Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice and Evenhandedness.

• Position: Book Review

J.H. Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice and Evenhandedness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 284.

This work evaluates the compatibility of liberal democratic principles with unfamiliar identities and cultures. The author advocates a contextual approach to theories of justice and democracy, stressing that the conventional understanding of justice, which postulates government neutrality, should be supplemented with an appreciation for the citizenship, history, and cultural foundations of a particular political community.

Carens's strategy is to move back and forth between theory and context. He cautions that our understanding of general principles is virtually useless if it is not applied to different contextual situations. His approach differs from Rawls's in that he wishes to supplement what Rawls calls "our considered convictions of justice" with intuitive (less considered) judgments relating to unfamiliar, but real, cases and issues.

Three distinctive features resonate throughout this book: its approach (emphasis on the contextual), the range of phenomena that it considers (accounting for cultural difference between political communities as well as cultural differences within), and its underlying conception of justice, which draws on different views of fairness. In addition, Carens's book is situated in a dialogue with Walzer's conception of justice in Spheres of Justice. Carens uses this conceptual framework to consider morality's relationship to liberal democratic values and cultural diversity.

In his discussion on liberalism and culture, Carens refers to Kymlicka's discussion on the dialogue between cultural diversity and political communities; however, he expresses reservations about Kymlicka's analysis. According...