We live in a time of turbulent change when many of the frameworks that have characterized our societies over the last few centuries – such as the international order of sovereign nation-states – are being called into question. In this new volume of essays and interviews, Habermas focuses his attention on these processes of change and provides some of the resources needed to understand them. What kind of international order should we seek to create in our contemporary global age? How (...) should we understand the political project of Europe and how can the democratic deficit of the EU be overcome? How should we understand the relation between democracy as popular sovereignty, which has become the defining principle of political legitimacy in the modern world, and the idea of basic human rights embodied in the rule of law? Habermas brings his formidable powers of analysis and his distinctive theoretical perspective to bear on these and other key questions of the modern age. His analysis is shaped throughout by his commitment to informed public debate and his powerful advocacy of a postnational renewal of the project of constitutional democracy. _Time of Transitions_ will be essential reading for all students and scholars of sociology and politics, and it will be of interest to anyone concerned with the key social and political questions of our time. (shrink)

From the theory of ‘deliberative democracy’ to the politics of the ‘third way’, the present Zeitgeist is characterized by attempts to deny what Chantal Mouffe contends is the inherently conflictual nature of democratic politics. Far from being signs of progress, such ideas constitute a serious threat to democratic institutions. Taking issue with John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas on one side, and the political tenets of Blair, Clinton and Schröder on the other, Mouffe brings to the fore the paradoxical nature of (...) modern liberal democracy in which the category of the ‘adversary’ plays a central role. She draws on the work of Wittgenstein, Derrida, and the provocative theses of Carl Schmitt, to propose a new understanding of democracy which acknowledges the ineradicability of antagonism in its workings. (shrink)

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to (...) provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship. (shrink)

Elements of the relation between religion and politics are standard themes in political theory: toleration and free exercise rights; the parameters of separation of church and state; arguments for and against constraints imposed on religious discourse by philosophic norms of public reason. But religious parties and partisanship are no part of political theory, despite contemporary interest in value pluralism and in liberal democratic theory's capacity to address multicultural, religious, and ethnic group claims. This essay argues that religious parties are missing (...) elements in discussions of identity politics. They play an important role not just in expressing but also in constructing and mobilizing religious political identity. Political activity linked to parties is a principal way of bringing diffuse, politically unorganized groups, whose leaders are self-appointed and not regularly accountable for the way they represent co-religionists in political life, into the democratic mainstream. With political organization and especially partisanship, the fact of pluralism is made concrete for democratic purposes. (shrink)

Any workable ideal of deliberative democracy that includes elections will need modern democracy's ever-present ally, parties. Since the primary function of parties is to win office rather than to reflect on public questions, parties are potential problems for the deliberative enterprise. They are more at home in aggregative models of democracy than in deliberative models. While deliberative democracy will need its moments of aggregation—and therefore, must have parties—partisans as they actually arise in the political world possess traits that undermine the (...) deliberative ideal. If partisans of partisanship are to be unembarrassed by (or are to correct) these defects, even workable ideals of deliberative democracy need to stand at some distance from the partisan imperative. (shrink)

Rawls?s controversial idea of public reason is often criticized for being exclusionary and unfair. Yet it is possible to read the idea of public reason as being largely innocuous, especially if one attends to all the qualifications and specifications of the idea that Rawls articulated. This essay pursues such a reading, by systematically considering each element of qualification that Rawls built into the idea of public reason. Considered together and in terms of their cumulative effect, they make the innocuous reading (...) possible. My aim is not, however, to try to defend Rawls?s idea of public reason by claiming that it is innocuous, but to help clarify the ambiguous nature of the idea through this reading. (shrink)