Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy

Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

New York Times' writer John Vinocur notes that the French avoid the real issues and compromises necessary to create an identity that is both Muslim and French by charades such as debates over whether to ban the burqua, which he calls "low-risk choreography as ancient as the minuet."1 In the so-called republican revival in contemporary political theory, some have noted similar dances of avoidance in which the legacies of historical figures like Machiavelli and Rousseau become a field for stylized sparring over the deficiencies of contemporary politics without the high risk of directly confronting messy questions of class, religion, and identity. In Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy, Cécile Laborde succeeds in leading the reader through some of the intricate steps of both of these modern minuets. Trained as a political theorist in both France and England, and a neo-republican fellow traveler, Laborde is very well-equipped to act as a guide to francophone and anglophone republicanism.2 But it is her own lucid intelligence that makes Critical Republicanism such a provocative and stimulating read.

Laborde's book is above all a contextualization of the hijab controversy in French political thought, illuminating why the debate over Muslim girls' right to wear the hijab in schools became a lightening rod for debates over France's political identity. But it is larger than a book on the hijab controversy in two senses. First, she uses her understanding of contemporary political theory in the English-speaking world to gain critical distance on French republican thinking and to translate its tenets into the language of Anglo-American political theorizing. Thus the French republican understanding of fairness is likened to Brian Barry's egalitarian liberalism; French notions of liberty as autonomy are explicated through Rawls's distinction between a comprehensive liberal education and a political liberal education; laïcité emerges as a more robust version of liberal neutrality; the insights of French feminists are appropriated through the lens of Philip Pettit's republican theory of non-domination. Yet Laborde points out that French republicanism is a distinctive theoretical force in its own right. In England and America, republicanism is often a perspective to be excavated in order to reveal buried insights: past Machiavellian moments...