On Conditions of Participation: The Deficits of Public Reason

• Authors: Marek Hrubec
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper analyzes the conditions of civic participation that are elucidated by criticism of the deficits of public reason. The interpretation proceeds in three steps. First, the idea of public reason and discourse is analyzed, followed by an explanation of democratic deficit and of the social deficit in the second and third steps, respectively. These deficits are analyzed as an essential limit to political and social conditions of the participation of citizens. The analysis focuses thereby on the theory of public reason by one of the most influential political philosophers of the last decades, John Rawls. The paper identifies two main pitfalls in his theory: first, the deficit following from an inadequate integration of an individual into society, which, in this case, represents democratic deficit, second, the deficit linked with underrating the socio-distributive dimension of justice, which means a social deficit.

Keywords

EN

participation; public reason; liberalism; John Rawls; critical

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human Affairs
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 81-91

Dates

published

2008-06-01

online

2008-06-19

Contributors

author

Marek Hrubec

• Centre of Global Studies Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Jilská 1 110 00 Prague 1 Czech Republic

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10023-008-0007-3