A Secular State for a Postsecular Society? Postmetaphysical Political Theory and the Place of Religion

Abstract

Like many contemporary political theorists, Jürgen Habermas asserts a close connection between social integration and legitimation. In common with theorists such as Rawls, for example, Habermas emphasizes that the motivation of citizens to live together peacefully in a particular political order cannot be separated from their view of the justification of the political authority governing that order. 1 For both theorists, a political order is deficient if citizens accept a particular form of government merely as a modus vivendi. 2 Although in such cases citizens with different beliefs agree to a set of political arrangements that allow them to live together peacefully, an agreement of this kind does not generate the social solidarity required by a political order that is stable "for the right reasons." 3 Thus, against proponents of democracy as a modus vivendi, 4 Habermas and Rawls see social solidarity as intimately bound up with the rational acceptability of laws and political decisions. In contrast to Rawls, however, Habermas attributes an epistemic dimension to political legitimation. 5 Unlike Rawls, who rejects the view that truth is at stake in democratic public deliberation and decision-making, 6 he insists that democratic deliberation improves the epistemic quality of democratic decisions and that such decisions raise a claim to truth. This is why he describes the democratic constitutional state -the form of government he favors -as an "epistemically demanding form of government that is, to an extent, sensitive to truth" and claims that a "posttruth democracy" would no longer be a democracy. 7 In other words, when Habermas asserts a close link between social integration and the rational acceptability of laws and political decisions, he means rational acceptability in a truth-analogous sense. On his account, legal-political validity shares with truth an ideal moment of unconditionality: like truth, this form of validity is context-transcending in the strong sense that it refers to a kind of validity that always goes beyond the standards of validity actually prevailing in a particular social-cultural context. 8 A crucial ingredient of Habermas's account of context-transcending validity, however, is its rejection of an "otherworldly" reference point. In contrast to approaches that locate the source of context-transcending validity externally, in some metaphysical "outside" or "otherness," Habermas insists that it is "innerworldly." As he often puts it, communicative rationality expresses a concept of "transcendence from within" -a transcendence that is immanent to human practices. 9 This is one of the principal reasons why he describes his theory as "postmetaphysical." A further defining feature of postmetaphysical theory is that it is ethically abstemious: it refrains from judging the validity of particular conceptions of the good. 10 In the

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Religion in the public sphere: What can public theology learn from Habermas’s latest work?

“…This change in his views was so remarkable that many scholars paid attention to Habermas's new interest in religion (Cooke 2006(Cooke , 2007Harrington 2007aHarrington , 2007bLafont 2007 (Habermas 2001(Habermas , 2005.…”

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