Justice and Liberal Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Reading of Rawls‪.‬

1. Introduction In this paper I address the controversy between the political liberalism of John Rawls and the radical democracy of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Both positions form a set of normative proposals for organizing liberal-democratic society. The aim of the paper is to initiate a dialogue between these two positions that are generally considered exclusive. Rawls, often viewed as the most influential political philosopher of the twentieth century, represents the mainstream in this controversy, whereas the "radical democrats" occupy the place of the challengers. As it is often the case with intellectual movements, building one's identity through opposition is the strategy of the challengers, while the mainstream, not in need of justifying its existence, usually ignores the challengers' contestations and instead engages with self-affirming debates with loyal critics. This is roughly the case with the opposition in question: on the one hand, besides Habermasian deliberative democracy, Rawlsian political liberalism is one of the central contemporary targets for radical democratic criticisms. On the other hand, we rarely find any responses to their complaints from the political liberalism movement. (1) Beneficial as it may be for the "division of labor," I believe that both movements would gain much if instead of opposition and silence there were a dialogue between them. Dialogues, however, can occur only if the parties are somehow deemed complementary to each other, and this involves bringing out both the differences separating the respective positions as well as the common grounds uniting them.