"e pluribus unum": the new american identity question.

Summary The question of American identity underwent a turning point in the 1960s. From the emphasis, both in the social sciences and in the political debate, on a liberal pluralism open to cultural diversity but politically integrative, even assimilationist, designed by the founding fathers and fed by immigration of various origins, American society has moved on to a new grammar of pluralism, the rules of which are dictated by identity differentiation based on cultural criteria claimed as determinant by minorities, in legal terms in particular in the public space: "race", gender, ethnicity, sexual behavior. The purpose of this thesis is to shed light, in the American socio-historical context of the 1960s to the present, on this new way of formulating the American identity question through three of the major currents of ideas that have set out to answer it: republicanism, communitarianism and multiculturalism. These three currents have as their common point of departure the criticism of a classical liberal interpretation of American identity that they consider inadequate to the demands of the identity turn. The different readings of contemporary American identity given by the authors who embody these currents make it possible to draw the contours of a new political approach to American liberalism. Beyond the American example, they also allow us to question the content of modern identity, both individual and collective, in modern liberal democratic societies, and thus provide answers to the challenges they face today.