ABSTRACT
John Rawls’ magnum opus A Theory of Justice ([1971] 1999b), which triggered a wide-ranging revival in normative political theorizing (Wolff 2013), poses a fundamental question: what are the basic principles of a just society? His influential answer reworks Kant’s contract view as a universalist theory of justice and a critique of the utilitarian tradition, and continues to be deeply influential in political theorizing up to the present day. The breadth of Rawls’ autonomy liberalism notwithstanding, issues such as nationalism, culture, and religion are either nonexistent or play a marginal role in A Theory of Justice. 1 Yet the intensification of the presence of religion in the public sphere, resulting in a prolonged culture war (Hunter 1992), in addition to the internal problems of his initial project, led Rawls to recalibrate his theory as political liberalism (Rawls [1993] 2007, 1999a). In this second stage of the development of his view, Rawls goes back to an original interrogation of Western liberalism and political modernity, namely to the conundrum of legitimizing coercive power in a society where different moral and religious doctrines are in conflict. Echoing the main concern of the liberal thinkers confronted with the devastating wars of religion of the sixteenth century, Rawls focuses on the following question: how is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines? (Rawls [1993] 2007: xxvii). Religion poses the toughest challenge for answering this question, since any “religious doctrine that is based on religious authority, for example, the Church or the Bible” appears to at odds with “a reasonable political conception that supports a just democratic regime” (Rawls [1993] 2007: xxxix).
