Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Communicative Action, Strategic Action, And Inter-Group Dialogue, Michael James

Faculty Journal Articles

A consensus has emerged among many normative theorists of cultural pluralism that dialogue is the key to securing just relations among ethnic or cultural groups. However, few normative theorists have explored the conditions or incentives that enable inter-group dialogue versus those that encourage inter-group conflict. To address this problem, I use Habermas’s distinction between communicative and strategic action, since many models of inter-group dialogue implicitly rely upon communicative action, while many accounts of inter-group conflict rest upon strategic action. Drawing on explanatory accounts of inter-group conflict, I outline five strategic logics of group conflict, what I call the resource, political, …