Politics and the Relevance of Cultures

The essay suggests that there are reasons to keep worrying about cultural heritages and to try to understand and compare different cultures. Such endeavours are not just exercises for academic life, but guide the actual, practical processes of development that our multicultural societies need to go through. The essay considers a common conception of politics, i.e. the social contract tradition, which seems to tell against the stance that the essay to defend. It is argued that this conception of politics opens up several problems concerning practical reason. The essay discusses then the nature of practical reason and argues that it has some universalistic features, but also some features which link it to particular cultures. The author suggests that the account of practical reason that he proposes can be used to argue that the study of cultures should matter for our current practical problems in the domain of politics.