Multiculturalism, Deliberative democracy, Public communication, History, Normative comparison
Abstract
Public reason’s paradigm, configured by John Rawls in Political Liberalism [1st Or. ed. 1993, 2005], isincreasingly criticised for its limits in regulating a deliberative praxis able to deal with democratic pluralism. In fact,deliberative theorists usually tend to stretch and modify the ideal of a political use of public reason in order to point outthe consequences of Rawls’ theses in multicultural societies, so that the philosopher’s paradigm turns out to be weakenedfrom a normative point of view; this approach paves the way to aporias as the one between cultural minorities’ freedomof expression and normativity of communication. In the first section of the present article I begin my analysis from arecent publication by Monique Deveaux [Deliberative Democracy and Multiculturalism, 2018] to study an example ofpublic reason’s theoretical weakening and its aporetic effects; in the second section new research perspectives arehypothesised in order to offer an alternative proposal to the removal of liberalism’s criteria in multicultural democracies.More specifically, I propose the concept of “history” as a point of balance between democratic inclusion and normativityof communication in contemporary liberal democracy
