Identity in Democracy

paper is about a democratic idea and its different form as view of john rawl's.

The Review of Politics, 2009

In this article, I sketch a reading of Rawls's work that ties together many of the features that distinguish it from the work of other authors commemorated in this issue. On this reading, the two world wars and the Holocaust pressed the question of whether a just liberal democracy is possible. Seeking to defend reasonable faith in that…

In my thesis, I develop a framework based on John Rawls's Political Liberalism that addresses the question: how is it possible for democratic institutions and their decisions to be legitimate, given that (i) they are supposed to be governed by the "will of the people", but (ii) the people will disagree with each other about what political institutions ought to do about any given issue? Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson advance a deliberative democratic response to this question, which has served as the basis of governments' attempts to "strengthen democracy". They argue that political decisions are justified insofar as they are made in a process that allows citizens to exchange reasons that are respectful and moral. Furthermore, although a binding decision must be made at some point, it should be possible to revisit any decision after a period of time.

Journal of Nationalism, Memory, and Language Politics, 2019

Focusing on the topic of public dialogue between religiously theistic, quasi-religious, atheistic, and non-religious citizens in a liberal democracy, this paper develops a practical strategy of dialogue in the wake of Rawls' Political Liberalism (1993). To set the stage for a rereading of Rawls, the chief points of liberal citizenship are outlined in critical dialogue with recent literature that urges citizens to abandon liberalism. While metaphysics, religious norms, and moral visions of the good are not bracketed by liberal regimes, it is true that liberal states nonetheless attempt to remain neutral in matters of religion and worship. This may yield many worldviews incommensurable with each other. Liberalism, then, as a political order, involves a pluralism of worldviews, some religious and some not. A hermeneutics of public dialogue can enable citizens to be reconciled with, rather than escape, the pluralism born of liberalism. I suggest the point of departure for such a hermeneutic lies in the vocabulary of Rawlsian "overlapping consensus." Reconsidered in this light, overlapping consensus can open up the prospect of dialogue among citizenry in the public square in a manner that facilitates agreement and cooperation. This is due to the fact that overlapping consensus contrasts with the idea that when one converges on a policy, one must always do so for the same reason or theoretical justification. The paper concludes with the structure of a four-way dialogue that may result from the application of this hermeneutic. Keywords hermeneutics; liberalism; political constructivism; public dialogue; Rawls Within itself the political conception does without the concept of truth... Once we accept the fact that reasonable pluralism is a permanent condition of public culture under free institutions. Holding a political conception as true, and for that reason alone the one suitable basis of public reason, is exclusive, even sectarian, and so like to foster political division.-John Rawls (1995, 94, 129).

Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2024

This article assesses Frank I. Michelman's constitution-centered and proceduralist interpretation of Rawls' conception of political legitimacy and argues that it merits attention because it highlights the institutional aspects of Rawls' understanding of political legitimacy for constitutional democracies. However, the article also questions Michelman's interpretation of Rawls' 'liberal principle of legitimacy' (LPL) and the later 'idea of political legitimacy based on the criterion of reciprocity' (ILBR). As Michelman rightly points out, for the exercise of political power to be legitimate in a constitutional democracy, it must be in accordance with a constitution that is itself legitimate or reasonably acceptable to free and equal citizens. Yet, the article argues that Rawls' two legitimacy formulations are attempts to make an additional point: Namely that when democratic citizens exercise political power in 'the fundamental political issues', or in issues that shape the basic justice of society or the essentials of the constitution itself, they must respect the ideal of public reasonor ensure themselves and other citizens that their exercise of political power is in accordance with the underlying basic political-moral ideas of persons and society that make the constitution itself acceptable to them. The LPL and the ILBR are conceptions of political legitimacy, not in the sense of setting up a criterion for when a specific law is legitimate, but in the sense of outlining civic or "office-specific" constraints that citizens and public officials must put on their reasoning and exercise of political power in the fundamental political issues for the practice of a constitutional democracy to be legitimate, or well-ordered, reasonably just, and stable for the right reasonsin the long run. The article also discusses why Rawls saw the need to reformulate the LPL, and how the later ILBR assigns a new significance to citizens' actual use of public reason and their intersubjective deliberation.

Tradition and Discovery 49:3, 2023

John Rawls's political liberalism is supported and better understood via Michael Polanyi's tacit and emergent structures. Rawls claims the political is "freestanding" and "neutral" relative to comprehensive moral doctrines and metaphysical assumptions. Polanyian critics of Rawls emphasize the personal nature of our political commitments and Polanyi's metaphysical realism. They also claim tacit knowing makes Rawls's "veil of ignorance" impossible. However, as an emergent social order, political liberalism is a joint comprehension of a plurality of competing traditions that operates as an upper-level control in a dual control system; it supports yet constrains individuals in traditions so they may mutually flourish under its umbrella. Emergent levels have their own rules of organization and hence possess a rationality that can function independently and neutrally relative to its subsidiaries and so is freestanding, as Rawls claims. Still, since this level is constituted by overlapping consensus and is not a modus vivendi, there is indeed personal commitment to political values, as Polanyi affirms. This continuity makes it difficult to disambiguate one's comprehensive ethical understanding from one's political understanding. But, as with counterfactual hypotheses in science, Polanyi could endorse the artifice of the veil. By occluding politically irrelevant facts we better access this shared level, and tacit convictions about political justice become explicit.

Angelaki, 2004

journal of the theoretical humanities volume 9 number 3 december 2004 F or any teacher, student or practitioner of the architecture and the law of states, the passing of John Rawls, over a year later, is doubtless still providing an unusual moment in modern liberal democratic discourse. On one level, this is quite naturally a moment in which those who admire Rawls' powerful and intensive achievement may find themselves drawn to considering this achievement anew, as Rawls' system itself sought at every moment to renew the cause of a democratic justice. It is at this moment , then, that I wish to offer such a fresh assessment of what is arguably the most important conception developed in Rawls' corpus, his great latter-day state of nature, the hyperdemo-cratic construct of the "original position." More specifically, however, I want to read Rawls in a mode which has everything to do with John Rawls "himself," as this self emerges in his discourse, as his discourse, with all the import for the study of democracy which the passing of his material self offers in parallel. Firstly, I want briefly to set out a short reading of the Rawlsian political subject, that agent who, from A Theory of Justice to The Law of Peoples, imaginarily dwells in the original position and guarantees the justice of the arrangements produced there. In this reading, I begin by considering further one common complaint: that this agent of Rawls' original-position exercise in A Theory of Justice is a subject which, though it be for purposes of egalitarianism and other sorts of fairness, is imaginatively emptied of all meaningful distinction between itself and other such subjects. It is this erasure, I want to contend, which seems to imply that "any" subject (if the idea of a plurality of subjects has not thereby lost its meaning) will carry out the original-position exercise in exactly the same way as Rawls' text claims, a fact which makes any enactment of the exercise after the first redundant. The original position's state of nature is thus foreclosed in favor of its very first performance , but this performance is that of Rawls' text itself. It is a text in/for which theory is practice. Leaving aside for the moment most of the relevant definitional questions, I should note that this reading will only be a "deconstruction" of Rawls' text (to use a term as out of fashion as "state of nature") in that (a) it will illuminate a governing structural feature which, running through both the writing and reading of A Theory of Justice, undoes this text's own claims to present a mere blueprint for state-building, 2 and (b) it will also, in describing this structurality, make use of tools supplied by various texts etc

Voluntas: Revista Internacional de Filosofia

This article argues about John Rawls' paradigm shift in contemporary political philosophy. In the article, this paradigm is defined as democratic insofar it claims, among other things, to leave enough room for democratic deliberations and citizens’ political autonomy. On this specific issue, Rawls and Habermas dialogue is still particularly fruitful. Both authors believe that contemporary political philosophy must be modest in some relevant theoretical and methodological aspects but they disagree on which of these aspects should be more or less modest. This article argues that when we look for the legitimate boundaries of the contemporary political philosophy, Rawls and Habermas projects should be seen as closely complementary to one another. On the one hand, the article partially agrees with Habermas’ objections to Rawls that political philosophy should not be too modest in providing orientations for the normative grounds of the political justification. On the other hand, agai...

John Rawls famously distinguishes between ideal and non ideal theory, according priority to the former. He depicts his own efforts to articulate the conception of justice as fairness as an instance of ideal theory. Subsequent political theorists have taken Rawls's distinction as a template for how we should understand the tasks of political theory. Yet they also have struggled to clarify the underlying distinction with notable lack of success. We argue that Rawls himself does not abide by the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory and that this affords a good reason to set the distinction aside as a distraction.