From Pluralism to Diversity: Modulating Conceptions
of Politics and Agency
From Pluralism to Diversity:
Modulating Conceptions of Politics and Agency
Sasheej Hegde
University of Hyderabad
Abstract
The idea of diversity today exerts a powerful influence both
on the process of politics and on the study of politics. The
idea informs a wide range of ideals and methods and, perhaps
more important, it shapes influential definitions of politics
and political subjectivity and agency. The lecture is an attempt
to examine this influence. Working off Charles Taylor’s
efforts to identify a space for the ‘politics of recognition’,
I turn to recent efforts to theorize the course of politics
in India to articulate a concept of political agency that
is a counterpoint to agonistic conceptions of politics and
‘political perspectivism’ per se. The argument
is not for a new, extra-historical (or postcultural) foundation
for agency and for political claims, but rather to theorize
the quest for unity and rational consensus as marking ‘the
essence of the political’. This approach to diversity
allows us to enrich accounts of political subjectivity and
agency at the same time that it forces us to rethink our relation
to political theory and political sociology.
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