Max Diamond — Identitarianism and the Splintering of Democracy

I don't see identarianism or identarian epistemology as problem although it is an issue. It lies at the foundation of postmodern critique. 

identarianism or identarian epistemology are issues that a represetative democracy should be able to handle by ensuring that all identity groups are represented by qualified people. so that all can feel –genuinely – that they have a seat at the table rather than either token representation or no representation.

This is what social and political liberalism are about, after all.

Quilette
Identitarianism and the Splintering of Democracy

Max Diamond

Hannah Arendt was a literary intellectual, defined by Thomas Pynchon as, “people who read and think.” Like Socrates, Hannah Arendt thought and went where thought took her. Arendt’s thinking led her many places, but one of the more interesting topics she thought about was the source of human values. Arendt shared Nietzsche’s and Marx’s belief that moral values are made by humans and not, as the Enlightenment believed, independently existing principles of right and wrong. As Nietzsche and Marx are both earlier in history and more forceful in their language then Arendt (and also, notably, men), Arendt’s own thinking on how values are made gets less attention than it merits.

Arendt devotes much of her most important book, The Human Condition, to elaborating three different categorical distinctions important for how she thinks our experience of existence shapes how we make human values. She calls the first distinction the social/private/political distinction, the second the labor/work/action distinction and the third the earth/world distinction. To understand these three distinctions correctly is to follow Arendt’s thinking on human values, and they are best taken in reverse order....

OUP Blog

Hannah Arendt and the source of human values

Steven Maloney