Rawls and Habermas Reason, Pluralism, and the Claims of Political Philosophy [Hardcover]

This book offers a comprehensive evaluation of the two preeminent post-WWII political philosophers, John Rawls and J?rgen Habermas. Both men question how we can be free and autonomous under coercive law and how we might collectively use our reason to justify exercises of political power. In pluralistic modern democracies, citizens cannot be expected to agree about social norms on the basis of common allegiance to comprehensive metaphysical or religious doctrines concerning persons or society, and both philosophers thus engage fundamental questions about how a normatively binding framework for the public use of reason might be possible and justifiable. Hedrick explores the notion of reasonableness underwriting Rawls's political liberalism and the theory of communicative rationality that sustains Habermas's procedural conception of the democratic constitutional state. His book challenges the Rawlsianism prevalent in the Anglo-American world today while defending Habermas's often poorly understood theory as a superior alternative.Todd Hedrick is Assistant Professor of philosophy at Michigan State University. This book is a highly informed, scholarly and very readable discussion of the differences between the two leading political theorists of the last half-centuryRawls and Habermas. Hedrick offers a careful analysis of Habermas's political philosophy and does a superb job of developing immanently some of the tensions and difficulties in Rawls's evolving account of constructivism. The result is a lively engagement with the ideas of these two important theorists and one that is sure to invite a response, especially from those who are more sympathetic to Rawls's political constructivism than Habermas's reconstructive project. A critical evaluation of Rawlsian and Habermasian paradigms of political philosophy that offers an interpretation and defense of Habermas's theory of law and democracy as a superior alternative to Rawls's political liberalism. This book offers a clC%