Of acknowledgement, manners and multicultural democratic society

Clayton Chin and Geoffrey Brahm Levey’s article “Recognition as acknowledgment” offers a timely proposal to address a dimension of multicultural democracy – symbolic politics – that they take to have been neglected by liberal theorists of multicultural rights as well as theorists of recognition. I approach this argument, first, by taking up Chin and Levey’s argument in relation to an argument advanced by Jacob Levy in his essay “Multicultural manners” which also aims to address issues that are not well-captured by the rights or recognition approaches in order to bring into focus the issue of social belonging. This discussion will serve to provide a basis for a second focus on the salience of the politics of the border and of citizenship for symbolic politics in order to raise some questions about how a concern with forms of symbolic exclusion necessarily engages issues of territorial and civic inclusion and exclusion