ABSTRACT
The topic proposed for our discussion recalls a question that Ernst Wolfgang Böckenförde, in the mid-1960s, formulated quite precisely in the following manner: whether the liberal, secularized state is nourished by normative presuppositions which it itself cannot guarantee.1 This question expresses doubt about whether the democratic constitutional state can renew the normative presuppositions of its own existence from out of its own resources. It also expresses the presumption that this state is dependent upon autochthonous world views or religious traditions-in any case, collectively binding ethical traditions. While, in the face of the “fact of pluralism” (Rawls), this would indeed bring a state obligated to world-view neutrality into trouble, this conclusion does not yet speak against the presumption itself.
