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Book Review
| Carol Weisbrod, Emblems of Pluralism: Cultural Differences and the State, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. $45 cloth (ISBN 0-691-08924-8); $17.95 paperback (ISBN 0-691-08925-6).
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| Emblems of Pluralism is a suggestive, timely, unusual exploration of relations between states and internal groups. It invites the reader to think freshly about how peoples do—may hope to—live together peaceably and fruitfully on the earth within particular political spaces. |
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Weisbrod underwrites the invitation with her quiet command of a remarkable range and depth of learning. Here her learning takes form as well-recounted stories of the kind that establish peoples' identities. There is a rich diversity of them, and they work well together. We find everyone from A to Z—from Azcarate to Zog I, with the Cyclops and Willie Nelson in between—lying down together. It is an aesthetic success that performs on the page the pluralism Weisbrod addresses and commends. |
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Aesthetics counts to her because she knows that the meaning that lies closest to the heart is not always sayable and can be summoned, if at all, by silence or by the arts. It is a matter of apperception, or intuition, or of reading between the lines. So, for pluralism, she says, we must have a "feeling" (209). And about a primary theme of the book—the relations among individual self, group, and state—she speaks of "our sense of the role of the state," which takes us to the level where "the political is personal, a product of our deepest selves" (177). And to engage in federalism, she says, "a special state of mind" is required (39). |
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To put it this way, gives the reader pause: "a special state of mind"— for federalism? She must be asking us to think of the meaning and practice of "federalism" in its Latin sense of foedus as cognate with faith. She must be summoning for federalism meaning that lies beyond the dimensions inhabited by the Federalist Society and the Rehnquist Court. It is artfully done. |
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And as it turns out, aesthetics is also for her related to ethics. The trend toward centralization and vertical-hierarchical relationships of the state, she says, ignores the pluralist or horizontal stories, the counter-stories, (4), like the ones she tells that represent to the reader the forgotten individual, the pariah group, and the odd case. These she raises to memory both to preserve them from oblivion and to challenge us about what we thought we knew about sovereignty, about federalism, communities, about ourselves—about who, after all, we are. This is ethics in action. |
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This ethical work of the book is matched by its ontological work. Weisbrod says what is true about us is that we are multiple. We are dialogic selves within and various selves without, depending on context and community. After finishing her book, neither the writer nor the reader remains in the same place from which they started the journey of it. We are convinced that the author will have moved on, will have continued probing what she wrote; that she will have new counter-arguments, additional perspectives, and other stories; that she will be yet a different person. We are convinced that we should hurry to join her in developing those questioning, tentative, modest habits of mind that will match the reality of our own, developing multiplicity. |
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Weisbrod organizes the book around two paintings. One, used as the cover illustration, is Erastus Field's Historical Monument of the American Republic. She says that its collection of massive, aggressive towers thrusting heavenward "implies a hierarchical understanding of American federalism" (13). To this reader, each tower is very like what, years ago, Sunday School teachers held up as a representation of the biblical Tower of Babel, an association that is perhaps intentional. Babel is, after all, where humanity was scattered and language was confused, thereby making pluralism possible and federalism necessary. |
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The other painting, discussed but not reproduced in the volume is Edward Hicks's Peaceable Kingdom, the non-hierarchical lion lying down with the lamb. Weisbrod's heart lies with this painting, but not sentimentally so. (The book remains unsentimental throughout.) She troubles about the lion. She tastefully refrains from citing Woody Allen's well-traveled observation that the lion lies down with the lamb but that the lamb doesn't get much sleep. And she also avoids G. K. Chesterton's less well-known objection to the imperialism of the lamb: Who is the lamb to enforce vegetarianism on the lion? But she shares the sense of both. The reality of the pluralism she commends admittedly risks sleepless nights for some and hungry days for others. |
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Weisbrod notes that, as scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson "would stand aside and watch," and she cites the description of him offered by the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica: "Humanity was his hero. He loved man, but he was not fond of men" (199). Weisbrod is an emblem of what we hope scholars of the humanities are. She is a careful observer. She loves humanity. And she is dearly fond of men and women. |
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| Milner S. Ball
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| University of Georgia |
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