Review Article: Modus vivendi versus public reason and liberal equality: three approaches to liberal democracy

Liberal democracy constitutes a particularly attractive political model with its emphasis on both popular sovereignty and individual liberty. Recently several new and innovative articulations of the liberal democratic ideal have been presented. This article reviews three of these recent theories and particularly their democratic credentials. The selection includes theories emphasizing modus vivendi, Rawlsian political liberalism and liberal equality. Taken together these theories show different ways to conceptualize democracy within liberal thought. I argue that ultimately all three approaches struggle with articulating a persuasive conception of democracy, but nevertheless these theories show that liberals do think seriously about the role of democracy in their theories.     

Self-respect and public reason

In A Theory of Justice John Rawls argues that self-respect is ‘perhaps the most important’ primary good, and that its status as such gives crucial support to controversial ideas like the lexical priority of liberty. Given the importance of these ideas for Rawls, it should be no surprise that they have attracted much critical attention. In response to these critics I give a defense of self-respect that grounds its importance in Rawls’s moral conception of the person. I show that this understanding of self-respect goes well beyond giving support to the lexical priority of liberty, also supporting Rawls’s still more controversial view of public reason. On my account, taking self-respect seriously requires the coercive enforcement of public reason. This is a novel argument for public reason, in that it grounds the idea in justice as fairness and mandates its coercive enforcement.     

A Pragmatist Critique of Liberal Epistemology

Abstract

This paper wrestles with the issue of the place of comprehensive beliefs within the public space. It tries to strike a middle path between the liberal ban on comprehensive beliefs and the anti-liberal claim that comprehensive beliefs should be given full pride of place in public deliberations. The article relies on arguments that are inspired by the pragmatist tradition. It starts locating the main cause of failures at articulating comprehensive beliefs and public reason in a central feature of liberal epistemology, namely the way it conceives public reason via a preliminary distinction between public and non-public beliefs. After criticizing this distinction, the article introduces a distinction between the normative practice of justification and the normative practice of adjudication as a more perspicuous way to establish the place that comprehensive beliefs should play within political forums. It then concludes showing that this approach provides a satisfying answer to the issue of the public role of comprehensive beliefs in a liberal democratic regime that is respectful of citizens’ thick identities while at the same time complying with the requirements of respect set by the liberal tradition.     

Partisanship and public reason

In the large body of literature concerning John Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993) and his conception of public reason, little attention has been paid to the implications that the constraints of public reason have for partisans, i.e. citizens who participate in politics through political parties. This paper argues that even on the basis of a ‘mild’ understanding of Rawls’s conception of the constraints of public reason, which takes into account the various stipulations Rawls provided throughout his later work, when applied to partisans the constraints of public reason lose none or little of their hindering force. This seriously undermines the contribution that parties and partisans can provide to the change and the varieties of public reason that Rawls himself advocates as a response to social change and, therefore, to political justification and legitimacy. Parties articulate, coordinate and enhance societal demands which, without their support, may remain unheard and fail to change the acceptable terms of public reason and political justification. If the political speech of partisans is restrained, this potential for change (and, therefore, its contribution to political legitimacy) is seriously undermined.     

Cohen vs. Rawls on justice and equality

G.A. Cohen criticizes Rawls’s account of justice because his difference principle permits inequalities that reflect the relative scarcity of different skills and natural abilities. Instead of viewing the ‘basic structure’ as the primary subject of justice, Cohen argues that individual citizens should cultivate an egalitarian ethos, which would enable a just society to dispense with the use of incentive payments to induce individuals to use their talents in socially ideal ways. This study examines Cohen’s critique, including his rejection of ‘incentives,’ and vindicates Rawls’s approach. Ultimately, Cohen’s argument fails to grapple with the moral pluralism that characterizes modern, democratic societies, whereas Rawls’s theory is constructed to accommodate such pluralism.     

Religious parties and the problem of democratic political legitimacy

Thinkers committed to an ideal of public reason are suspicious of religiously informed political activity as it undermines democratic political legitimacy. This paper considers Jürgen Habermas’s recent shifts on this question in light of the history of Europe’s religious parties in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These parties made a real and lasting contribution to Europe’s democratization and their history suggests ways in which Habermas and other defenders of public reason misunderstand the nature of democratic political legitimacy.     

Bridging the enduring gender gap in political interest in Europe: The relevance of promoting gender equality

Notwithstanding the improvement in gender equality in political power and resources in European democracies, this study shows that, on average, declared interest in politics is 16 per cent lower for women than for men in Europe. This gap remains even after controlling for differences in men's and women's educational attainment, material and cognitive resources. Drawing on the newly developed European Institute for Gender Equality's (EIGE) Gender Equality Index (GEI) and on the European Social Survey (ESS) fifth wave, we show that promoting gender equality contributes towards narrowing the magnitude of the differences in political interest between men and women. However, this effect appears to be conditioned by the age of citizens. More specifically, findings show that in Europe gender‐friendly policies contribute to bridging the gender gap in political engagement only during adulthood, suggesting that childhood socialisation is more strongly affected by traditional family values than by policies promoting gender equality. In contrast, feminising social citizenship does make a difference by reducing the situational disadvantages traditionally faced by women within the family and in society for middle‐aged people and older.     

Laborde’s religion

ABSTRACT

Cécile Laborde’s Liberalism’s Religion proposes liberal principles to address political controversies over religion. One is the public reason requirement that reasons for state policies should be accessible. Another is the civic inclusiveness requirement according to which symbolic religious establishment is wrong when it communicates that religious identity is a component of civic identity. A third is the claim that liberal states have meta-jurisdictional authority to settle the boundary between what counts as religion and what counts as non-religion. The article considers whether Laborde has managed to articulate these three principles in a way that is operationalisable and can serve to provide solutions to practical controversies over religion. It is argued that Laborde’s formulations leave important issues open, and some ways of settling these issues are considered.     

What is democratic reliability? Epistemic theories of democracy and the problem of reasonable disagreement

It has proven difficult to reconcile epistemic justifications of political authority, especially epistemic theories of democracy, with a basic liberal commitment to respecting reasonable value pluralism. The latter seems to imply that there can be no universally acceptable substantive outcome standard to evaluate the epistemic reliability of different political procedures. This paper shows that this objection rests on an implausible interpretation of political competence. In particular, the paper defends two claims: first, that epistemic theories of political authority are in fact compatible with a liberal commitment to respecting reasonable pluralism; but second, that if we take reasonable pluralism seriously, the standard of competence we should use is a pragmatic one. Good political decision procedures reliably fix practical problems of social coordination and adapt to new demands and developments; we need not demand that their decisions are all-things-considered just or optimal. This pragmatic account of political competence is compatible with reasonable pluralism, since on this basis we can comparatively evaluate political procedures without controversially asserting a single standard of ‘truth’ in politics. Hence, it is possible to give an epistemic account of political authority that works within a liberal theory of political justification.     

Equality,risk and responsibility: Dworkin on the insurance market

The concept of risk occupies centre-stage in debates about individual and social responsibilities and, within a broadly neo-liberal regime, the paradigmatic form of risk management is insurance. Nevertheless analysis of these recent shifts in welfare politics appears curiously disconnected from dominant trends of normative political theorizing. The rise of ‘insurance as government’ and ‘risk management as responsibility and opportunity’ has not obviously been addressed even by prominent liberal political theorists. Similarly the analysts of neo-liberalism have devoted little attention to tracing these concepts through the literature on political theory. This article seeks to remedy this disconnection, by showing how Ronald Dworkin – perhaps the foremost liberal theorist writing today – offers us an account of equality which foregrounds the apparatus of insurance, and represents the management of risk within the welfare system as both an opportunity and a responsibility. Furthermore, his account inherits many of the ambiguities and weaknesses of neo-liberal theory and redeploys them within the political theory of equality.     

Becoming Liberal,Unbecoming Liberalism: Liberal-Local Hybridity via the Everyday as a Response to the Paradoxes of Liberal Peacebuilding

Abstract

It has become clear that the liberal international institutions and ‘corridors of power’ have so far failed to deliver on their promise of a liberal peace for all. Liberal peacebuilding has often offered resources to an elaborate structuration of sometimes predatory elites – international and local – but not to the general populations of these multiple states. Institutions have been created, but the reach of liberal politics has had little impact – other than in basic security and in rhetorical, rights oriented terms – on the everyday life of populations. The local is commonly deployed to depict a homogenous and disorderly Other, whose needs and aspirations do not conform to liberal standards. Claims that moves toward the everyday have already been made disguise the limited ambitions of liberal statebuilders to enable a real improvement in local agency. In the midst of all of this the real everyday needs and lives of individuals have become obscured. This essay briefly suggests some theoretical responses, via the concepts of the ‘everyday’ and ‘empathy’. These offer the possibility of placing the social contract back within the heart of post-conflict states, or of allowing a new, post-liberal, politics which is more locally ‘authentic’, resonant and agential, to emerge.     

Perfectionist public space: a political philosophy approach

Public spaces are often sites of contention between competing conceptions of the good life. The potential for such conflicts increases in diverse societies where different ethnic, religious and cultural groups compete for space and representation in the public sphere. A paradigmatic example is the conflict between multiculturalism and conservatism towards the function and character of public spaces. A clear criterion is necessarily, in such conflicts, to determine which conception may be legitimately crowded-out, and which may prevail. The paper examines two strategies to justify such a criterion: a liberal approach and a perfectionist approach. According to the liberal approach, public spaces should reflect the pluralism of values in society, by combining multiplicity and coherence of values. Yet pluralism is too ambiguous a concept to determine, in practice, which conceptions of the good can legitimately be crowded-out, both physically and metaphorically, from the public sphere. Perfectionism, an ethical approach grounded in human developmentalism, holds that the good life is a life of developing and exercising our human capacities. This approach yields a substantive account of public space regulation: public spaces should promote the development and exercise of our human capacities. On this account, we can approach the conflict between competing claims on public spaces by asking whether crowding-out might harm the potential development and exercise of our capacities. The perfectionist approach also provides a finer distinction between different types of conservatisms, such that we may differentiate between conservatism that may be legitimately crowded-out from the spatial sphere, and conservatism which may prevail. This paper argues that a perfectionist approach—one which is explicitly committed to a view of the good life—is both necessary and timely.     

Rawls on agreeing to disagree: How democracies differ from non-democracies in justifying war

We use Rawls’s account of public reason and the Law of Peoples to test two hypotheses: democracies are more likely to invoke self-defense in justifications than non-democracies, and democracies are more likely to invoke human rights in justifications than non-democracies. Through an analysis of war justifications since 1875, we find that although democracies and non-democracies are similarly likely to use self-defense as a justification, democracies are more likely to justify war through human rights. Institutions and values centering on rights that promote domestic public justification also promote justifications compatible with those values and institutions at the international level.     

Semi-peripheral Islamophobias: the political diversity of anti-Muslim discourses in Poland

ABSTRACT

Bobako’s paper examines two genres of Polish Islamophobic discourse, a liberal and a nationalist one, and links their specificity to the semi-peripheral position of Poland. It argues that the liberal endorsement of Islamophobia is a way to confirm symbolically Poland’s belonging to ‘the West’ and its commitment to the normative project of European modernity, with its affirmation of individualism, human rights, sexual freedom and secularism. On the other hand, Bobako shows that the Islamophobia of the resurgent nationalist forces in Poland is, paradoxically, the outcome of a rejection of this very project, which is perceived as a threat to national political sovereignty and cultural autonomy. She connects this rejection to Poland’s post-Communist trajectory of economic marginalization and instability, providing a context for the widespread dissatisfaction with Poland’s place in the European Union.     

Flourishing children,flourishing adults: families,equality and the neutralism-perfectionism debate

Abstract

Political philosophers are divided on the question of whether society should guide individuals in their projects and goals in light of the competing, yet overlapping, values of moral independence and human well-being. The lively neutralism-perfectionism debate appears to be significantly muted, however, when it comes to children who, all parties assume, should be guided by adults in their plans of life. Thus, in their stimulating new book, Family Values: the Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships, liberals Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift affirm the role of the family in directing and enabling children’s flourishing. My paper challenges this distinction between parents and children in the liberal position to argue that the idea that it is appropriate to direct children to enable them to flourish, entails in fact, a commitment to policies that promote and enable the flourishing of all.     

From conditions of equality to demands of justice: equal freedom,motivation and justification in Hobbes,Rousseau and Rawls

Equal freedom is the common starting point for most contractual theories of justice from Hobbes and Rousseau to Rawls. But while equal freedom defines a common starting point for these theories, this does not result in a general consensus on the conception of justice. On the contrary, different ways of conceptualizing the contractual starting point leads to different conceptions of the demands of justice. To fully understand the relationship between equal freedom and justice we therefore first need to explicate how and why the initial condition of equality is transformed into demands of justice. In this paper we discuss how this transformation takes place in the theories of Hobbes, Rousseau and Rawls, with particular emphasis on the vexed relationship between motivation and justification.     

I'm Not That Liberal: Explaining Conservative Democratic Identification

The persistence of self-identified conservative Democrats in the electorate is puzzling. Both the ongoing Southern realignment and the recent ideological polarization should have resulted in conservative Democrats changing their party identification to accord with their discrepant ideology. Instead, the number of conservative Democrats, as a percentage of the total electorate, has held steady over the last 20 years. I propose an explanation for this phenomenon that draws upon theories of mass belief systems, as well as an element of recent political reality: the popular stigmatization of the word liberal. I argue that Democrats who are susceptible to elite cues garner positive affect toward the conservative label and negative affect toward the liberal label. They then identify themselves accordingly, regardless of their issue positions.     

A union of gender equality and pragmatic patriarchy: international marriages and citizenship laws in Singapore

As a patriarchal society, government policies, societal norms and government regulations in Singapore mirror that normative ideal. Citizenship status and rights along gender lines, manifested in the legal recognition of children of international marriages, reflected this reality for much of Singapore's independence. However, the onslaught of globalization, the rise in international marriages, disconcerting declining birth rates, and an acceptance of ‘foreign talent’ have given the economic imperative and demographic impulse to grant citizenship (by descent) to a person born outside Singapore whose father or mother is a citizen of Singapore, by birth, registration or descent. Previously, such a person would be granted citizenship only if his/her father was a Singapore citizen by birth. This paper examines the background and contextual realities leading to the Constitution of the Republic of Singapore (Amendment) Act 2004. It argues that the landmark constitutional amendment was motivated by pragmatic considerations of demography, economics, and political governance. The paper contends that state sovereignty, while seemingly challenged by international marriages, is still preserved rather than negated. It suggests that the state's ideological apparatus vis-à-vis the family is adaptable, enabling the continued institutional influence, if not control, over the family as the basic building block of Singapore society.     

Discomforts of Victory: Democracy,Liberal Values and Nationalism in Post-Communist Europe

This article tries to identify the main threats to post-communist liberal democracies, especially those perils related to the weakness of pluralist traditions, institutions, and values and the rise of movements and ideologies rooted in cultural and political malaise, ressentiment, and disaffection. Nine such perils are identified in the second half of the article, including Leninist legacies, salvationist popular sentiments, the rhetoric of reactionary nostalgia, the fluidity of political formations, the crisis of values, authority, and accountability, and the tensions between individualistic and communitarian values. The concern here is with a diagnosis of the main vulnerabilities of Eastern Europe's post-communist states in order to evaluate prospects for further democratic consolidation and risks for the rise and affirmation of ethnocratic parties and movements. Understanding the post-communist political and cultural situation, including persistent isolationist, anti-globalisation, populist and nationalist trends, is of critical importance for interpreting the main directions these countries will pursue in their efforts to join the European Union institutions.     

The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy: Democratization,Intervention, Statebuilding (Part I)

Since the end of the Cold War, democracy promotion, intervention and statebuilding have once again been explicit features of American foreign policy. Current assessments of this return, however, overlook both their longer term history and their roots in liberal (and not just American) ideology. The contradictions and dynamics entailed in the liberal philosophy of history have already played themselves out once before, in the modernization theories and policies of the early Cold War period. Despite their academic and political failures at the time, the same assumptions now underpin democracy promotion in the post-Cold War period and show signs of the same dynamics of failure. In this two part essay, I argue that the repetition of such counterproductive policies constitutes a recurring ‘tragedy of liberal diplomacy’ in which the shaping of US foreign policy by assumptions deeply rooted in the liberal philosophy of history plays a central part in producing the very enemies that policy is designed to confront and transform.