Religious Arguments in the Public Sphere: Comparing Habermas with Rawls

Abstract

In the discussion about the role of religious reasons in the public sphere, Habermas has developed a middle-ground position defined by his institutional translation proviso. After a presentation of Habermas’s postsecular perspective, we analyze the specificity of his account of public reason by comparing it with the position of John Rawls. We argue that Habermas’s interpretation of Rawls’s position is not fully correct and that it is therefore less clear than Habermas assumes that Habermas indeed advocates the more inclusionist position of the two.