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If there is one point that the critics of liberalism almost all agree upon, it is that liberal neutrality is an unappealing and perhaps incoherent doctrine. Many contemporary liberals do not endorse the idea of neutrality, and even those liberals most identified with the idea have backed off it in certain respects. In thinking about the challenges posed by cultural and linguistic diversity, the idea of neutrality seems especially unpromising. Nobody has made this point as clearly or forcefully as Will Kymlicka. 'The idea that government could be neutral with respect to ethnic and national groups', he argues, 'is patently false'. 'In the areas of official languages, political boundaries, and the division of powers, there is no way to avoid supporting this or that societal culture'. The aim of the present paper is to challenge this widely accepted assumption that liberal neutrality is irrelevant to thinking about cultural and linguistic diversity. Focusing on the problem of language policy, I argue that liberal neutrality represents a coherent position that should play a modest, but not negligible, role in the construction of a normative theory of language politics. A rehabilitation of the idea of liberal neutrality as part of what I will call a 'hybrid' theory of language policy points to a distinctive and appealing way of making the case for minority language rights and also to an understanding of the reasonable limits that can be placed on such rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the questions posed by Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and other scholars regarding the use of widely accepted analytical categories in the social sciences. Rudolph critiques research approaches that posit universal categories into which social scientists claim to classify diverse people and culture.

The notion that important elements of political action may be "socially constructed" has received growing attention in political science since the 1980s. Meta-theorizing and empirical work on culture, ideas, norms, and identity has garnered increasing space in top journals. "Constructivist" theorists of various types have won book contracts from university presses and faculty positions at prestigious universities. Despite rising recognition of ideational or constructivist scholarship, however, its status in the discipline remains ambiguous. Instances where empirical claims by non-ideational theorists entertain ideational alternative explanations are the tiny exception rather than the rule. Empirical ideational arguments, by contrast, still achieve high-level mainstream publication only given elaborate and explicit competition with non-ideational claims. Much of their apparent rise has also come not in old mainstream venues, but in the emergence of newer journals which are less insistent that constructivists engage elaborate contests with non-ideational theories along orthodox methodological lines. This is probably a typical pattern for new schools of thought that attempt over decades to be admitted to central disciplinary debates (at least in the post-1945 world of proliferating journals). But if we turn from publication patterns to the internal logic of competition between ideational and non-ideational scholarship, it becomes clear that we are not just looking at the slow movement of a new approach into mainstream debates. On both sides of this line-and especially amongst constructivists themselves-we find scholars arguing that the appropriate end-result will not be engagement and competition but the consolidation of separate-but-equal realms of inquiry.Two related notions suggest that constructivists and non-constructivists are most interested in distinct discussions. The first traces most famously to Max Weber, who taught that arguments that invoke meaning engage something other than explanation. Weber posited a difference between an argument's "adequacy on a causal level"-its explanatory force-and the kind of understanding, or "adequacy on the level of meaning," to which ideational scholarship aspires. He thought we could capture causality in action (being confident that under certain conditions, certain people would do certain things) without understanding the significance of what people were doing as they saw it. Later scholars expanded on Weber to put ideational work in its own interpretive or "hermeneutic" category, setting it off from the causal dynamics that non-ideational explanations of action ostensibly share with the natural sciences.This move is tied to the notion that much ideational scholarship asks "how" or "what" questions in a "constitutive" mode, creating a division of labor with the "why" questions posed by explanatory work. Culture, norms, ideas, identities, and other socially-constructed elements define certain realities and imbue them with meaning in inseparably constitutive ways. Explanatory scholarship plays out the more mechanistic causal workings within that context. We need constitutive scholarship, for example, to see how the norm of sovereignty constitutes the state. In constructivist claims this is not a separable, temporally-sequential, causal-explanatory relationship. The very minute that people accepted norms of sovereignty they looked around and saw states. Explanatory approaches can analyze cause and effect dynamics within that socially-constructed reality.This article argues that neither rationale for separate realms of inquiry stands up to scrutiny. Weber created the "understanding" category by defining explanation as a purely correlational exercise... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]