Hans F. Sennholz, “Multiculturalism Is Anticulturalism” — Summary

Hans F. Sennholz’s “Multiculturalism Is Anticulturalism” is a short polemical essay in moral and political criticism, marked “Notes, October 1993.” Its scope is narrow but forceful: it distinguishes voluntary ethnic pluralism from what Sennholz calls contemporary multiculturalism, which he presents as an attack on universal moral law.

Multi-ethnicity is an American ideal which does not in the least demean your American citizenship or diminish your love of America, the beautiful.

This opening concession is central to the essay’s strategy. Sennholz does not oppose inherited languages, customs, religions, or family transmission of tradition. His target is a doctrine he thinks replaces individual liberty and shared moral standards with group-based moral claims.

Present-day multiculturalism is a different matter. It does not seek the preservation and promotion of many cultures; it is a vicious attack on the Judeo-Christian culture of the West. It elevates race and gender above the basic moral standards that guide Western society. It is multi-morality, not multi-ethnicity. In fact, it is a counter-culture which attempts to destroy the moral foundation of American society.

The essay’s main conceptual move is therefore semantic and moral: “multiculturalism” is redefined as “multi-morality.” Against it Sennholz sets a Judeo-Christian moral universalism grounded in the Ten Commandments, which he interprets less as a program of state-imposed virtue than as a restraint on evil.

The basic axiom of Western culture always has been the belief in one God and His moral law. The Ten Commandments serve as complete and reliable guides on all questions of life in society.

This theological claim underwrites the essay’s political economy. Sennholz presents moral law as the condition for a voluntary, contractual, peaceful society: people may pursue their interests, but not through coercion, theft, falsehood, adultery, or covetous aggression.

Aside from these admonishments, you are free to pursue your own interests.

The middle section broadens the argument historically. Sennholz links contemporary multiculturalism to European anti-Christian movements, especially Marxism and Nazism. The point is not that American multiculturalists have committed comparable crimes, but that group-defined morality has, in his view, a dangerous intellectual ancestry.

The death of God and the rise of "working-class morality" brought forth the evils of Gulag.

Nazism supplies the parallel case: race replaces class as the moral sovereign. Sennholz’s structure is cumulative: first class morality, then racial morality, then contemporary race-and-gender morality. Each is treated as a rejection of transcendent standards in favor of collective self-assertion.

The American versions of multiculturalism are not guilty of any crimes against humanity, but their reasoning is as flawed and potentially harmful as that of the class or Aryan race culturalists. They, too, reject any transcendent source of morality. To them, only that which furthers the cause of the race or gender is moral.

The essay’s most compressed formulation comes in its rejection of differentiated justice. Sennholz argues that morality cannot be black, white, masculine, feminine, proletarian, or Aryan without ceasing to be morality at all.

They, too, seem to be unaware that there is no black morality—only morality, no black justice—only justice, no feminine justice—only justice. There is one moral law for all humanity.

The closing section turns from intellectual critique to institutional concern. Sennholz claims that government, courts, schools, and bureaucracies increasingly exclude Judeo-Christian references from public life under the banner of church-state separation. The essay ends not with policy detail but with moral confidence: false moral orders are self-defeating.

Despite such an array of counter-culture power nothing immoral is ever permanent. Evil does not live very long; it is self-destructive. Only the moral will endure to the end of time.

The work’s relevance lies in its fusion of libertarian individual freedom with religious moral universalism. Sennholz defends cultural inheritance when freely chosen, but rejects identity-based moral pluralism as “anticultural.” Its argumentative structure—liberty, moral law, historical warning, contemporary application, providential conclusion—makes the essay a concise statement of a 1990s conservative-libertarian response to multicultural politics.