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Against the background of violent ethno-nationalistic and religious clashes that plague the landscape of contemporary world politics and of the recent rise of particularistic populism all around the world — from Trump’s America to Erdogan’s Turkey, from AfD in Germany to Front National in France — this seminar explores the practical implications of the thoughts of selected political thinkers for two inter-related questions:
1. How can we (or can we, or must we) justify the universality of a deliberative democratic conception of political legitimacy in culturally diversified societies – in societies, that is, where people holding divergent religious and/or philosophical convictions co-exist at a common time and public space under a single legal and constitutional framework.
2. How can we (or can we) culturally stabilize deliberative democratic institutions and non-violent political processes in such diversified societies.
Two thinkers, Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, will be invited to the seminar to play permanent leading parts — if not in person, then through their relevant primary texts that can be read as addressing either or both of these questions. Six other thinkers, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzche, Max Weber, Carl Schmidt, Hannah Arendt and Hans Georg Gadamer will play recurring supporting parts in the background. As our in class-conversation develops and the plot thickens, a panoply of other thinkers may be invited to make guest appearances. Antonio Gramsci, Luis Althusser and Chantal Mouffe may be asked to voice the Neo- and Post-Marxist objections to deliberative democracy, Joseph Schumpeter and Leo Strauss may kindly voice elitist objections, Richard Rorty may represent the “postmodern bourgeois liberal” position, and Robert Dahl, Seymour Martin Lipset, Samuel Huntington, Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba may appear as the representatives of the Western-centric position of the mainstream of American political science on questions of cultural diversity and political stability. |
