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Article contents
Vico and Montesquieu: Limits of Pluralist Imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
From Plato onward, western moral and political philosophy has been dominated by a monist impulse manifest in a search for the best way of life, the best form of government, the perfect society, the highest human faculty, the highest or the best religion, the single most reliable way to acquire knowledge of the world, and so on. In ethics it has taken the form of moral monism or the view that one way of life can be rationally shown to be the highest or truly human. This view has commanded the allegiance of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Mill, Marx, and others. Because monism despises neglected human faculties, virtues, and ways of life and has been a source of much violence and oppression, we cannot hope to provide a coherent theory of human liberation and freedom without developing a coherent theory of moral and cultural pluralism. Although moral monism was challenged from the very beginning by the Sophists, the skeptics, and others, a systematic critique of it was not mounted until the eighteenth century by such writers as Vico, Montesquieu, Montaigne, Herder, and others, who stressed the inevitability and even the desirability of cultural diversity.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 25: Civilization and Oppression , 1999 , pp. 55 - 78
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 1999
References
1 For a critical discussion of moral monism, see my ‘Moral Philosophy and Its Anti-pluralist Bias’ in Philosophy and Pluralism, ed. Archard, David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Although moral and cultural pluralism are closely related and often overlap, they are distinct. The former refers to the view that the good life can be lived in several equally legitimate ways, the latter to the view that human life and its constituent activities and relationships can be given different and equally plausible meaning and significance.
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