Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political

Habermas and Rawls are two heavyweights of social and political philosophy, and they are undoubtedly the two most written about (and widely read) authors in this field. However, there has not been much informed and interesting work on the points of intersection between their projects, partly because their work comes from different traditions—roughly the European tradition of social and political theory and the Anglo-American analytic tradition of political philosophy. In this volume, contributors re-examine the Habermas-Rawls dispute with an eye toward the ways in which the dispute can cast light on current controversies about political philosophy more broadly. Moreover, the volume will cover a number of other salient issues on which Habermas and Rawls have interesting and divergent views, such as the political role of religion and international justice.

Dr. J. G. Finlayson is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Head of Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex. He is a contributor to the Oxford Handbook on Continental Philosophy, ed. Leiter and Rosen, 2007, author of numerous philosophical articles on Habermas moral and political thought appearing in Inquiry, European Journal of Philosophy and Journal of Political Philosophy, and of the widely selling Habermas: A Very Short Introduction, OUP 2005.

Dr. F. Freyenhagen is a lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Essex. He studied PPE at Oxford and philosophy at Sheffield and taught in the philosophy department at Cambridge. He works among other things on Rawls, and co-edited a collection of essays on his work (The Legacy of John Rawls), published with Continuum 2005 and reprinted in paperback 2007.

James Gledhill is about to complete a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics on the political philosophies of Habermas and Rawls.

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: The Habermas Rawls Dispute: Analysis and Re-evaluation, James Gordon Finlayson and Fabian Freyenhagen Part I: The Habermas-Rawls Dispute 1: Reconciliation through the Public Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism, Jürgen Habermas 2: Political Liberalism: Reply to Habermas, John Rawls 3: Reasonable versus True: or the Morality of World Views, Jürgen Habermas Part II: Disputing the Political 4: Justice: Transcendental not Metaphysical, Joseph Heath 5: The Justice of Justification, Anthony Simon Laden 6: The Justification of Justice: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue, Rainer Forst 7: Procedure in Substance and Substance in Procedure: Reframing the Habermas-Rawls Debate, James Gledhill 8: Habermas, Rawls, and Moral Impartiality, Chris McMahon 9: Rawls and Habermas on the Place of Religion in the Political Domain, Catherine Audard 10: Two Models of Human Rights: Extending the Rawls-Habermas Debate, Jeffrey Flynn 11: Beyond Overlapping Consensus: Rawls and Habermas on the Limits of Cosmopolitanism, Jim Bohman Part III: Afterword 12: A Reply to my Critics, Jürgen Habermas Notes on Contributors Index