ABSTRACT
In response to a secularist trend hostile to religion and the rhetoric of the clash-of-civilizations, a number of public figures and institutions have championed the vision of a positive interaction between democracy and religion mediated through dialogue (Leustean and Madeley 2009). The philosophical articulation of this trend is most prominently represented by Jürgen Habermas’ account of a postsecular society centred on the dialogue between believers and non-believers (Habermas 2006, 2008a: 140, 2011). Nonetheless, for a good part of his intellectual trajectory Habermas advanced a secularist theory of history, modernity, and democracy in which religion played only a marginal role. More recently, he has articulated a version of the public reason approach to the relation between religion and democracy whose significance remains deeply controversial (Bader 2012; Beckford 2012; Cooke 2013; Lafont 2014; Calhoun, Mendieta, and VanAntwerpen 2013). 1 To properly understand his changing view of democracy and religion, it is necessary to make a step back and consider Habermas’ philosophical system in its context. First, Habermas develops his political philosophy as part of a comprehensive philosophical system that deals with different issues such as rationality, language, history, social action, modernity, capitalism, ethics, law, and democracy. In contrast to Rawls’ methodological self-restraint (Chapter 1), Habermas’ interdisciplinary approach draws on a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics, social science, and philosophy of history to legal theory; as a result, Habermas’ view entails a broadening of the scope of the problematic of political philosophy: its questions, argues Habermas, cannot be properly grasped without engaging in an interpretative exercise with the help of the advances in sciences and humanities. 2 Second, Habermas’ philosophical system is an answer to a practical problem and historical context, namely to the shock of the collapse of Germany and the Western modernity into the horrors of the WWII and the Holocaust. His treatment of the question of the place of religion in a democracy develops against the background of this project of restoring confidence in universal rationality, historical progress, and modern democracy.
