Recent decades have seen sustained theoretical interest in how a cosmopolitan legal order could be created in a manner consistent with the liberal human rights ideals and democratic principles it is supposed to realize. I argue that this “democratic cosmopolitan” account of the genesis of cosmopolitan law faces at least two dilemmas. Both concern the role that “learning processes” play in its explanation of how a genuine cosmopolitan legal order can emerge from a global transformation in the meaning of sovereignty (...) and citizenship. The first dilemma is the theory’s reliance on underdeveloped sociological claims about the nature of democratic political processes, while the second concerns its one-sided analysis of how global trade and interdependence might produce a kind of “cosmopolitan learning.” In light of these issues, I propose that cosmopolitan theorists think beyond democracy as an ideal that should strictly guide the creation of a cosmopolitan legal order. (shrink)

This article argues that Habermas’s position on the relationship between religion and politics reaffirms his two-track political theory of the secular state and civic duty. His “hard-core” theory of secularism coupled with an ethics of citizenship seeks new ways of including religious citizens in modern pluralistic societies. The analysis of secularism both as a concept and as a guiding principle in Habermas’s work shows that most critics have misinterpreted his specific use of the term. The result of this is that (...) most secularist and accommodationist critics of Habermas’s ethics of citizenship disregard his two-track political theory and its co-originality principle that assumes the equal status of public and private autonomies of citizens. My aim is thus to shift critical attention to the central aspects of Habermas’s work on religion, specifically to the task of translating religious reasons into an all-accessible language. This task of translation faces several difficulties due to some points that are left unclear by Habermas, such as determining the line separating the informal and the formal spheres, and how to avert the risk of majoritarian hijacks of democracy that could altogether undermine the Habermasian framework. (shrink)