The books under review reflect state of the art discussions of multicultural theory, reexamining key concepts and developing new approaches. Monique Deveaux and most of the authors in Anthony Simon Laden and David Owen's edited volume begin with the set of assumptions, sometimes stated but usually not, that have become standard for the field. The first is the claim that a traditionally liberal definition of justice—identifying it with equal, difference-blind treatment—results in injustices for women and minorities. The second is the understanding that there actually is no such thing as equal, difference-blind treatment. Instead, even in laws aimed at the common good, some citizens lose out; even in such nation-building actions as establishing primary languages, celebrating specific holidays, and setting the length of the school day, governments at both national and local levels privilege majority groups and make life harder for others. And the third is the idea that issues of multiculturalism extend beyond relations between majorities and minorities within established states or nations to include relations between majorities and minorities within minority groups themselves. Proceeding from these common starting points, Deveaux in Gender and Justice in Multicultural Liberal States and the contributors to Multiculturalism and Political Theory set off in different but equally interesting directions.

In his contribution to Laden and Owen's volume, Will Kymlicka claims that acknowledging the tilted playing field changes the multicultural question: It is no longer one as to whether minorities should be granted some version of group rights but whether, since majorities engage in nation building, they must not acknowledge equal rights to nation building on the part of minorities. Kymlicka does not here address the question of whether such acts of nation building might not create injustices for minorities within minority groups. Moreover, as Charles Mills argues in his own contribution to the volume, we need to acknowledge not only the acts of nation building in which majorities engage but also the role of race in them. Nation building does not simply happen to exclude people of color; this exclusion is part and parcel of it.

Mills also raises questions about the focus on culture in debates over multiculturalism. As he points out, this focus either excludes questions of race or tries to reduce them to questions of culture, as if racism reflected dissatisfaction with African American and other minority cultures, rather than with African Americans and other people of color themselves. For other contributors to the volume, the focus on culture is simply distracting. Iris Marion Young maintains that what she calls “positional differences”—differences in power, the division of labor, and differences in socialized capacities—are as important as differences of nationality, ethnicity, and religion. Likewise, Owen and James Tully contrast the issue of (cultural) recognition to what they see as the more urgent need for (material) redistribution.

Two contributions productively question the implicit assumption in multicultural theory that we can accommodate all differences or do so without sacrifice. Bert van den Brink looks at the wholesale rethinking of Dutch identity that followed the murder of Theo van Gogh. That rethinking, he says, had to give up the idea of an enlightened Dutch citizenry but continued to call for unity and consensus. Van den Brink thinks such calls are empty; what a specifically civic competence calls for, instead, is the ability to find common frameworks and courses of action despite disagreement. Danielle Allen takes up the discussion between Ralph Ellison and Hannah Arendt on the school desegregation struggles in Little Rock in 1957. For Arendt, the attempt by a group of African Americans to integrate Central High was a nonpolitical act betraying a self-interest in social advancement. For Ellison, it was a political act that recognized the need for struggle and sacrifice, even the sacrifice of children, to uphold the law. Allen takes from Ellison the idea that in all the discussion of accommodating and recognizing difference, sacrifice and loss must also have their place. Indeed, like van den Brink, she thinks that not all differences will be accommodated, not all disagreements overcome. Like both Ellison and Arendt, however, she agrees that the winners should leave behind no more disagreement than is compatible with friendship.

These reflections on the persistence of differences are especially striking in light of the focus of many of the authors in these two volumes on deliberative democratic approaches. Currently, the two most prominent conceptions of deliberative democracy are those of Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, at one end, and Jürgen Habermas, at the other. Gutmann and Thompson theorize deliberative democracy as a process of moral debate, facilitating discussions about individual rights and the fairness of decision-making procedures and helping citizens to live with the persistence of moral disagreements. Habermas expands deliberative democracy beyond moral questions to encompass pragmatic and ethical questions. While we are sometimes concerned in democracies about the rights we possess and the principles of action we ought to adopt, we are often concerned with strategies for accomplishing predetermined goals and with the issues of what kind of lives we want to lead or what kind of people we want to be. In Habermas's version of deliberative democracy, there are also domains to which deliberation does not apply, such as administration and the economy, and there are aspects of politics that go beyond deliberation, such as crafting compromises, identifying social pathologies, and agreeing to disagree.

Deveaux and Laden add to these approaches to deliberative democracy. In his own contribution to his edited volume, Laden contrasts negotiation to deliberation and theoretical approaches to multicultural issues to political ones. Here, he shows that if we take a theoretical approach and try to achieve settled solutions through negotiation, we will usually be disappointed. Conversely, we might conceive of our discussions as exchanges of claims, the authority of which we try to discover together on the basis of shared reasons. Laden does not think that the authority of shared reasons issues from public reason or from the rational basis of speech as, respectively, Gutmann and Thompson and Habermas do. Instead, he attributes it to the relationship among the partners to the discussion. Moreover, he thinks that in the course of the discussion, we can come to understand our relationship and thus the authority of our demands differently. Indeed, even if a settlement is not forthcoming, we can think of deliberation as building solidarity and as allowing us to focus as much on our relationship to our deliberative partners as on our allegiance to the group to which we belong.

For her part, Deveaux is interested in democratic processes for mediating tensions between the demands of liberal democratic states, on the one hand, and the practices of cultural and religious minorities with regard to women, on the other. If such mediations are to be legitimate, she argues, they must include all stakeholders, including the members of the cultural communities whose practices are at issue. Moreover, all parties to the deliberation must occupy roughly equal positions within open and democratic procedures for deliberation and decision making. Nonetheless, Deveaux insists that deliberative democrats are much too focused on moral debate. She argues that they need to recognize and even to prioritize more pragmatic and strategic models of conflict resolution, making use of negotiation, bargaining, and compromise in addition to rational argumentation. Indeed, she thinks that moral expressions of concerns are often masks for strategic interests and that cultural (what Habermas would call ethical) concerns usually reduce to either moral or strategic ones. Deveaux thus explicitly notes her deviation from Gutmann and Thompson's version of deliberative democracy and from what she thinks is Habermas's version. Nonetheless, she arguably has a narrower conception than the latter insofar as he allows for strategic, moral, and ethical deliberation.

One might in fact argue that Deveaux's own case studies point to the significance of ethical deliberation. In the first of these, she examines the disagreement in the early 1990s between some Native women's groups and mainstream Aboriginal bodies over the Charlottetown Accord in Canada. For the most part, she focuses on the strategic interests of the mainstream bodies in excluding women's voices from the negotiations with the Canadian government. Nevertheless, she also points to differences in the ways that different groups interpret shared principles, including justice and equality. If a Western conception of justice involves fairness, for many Native people, Deveaux claims, it involves the achievement of respectful coexistence. Likewise, if a Western account of equality focuses on individual equality, for many Native people it points to the importance of well-being and harmony in one's community.

The differences here are interpretive differences. They arise primarily from the different ways in which the different groups involved in the controversy interpret shared principles, and these group discussions are thus arguably best viewed as discussions of meaning. Typically, in discussions of meaning, however, we allow for more than one plausible interpretation. Rather than seeing their differences as strategic ones over competing interests or as moral ones over incompatible norms, suppose the participants in the debates over the Charlottetown Accord had seen themselves as engaged in discussions of meaning? Could they not have found themselves forging a compromise in which they meshed interpretations of justice as fairness with interpretations of justice as respectful coexistence, and ideas of individual equality with ideas of communal harmony? Deveaux herself admits that compromises based on interests can fail when participants' interests change. In contrast, compromises that result from ethical deliberations have a stability based on a mutual recognition of legitimate interpretive differences.

This modification to Deveaux's thesis ought not detract from her book's value as a contribution to the debates over deliberative democracy and multiculturalism. Rather, with the essays in the edited volume, it provides the foundation for further work. This work ought to continue to develop deliberative democratic ideas and it ought to incorporate into them much of what we can learn from these two books. Most importantly, perhaps, from Young, Owen, and Tully we can learn to attend to positional differences as well as cultural ones, and from van den Brink and Allen we can learn to the recognize the struggles, virtues, and sacrifices outside of deliberation that are also part of multicultural politics.