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Articles

Democracy & the Unreasonable: Lessons from Rawls

Francisco Mejia Uribe asks if democracy can overcome fundamentalism.

How can democracy accommodate an increasing number of conflicting worldviews within a single legitimate and stable political structure? This is one of the most pressing questions of our time. Is there a way to successfully fend off fundamentalists of all stripes, religious and secular, and protect plural democracy from being hijacked by the narrow moral agenda of a particular group?

If you believe, as I do, that this issue is of paramount importance, then you’ll be happy to know that John Rawls (1921-2002), one of the brightest philosophical minds of the twentieth century, spent the last two decades of his life wrestling with this very problem. In his words, this is “the torturing question in the contemporary world, namely: can democracy and comprehensive doctrines, religious, non-religious, be compatible? And if so, how?” (Political Liberalism, p.485). In this article I will present Rawls’ answer to this question, which he elaborated most fully in the expanded edition of Political Liberalism (1993).

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