Book Review: Rawls and Habermas: Reason, Pluralism and the Claims of Political Philosophy
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663914560970 |
| Author | Haris Psarras |
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
TODD HEDRICK, Rawls and Habermas: Reason, Pluralism and the Claims of Political Philosophy.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. x þ242, ISBN 9780804770774, $ 65 (hbk).
The irrationality of totalitarianism, as manifested throughout the 20th century, reinforced
an old liberal desideratum. Reason, liberal theorists argue, requires political institutions
to affirm what totalitarianism ruthlessly opposed, that is, the freedom of thought, belief
and religion. In fact, political institutions should show equal respect towards different
world views held by individuals falling under their authority. But the plurality of world
views, whose protection is grounded on an appeal to reason, often entails a plurality of
opposing views on reason itself. It is this complexity that we find allusively encapsulated
in the subtitle of Todd Hedrick’s monograph Reason, Pluralism and the Claims of Polit-
ical Philosophy. This is a fascinating topic that would probably be discouragingly broad,
had it not been narrowed down through Hedrick’s focus on its treatment by Rawls and
Habermas, as the book’s main title suggests.
Hedrick keeps the promise that the title and subtitle, meaningfully coupled as they
are, make to the reader. His book comparatively appraises the success of the distinct
ways in which Rawls and Habermas – each in his own right – articulate and defend a
claim that they both make in the name of political philosophy. Their common claim is
that moral pluralism in contemporary societies by no means hinders us from appealing
conclusively to reason, when we seek to justify the exercise of political power. The
divergence between their two versions of this claim is due to subtle differences between
their (otherwise similar) accounts of reason and treatment of pluralism’s intricacies.
In comparison with other contributions to the relevant literature, Hedrick’s mono-
graph presents a twofold originality. Instead of comparing Rawls and Habermas’s ideas
on political legitimacy per se, it concentrates on a contrast between their methodologies.
In doing so, Hedrick looks at the distinct conceptualizations of reason on which the two
philosophers frame their respective justifications of political legitimacy. This book also
owes its distinctness from other academic works on Rawls and Habermas to the fact that
it takes sides in the methodological disagreement between them. Hedrick’s argument, as
it unfolds in the book’s nine chapters, maintains that Habermas’s discursive procedural-
ism is superior to Rawls’s free-standing approach to reasonableness. This is because, the
argument continues, although both are compatible with a plurality of opposing compre-
hensive doctrines, in Rawls’s version such a compatibility is earned through a norma-
tively deflated account of reason that eventually undermines reason’s capacity to steer
our behaviour authoritatively.
Social & Legal Studies
2015, Vol. 24(1) 135–151
ªThe Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663914560970
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