Political Liberalism. Neutrality and the Political

Abstract. The paper examines the current discussion in liberalism around the issue of the "neutrality" of the state. It scrutinizes the "political liberalism" defended by John Rawls and Charles Larmore and shows that the consequence of their approach is to evacuate the dimension of "the political" from the idea of a well-ordered society. By presenting the exclusions existing in their model of liberal society as the product of free agreement resulting from rational procedures, "political liberals" offer us a picture in which antagonism, violence and power have only disappeared because they have been made invisible. The consequence is to leave liberalism unable to conceptualize power and antagonism. The paper concludes that there cannot be such a thing as a "neutral justification of the neutrality of the state" (Larmore 1987) and that a pluralist perfectionist perspective like the one proposed by Joseph Raz offers a more adequate way to envisage the specificity of modern pluralist democracy.     

Le probléme des origines des Assemblées d'États: Réflexions méthodologiques à la lumière de l'histoire sud‐est européenne de l'institution

Summary

This paper examines the relations between republican and democratic forces in Restoration Spain. From the middle of the last century, republicanism was the political movement most clearly involved with the democratization of Spanish politics. After the collapse of the 1873 Republic, the republican movement went through a severe crisis which led to its fragmentation over issues both of principle (federalists against unitarists) and of practice (revolutionaries against reformists). Between 1873 and 1931 Spanish republicanism underwent a marked transformation. The old republicanism was characterized by the modes of political activity of the nineteenth century — the club, the committee, the masonic lodge. The new republicanism, on the other hand, emerged from the first decade of the present century clearly moving in the direction of the modern political parties which finally crystallized out in 1931. Together the Radical and the Reformist parties are a case‐study in the transition between the classical and the modern which perfectly exemplifies the hybrid nature of republican democracy.

Though Spanish republicanism was socially heterogeneous, embracing within its various parts elements of the upper and middle bourgeoisie, substantial sections of the petty, urban bourgeoisie, and a declining, but still numerous, section of the working class, it still needed an alliance with the socialists (the Conjunción of 1910). However, what was most notable about Spanish republicanism was its link with the intelligentsia; it was they who gave it its character and who made the greatest effort to integrate Spain into the most modern currents of European thought.