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Todd Hedrick, Rawls and Habermas: Reason, Pluralism, and the Claims of Political Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), vii + 242 pp.
This book explores the political philosophies of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. It views both as attempting to find a place for reason in political life given that we now live in a "post-metaphysical" age - that is, an age in which it is no longer possible to understand reason as putting us into epistemic contact with a set of timeless and universal moral truths relevant to the organization of political cooperation. The focus is on Rawls's Political Liberalism and Habermas' s Between Facts and Norms, but greater attention is devoted to Habermas's theory, which Hedrick regards as the more successful of the two. In what follows, I describe Hedrick's argument and then raise some questions about it.
Hedrick argues that Rawls's theoiy can be interpreted in two different ways, but that both are unsatisfactory. On the first, Rawls has simply described the moral sensibility of "reasonable" people, understood as people who agree with Rawls in viewing political society as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage among individuals who have a capacity for a sense of justice and a capacity for a conception of the good. Rawls extracts from these materials a political conception of justice, justice as fairness or a close relative, that he thinks such people should be able to accept. But according to Hedrick, the ultimate ground of this conception, in Rawls's theory, is provided by the particular comprehensive doctrines that provide the basis for endorsing it. The upshot is that the theoiy does not really identify a shared standpoint by reference to which the political disputes that arise in modern polities can be resolved. Such polities contain people who do not hold comprehensive doctrines that are reasonable in the specified sense, for example, communitarians and utilitarians. On the descriptivist interpretation, then, Rawlsian public reason is not fully public.
The alternative interpretation of Rawls that Hedrick sees as available responds to these descriptivist womes by seeking a substantive normative foundation for the conception of justice that Rawls offers. Hedrick discusses two such views, those of Ronald Dworkin and Charles Lannore, both of which seek a foundation for Rawlsian liberalism in...