What is the meaning of Pluralism?

Pluralism is a concept which accommodates diversity and regards diversity as inevitable. Unlike the advocates of monism who ignore multiple, disparate identities, cultures and traditions and often make deliberate efforts to ro combine them into one artificial political unit, pluralism accepts plurality as a fact of life.

It seeks to protect and promote such diversity in spite of the differences among them. Pluralism has a long history of evolution. It basically emerged as a protest against monism of the German idealistic school of thought led by Hegel. As early as the 1830s the idea of pluralism as an approach to philosophy, psychology and even theology had started taking roots.

It was then argued that pluralism could be interpreted either in a psychological, a cosmological, or a theological sense. Simply for the sake of acquaintance, psychological pluralism claimed that, there exist other independent beings, spiritual beings, or souls, and that they cannot be regarded as mere parts of a universal cosmic soul. Similarly, cosmological pluralism advocated the belief in the plurality of worlds inhabited by rational beings or the belief in various systems of bodies Theological pluralism reintroduced the concept of polytheism.

After further philosophical churning by the European philosophers, by 1870s, pluralism its mark in other fields like various social sciences as well. John Dewey isolated it as a tendency to emphasise on differences and multiplicity and famously stated that pluralism gave birth to “the theory that reality consists in a plurality or multiplicity of distinct beings.” Pluralism made its way into the domain of applied politics in the early twentieth century.

The pluralists like Harold Laski, Frederic Maitland, GD.H Cole, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and others criticised the core of monist theory of sovereignty which held sovereignty of state as inalienable and indivisible. According to them power of the state was limited by the influence of other social, economic and political actors in the political domain. And they argued that it is in the interest of state to concede power to these plural institutions.