongoing emergence of new identities rather than fixing a settled set; Jacques Rancière makes the uncounted forcing their way into the order the very moment of politics (his reading of the political is taken up under power, critique, and the radical traditions). Coexistence, on these views, is an ongoing contest, never a reached settlement.

The political reach of value-pluralism

If fundamental values are irreducibly many and genuinely conflict — the value-pluralist thesis (set out among the standing disputes) — a politics follows. Where a monist who holds all values reducible to one might justify imposing that single measure on everyone, the pluralist has principled grounds for not doing so: there is no single ranking to enforce, and a politics that forced one would suppress goods every bit as real as those it served. William Galston (Liberal Pluralism, 2002) develops this into a case for a liberalism of maximal accommodation — wide latitude for divergent ways of life, and a strong presumption against state interference in how communities and individuals pursue their plural goods. The contested point is whether value-pluralism delivers this liberal payoff at all: critics note that incommensurable values give no automatic verdict for toleration over its opposite, since the case for letting differences stand is itself one value among the many the thesis says cannot be ranked.

Cosmopolitan and bounded claims

The widest form of the question asks how far the relevant community extends. Cosmopolitanism holds that every person has equal moral standing regardless of nationality, so that justice and serious duties cross borders — Thomas Pogge argues the global institutional order itself harms the world’s poor and so owes them more than charity. Against this stand the claims of the bounded community: that special duties to compatriots are genuine and not mere prejudice, that justice presupposes the shared institutions and reciprocity a bounded polity provides, and that political obligation is owed first to those one actually stands with. The reconciliations — duties that are both universal and special, weighted differently at different ranges — are themselves the matter in dispute. (The process-relational tradition’s version of holding many worlds together without a meta-frame is treated under cosmopolitics.)