The Habermas-Rawls Debate

James Gordon Finlayson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780231549011
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Critical Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are perhaps the two most renowned and influential figures in social and political philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1990s, they had a famous exchange in the Journal of Philosophy. Quarreling over the merits of each other's accounts of the shape and meaning of democracy and legitimacy in a contemporary society, they also revealed how great thinkers working in different traditions read—and misread—one another's work.

In this book, James Gordon Finlayson examines the Habermas-Rawls debate in context and considers its wider implications. He traces their dispute from its inception in their earliest works to the 1995 exchange and its aftermath, as well as its legacy in contemporary debates. Finlayson discusses Rawls's Political Liberalism and Habermas's Between Facts and Norms, considering them as the essential background to the dispute and using them to lay out their different conceptions of justice, politics, democratic legitimacy, individual rights, and the normative authority of law. He gives a detailed analysis and assessment of their contributions, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their different approaches to political theory, conceptions of democracy, and accounts of religion and public reason, and he reflects on the ongoing significance of the debate. The Habermas-Rawls Debate is an authoritative account of the crucial intersection of two major political theorists and an explication of why their dispute continues to matter.

INDEX

Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book.

Note: Habermas and Rawls are referred to as H and R throughout.

accountability, principle of, 29

abductive inference, 32

abortion, 228

Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max: as influences on H, 4, 250n10. See also critical theory

agent-relative vs. agent-neutral reasons, 37

Alexy, Robert, 30

Apel, Karl-Otto, 4, 95

Aristotle, 20

asymmetry objection. See public reason: and unfairness/asymmetry objection

Audi, Robert, 214, 218–219, 229

Austin, J. L., 4

Austin, John, 85

autonomy, 65, 190, 197–198; Kantian idea of, 23; moral, 99; of parties in original position, 163, 190; political, 89, 96, 99, 100–108, 167, 262n23; priority of private over public in R, 160, 169–172, 173, 191–196, 209, 265n14; R’s argument for, 25. See also co-originality: of public and private autonomy

avoidance, R’s method of, 158–159, 162, 173, 186–187, 197; H’s objection to, 203–205

Baier, Kurt, 72

Baldwin, Thomas, 203–204

basic structure of society, 21, 51, 75–76, 135, 167, 196, 254n26

Baxter, Hugh, 86, 97, 229

Baynes, Kenneth, 92, 94, 97, 128, 165, 166, 182

Beitz, Charles, 165

Benhabib, Seyla, 68–74, 109. See also feminists and feminism

Berlin, Isaiah, 3, 193

Between Facts and Norms, 79, 93, 98–99, 155; priority of right over good in, 91; as procedural, 166; and rational reconstruction, 245; solidarity in, 106; structure of, 84–87

Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang, 234–235

Brandom, Robert, 6

burdens of judgment, 114, 187, 196

Cassirer, Ernst, 1

Chambers, Simone, 74–75

Chomsky, Noam, 43

circumstances of justice, the, 19

civility, duty of, 134–135, 137, 179, 214–222, 235, 239, 268n23; as applying to political theorists, 180, 233, 244. See also public reason

civil society, H’s co...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Much Ado About Nothing
• I. The Early Debate
• II. Habermas’s and Rawls’s Mature Political Theories
• III. The Exchange
• IV. The Legacy of the Habermas–Rawls Dispute
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index