ABSTRACT
The proceduralist project in liberal constitutional theory goes far beyond ‘a political compromise, as in a modus vivendi’;1 it is not satisfied with ‘a community of purpose which consists simply of a shared desire to avoid reciprocal destruction’.2 According to Frank Michelman, proceduralism requires ‘a shift of the moral critical gaze’.3 As developed by Rawls, proceduralism takes citizenship to be an ideal that imposes the moral ‘duty of civility – to be able to explain to one another on those fundamental questions how the principles and policies they advocate and vote for can be supported by the political values of public reason’.4 The lure of proceduralism lies in its association with the ideas of rational discourse (in Habermas) or public reason (in Rawls),5 which are supposed to provide sufficiently strong internal (as opposed to external) reasons6 for endorsing the liberal-democratic constitutional order and for maintaining a critical stance towards the problem of legal coercion. Proceduralism aspires to fulfill the ‘hope to liquidate or get past such disagreements about the first-order merits of laws’.7 The duty of civility supplies the normative grounds for the disaggregation of public law and political theory. Civility is crucial for the ideal of self-government between citizens who pursue fundamentally different conceptions of the good.8
