Relativism and Religion: Why Democratic Societies Do Not Need Moral Absolutes 9780231540377

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RELATIVISM AND

RELIGION

religion, culture, and public life

religion, culture, and public life Series Editor: Karen Barkey

The resurgence of religion calls for careful analysis and constructive criticism of new forms of intolerance, as well as new approaches to tolerance, respect, mutual understanding, and accommodation. In order to promote serious scholarship and informed debate, the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life and Columbia University Press are sponsoring a book series devoted to the investigation of the role of religion in society and culture today. This series includes works by scholars in religious studies, political science, history, cultural anthropology, economics, social psychology, and other allied fields whose work sustains multidisciplinary and comparative as well as transnational analyses of historical and contemporary issues. The series focuses on issues related to questions of difference, identity, and practice within local, national, and international contexts. Special attention is paid to the ways in which religious traditions encourage conflict, violence, and intolerance and also support human rights, ecumenical values, and mutual understanding. By mediating alternative methodologies and different religious, social, and cultural traditions, books published in this series will open channels of communication that facilitate critical analysis. After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, edited by Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen Religion and International Relations Theory, edited by Jack Snyder Religion in America: A Political History, Denis Lacorne Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, edited by Ahmet T. Kuru and Alfred Stepan Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, Mark C. Taylor Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal, edited by Mamadou Diouf Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo, Mark C. Taylor Democracy and Islam in Indonesia, edited by Mirjam Künkler and Alfred Stepan Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference, edited by Linell E. Cady and Tracy Fessenden Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill, Mark C. Taylor Boundaries of Toleration, edited by Alfred Stepan and Charles Taylor Choreographies of Sharing at Sacred Sites: Religion, Politics, and Conflict Resolution, edited by Elazar Barkan and Karen Barkey Beyond Individualism: The Challenge of Inclusive Communities, George Rupp Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World, edited by Hent de Vries and Nils F. Schott

RELATIVISM AND RELIGION

WHY DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES DO NOT NEED MORAL ABSOLUTES

CARLO INVERNIZZI ACCETTI

columbia universit y press

new york

columbia u niversity press publishers s ince 1893 n ew york

c hichester, w est s ussex

cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Accetti, Carlo Invernizzi, 1983– Relativism and religion : why democratic societies do not need moral absolutes / Carlo Invernizzi Accetti. pages

cm.—(Religion, culture, and public life)

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-231-17078-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-231-54037-7 (e-book) 1. Political theology.

2. Democracy—Moral and ethical aspects.

aspects—Catholic Church. BT83.59.A224

4. Relativity.

3. Democracy—Religious

I. Title.

2015

322′ .1—dc23 2015009760

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Th is book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 cover design: james victore References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To recognize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly. —Joseph Schumpeter

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction

1

1. The Discourse of Anti-Relativism in the Political Thought of the Catholic Church 33 2. Elements for a Public Critique of the Catholic Discourse of Anti-Relativism 87 3. Rationalism: Between Relativism and Religion

129

4. Defense of a Relativist Conception of Democracy Conclusion 211 Notes 221 Bibliography 253 Index 265

163

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing this book I accumulated more debts and received help from more people than it may be possible to acknowledge in a short note. I would like to thank first of all Nadia Urbinati, whose unfailing guidance and mentorship has been both formative and inspirational. I am indebted to her for most of the ideas contained in this book. I would also like to thank Jean L. Cohen for her support throughout the writing process and for her insightful comments on several earlier drafts of the manuscript. During my years at Columbia University, I also received extremely helpful comments from Andrew Arato, Akeel Bilgrami, Andreas Kalyvas, Ira Katznelson, Allan Silver, and Melissa Schwartzberg. In addition, I would like to express my special gratitude to Patrick Weil for his advice and support before, during, and after the writing process. An early version of the manuscript was presented and discussed at the Sciences Po Political Theory seminar in Paris, for which I thank in particular Jean-Marie Donegani and Astrid Von Busekist. Several chapters of the book were also presented, at different stages of completion, in workshops and conferences organized at the Columbia Global Center in Paris, Princeton University, Humboldt University in Berlin, the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. I would like to thank

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AC K N OW L E D G M E N TS

Justine Lacroix, Jan-Werner Muller, Cécile Laborde, Samuel Moyn, MariaPia Lara, and Jean-Yves Pranchère for the helpful and insightful comments offered on these occasions. Finally, during the last phases of writing I spent a semester in residence at the Italian Academy of Columbia University. I would like to thank David Freedberg for offering me this opportunity and Barbara Carnevali, Mattia Gallotti, and Gloria Origgi for the useful and pleasant discussions during my time there. Although academic convention has it that personal friends and peers should be thanked last in this context, without the innumerable discussions I had with them throughout the writing process, and indeed their friendship and loyalty, this book could never have been written. In particular, I want to express my gratitude to Chris Bickerton, Pablo Bustinduy, Joshua Craze, Sandipto Dasgupta, James Fontanella, Alex Gourevitch, Giulia Oskian, Tom Theuns, and Ian Zuckerman. How could I even begin to say how much I owe each one of you? I would also like to thank my father, Emanuele Invernizzi, for all his guidance and advice, and my mother, Consuelo Accetti, for her affection and support. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers from Columbia University Press as well as Wendy Lochner and Christine Dunbar for their help and collaboration during the editorial process.

RELATIVISM AND

RELIGION

INTRODUCTION

A DICTATORSHIP OF RELATIVISM?

A specter is haunting Western societies: the specter of relativism. Once only thought to constitute a relatively marginal philosophical or meta-ethical position, it is now treated as a social and political problem, and it is primarily as an antidote against this supposed problem that the reference to a set of “absolute”—and in particular “religious”—moral values is increasingly defended. Consider, for example, what Cardinal Josef Ratzinger asserted in the last homily he gave before the assembled conclave, the day before being elected pope: Today, having a clear faith based on the creed of the Church is often labeled fundamentalism. Whereas relativism; that is, letting oneself be tossed here and there by every wind of doctrine, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely in satisfying one’s ego and desires.

In the years that have elapsed since Benedict XVI’s election, this opposition between “relativism” and “a clear faith based on the creed of the Catholic

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Church” has been made into the backbone of the Vatican’s pontifical message. Neither of the popes that has been in office since then nor any other official spokesperson of the Catholic Church has missed an occasion to denounce the poisonous effects that relativism is supposedly having on modern societies and to present Christianity as the only available antidote against it. This has led to the constitution of a whole body of discourse that certain commentators have not hesitated to describe as amounting to an intellectual “crusade” against relativism. Nor is this discourse restricted exclusively to the Catholic Church. The concern with relativism cuts across denominational distinctions. In the sermons preached in many contemporary evangelical churches in the United States, for instance, relativism is often treated—along with liberalism and secularism—as part of a sort of “unholy trinity” that is supposed to be corroding the moral foundations of contemporary societies. Indeed, a recent poll conducted among evangelical preachers in the United States found that, after “abortion,” “moral relativism” was indicated by most respondents as “the most pressing moral issue faced by America today.” For anybody familiar with the language used in contemporary evangelical churches in the United States, this is unlikely to come as a surprise. In a lecture delivered at the National Ligonier Conference in 2007, for instance, John Piper, pastor at the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, summed up the objections made by evangelical Christians against relativism: Relativism is an invisible gas, odorless, deadly, that is now polluting every free society on earth. It is a gas that attacks the central nervous system of moral striving. The most perilous threat to the free society today is, therefore, neither political nor economic. It is the poisonous, corrupting culture of relativism. . . . Here is a list of seven amongst the most evil and destructive effects of relativism: 1) Relativism commits treason against God. 2) Relativism cultivates duplicity. 3) Relativism conceals doctrinal defection. 4) Relativism cloaks greed with flattery. 5) Relativism cloaks pride with the guise of humility. 6) Relativism enslaves people. 7) Relativism leads to brutal totalitarianism.

Finally, by way of further illustration, consider also the following passage from the book titled Milestones by Sayyid Qutb—which is considered by many one of the principal intellectual reference points for the contempo-

INTRODUCTION

3

rary strands of political Islamism that denounce the “moral corruption” of modern and in particular liberal-democratic societies: “Mankind today is on the brink of abyss, not because of the danger of complete annihilation, which is hanging over its head (this being just a symptom and not the real disease) but because humanity is devoid of those vital values which are necessary not only for its healthy development but also for its real progress.” Although the term “relativism” itself is not explicitly mentioned in this passage, the key idea it advances is analogous to the ones contained in the other passages mentioned, namely, that modern societies are under threat of being destroyed because they are supposedly in the process of losing their commitment to a set of “absolute” moral values. The implicit message—which Qutb goes on to articulate very incisively in his book—is that modern societies need to make reference to a set of ultimately religious moral values in order to avoid annihilation. THE CRITIQUE OF RELATIVISM AS A CRITIQUE OF DEMOCRACY

The political overtones implicit in the notion of a “dictatorship of relativism” and in the idea that “relativism leads to brutal totalitarianism” are by no means coincidental. For the key claim that is being advanced in the passages quoted above is not simply that relativism constitutes a problem for the spiritual lives of individuals, but also that it constitutes a danger for the survival of modern societies. There is thus a political dimension to the contemporary religious discourse of anti-relativism, which translates into a project of reasserting the importance of a reference to the notion of “absolute truth,” not only in the private domain of individual morality, but also in the public domain of contemporary politics. It is this political dimension of the religious discourse of anti-relativism that I intend to discuss over the course of this book. Specifically, what I am interested in discussing is the bearing of this discourse on the domain of democratic theory. My contention is that the call for a reassertion of a reference to a notion of absolute truth within contemporary politics constitutes one of the last remaining grounds upon which the democratic principle of self-government can be—or at least still is—criticized. To show this requires a brief foray into the history of anti-democratic rhetoric. As is well known, this form of government did not always enjoy the nearuniversal favor it is invested with today. On the contrary, throughout most

4

INTRODUCTION

of the history of Western political thought, democracy was generally assumed to constitute one of the “degenerate” forms of government. The arguments sustaining this consensus can mostly be traced back to a Platonic heritage, which in fact proves to have several elements in common with the contemporary discourse of anti-relativism. In the famous book 8 of The Republic, for instance, Plato argues that democracy leads to a degeneration of the moral and political standards of society, since individuals are led into believing that they can do whatever they want because of the absence of a common authority. Chaos and disorder are assumed to ensue, and the only way in which peace can be reasserted is said to be through a form of tyranny keeping society under control “with an iron fist.” For centuries, this—or some set of views akin to it—constituted the political common sense on democracy. Opinions only gradually began to shift over the course of the past two centuries, during which democracy was progressively posited as the bedrock of all forms of political legitimacy. Today, the process has reached such a point that it appears very difficult to find anybody explicitly declaring him- or herself against the democratic principle itself: even those who might secretly harbor other sympathies usually say they are democrats, and couch their arguments in democratic terms. This does not mean that the previous critiques of democracy have simply been forgotten. Rather, they have been incorporated within a democratic framework by being transformed into arguments for limiting democracy from within. The political struggle today is therefore largely fought in terms of different conceptions of democracy and in particular of the limits that should be imposed on them. Within this struggle, critiques of the democratic principle still have an important role to play because they serve as the basis for different views as to whether, and in what way, democracy should be limited for its own sake. The political significance of the contemporary religious discourse of anti-relativism emerges from this context. For, from the point of view of contemporary political common sense, the claim that relativism leads to “dictatorship,” “tyranny,” or even “totalitarianism” can be interpreted as a way of stating that it represents a threat to the survival of existing democratic regimes. The political consequence is that, in order to be sustainable as a form of government, democracy needs to be complemented with reference to a notion of absolute truth, both limiting and guiding the democratic

INTRODUCTION

5

exercise of political power, and therefore keeping it within the bounds of moral legitimacy. This link between the issue of relativism and that of democracy was, for example, drawn explicitly by Pope John Paul II in a document that can be in many ways considered the intellectual foundation for the rise to prominence of the religious discourse of anti-relativism in the aftermath of the Cold War—the encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor: Today when many countries have seen the fall of ideologies which bound politics to a totalitarian conception of the world, there is no less grave a danger that the fundamental rights of the human person will be denied.  .  .  . This is the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism, which would remove any sure moral reference point from political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgement of truth impossible. Indeed, if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.

The central argument that John Paul II seems to be making here is that a conception of democracy founded on relativism would ultimately be selfdefeating. The reason he alludes to is that relativism is incapable of specifying any determinate principles to “guide and direct political activity.” This is taken to make a relativist conception of democracy vulnerable to the paradox whereby democracy may be overthrown by democratic means because it implies that there can be no limits on what a sovereign people may legitimately do to itself. Relativism is therefore accused of providing no guarantee that democracy will not transform itself into a form of “totalitarianism.” From this, John Paul II goes on to deduce that democratic regimes need to make reference to some notion of absolute truth in order to remain politically sustainable, because by imposing a set of external limits on the power exercised by the people over themselves, the reference to a notion of truth offers the only available guarantee that democracy will not overthrow itself. Moreover, since Christianity is implicitly assumed to constitute the natural foundation for such a notion of absolute truth, faith in Jesus Christ is ultimately posited as a necessary complement to the good functioning of democracy.

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INTRODUCTION

Although he does not mention democracy explicitly, a very similar argument is also made by John Piper in the lecture I already quoted above: The formula is simple: when relativism holds sway long enough in a society, everyone begins to do what is right in his or her own eyes, without any regard for submission to truth. In this atmosphere, a society begins to break down. . . . When the chaos of relativism reaches a certain point, the people will welcome any ruler who can bring some semblance of order and security. So a dictator steps forward and crushes the chaos with absolute control. Ironically, relativism, the great lover of unfettered freedom, destroys freedom in the end.

The Platonic heritage is still clearly visible in both formulations of this argument, since the key claim they make is that a political system founded on relativism leads to the dissolution of the moral fabric of society and ultimately to the emergence of a kind of political regime that radically negates the essential principles of freedom and democracy. Indeed, even the antidote recommended against this danger can be seen as a Christianization of the Platonic idea that the political order must be founded on a set of absolute truths standing above and beyond the human order of things. The key difference with Plato, however, is that the contemporary critics of relativism do not present their arguments as critiques of democracy as such, but rather as analyses of the conditions for its survival. In this sense, it is possible to say that the critique of democracy has become internal: instead of opposing democracy from outside, the point advanced is that democracy needs to be complemented by a religious criterion of legitimacy for its own sake—that is, in order to guide and limit its own exercise of political power. A POLITICAL RESPONSE

My goal over the course of this book is to examine the body of discourse making this claim in order to assess its cogency. More specifically, what I am interested in exploring is the challenge represented for democratic theory by the idea that democratic regimes need to be complemented by the reference to a set of absolute moral or political truths in order to avoid degenerating into a form of tyranny or totalitarianism.

INTRODUCTION

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From the point of view of what has been stated, this can be interpreted as a way of intervening in the contemporary political debate over the meaning of democracy and the conditions of its legitimacy. In this respect, it should however be made clear from the start that I will not be adopting the position of a neutral or disengaged observer. On the contrary, it is precisely because I consider myself both a philosophical relativist and a committed democrat that I am interested in examining the challenge posed for democratic theory by the contemporary discourse of anti-relativism. In this sense, there is a polemical dimension to this book, which consists in the project of first assessing the critique of democracy implicit in the idea that democracy needs to make reference to a set of absolute moral or political values in order to avoid degenerating into a form of tyranny or totalitarianism, and then attempting to provide a response to it by testing both the coherence and the political sustainability of a conception of democracy founded on a form of philosophical relativism. That said, since I remain convinced that a necessary preliminary for a convincing critique is an adequate understanding of one’s opponent’s position, a significant portion of this book will be devoted to the project of reconstructing the intellectual grounds for the contemporary discourse of anti-relativism. In other words, it is precisely because I want to take a stand against the contemporary religious discourse of anti-relativism that I will first have to bring into relief the challenge it represents for democratic theory in the fairest possible way. In so doing it will also be possible to address a number of broader theoretical and political issues, which are at the heart of contemporary democratic theory. Before moving on to outline these broader theoretical stakes of the present discussion, it is, however, worth highlighting a further important aspect of my approach, which circumscribes the set of issues under consideration. THE FOCUS ON THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

For the purposes of the present discussion, I have decided to restrict the domain of analysis to the formulations of the religious discourse of antirelativism offered by the Catholic Church, and in particular by Vatican doctrine as it is contained in the body of papal encyclicals promulgated over the course of the past two centuries. The principal reason for this is one of

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INTRODUCTION

focus: the discourse of anti-relativism has recently been employed by a variety of both religious and non-religious advocates for the purpose of substantiating a wide array of political projects. It would simply be unmanageable to try to discuss all the various strands of this discourse in one book. At the same time, however, I also think that the decision to focus on the Vatican’s formulations of the religious discourse of anti-relativism can be justified positively, on the basis of a number of concurring observations. First of all, as we will see in more detail, the contemporary discourse of anti-relativism originates from within official Catholic doctrine. The first recorded usage of the term to refer to a social and political problem, rather than simply a philosophical position, for instance, occurs in a papal encyclical of 1884. Since then, official Catholic doctrine has continued to elaborate and refine this original intuition, so that today it is within this body of texts that one finds the most sophisticated formulations of the religious discourse of anti-relativism. When the Catholic formulations are compared to others one might encounter in the discourse produced by other religious organizations, the differences are in fact often striking, simply because the Catholic Church has a much more established tradition of scholarly apologetics. Indeed, it has already been pointed out by several observers of religious trends—especially in the United States—that the Catholic Church is progressively assuming a position of “intellectual leadership” within a broader “faith-based” political front. From this point of view, the well-known theological and political disputes between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism appear largely a thing of the past, and what is increasingly replacing them is a sort of inter-denominational division of labor whereby Catholic apologists provide the intellectual foundations, while Protestant organizations supply the grassroots support, for a set of essentially convergent positions. Thus the Vatican’s formulations of the discourse of anti-relativism can be considered exemplary of a much broader range of arguments raised from a variety of religious standpoints. Last but not least, a further reason for focusing on the Vatican’s formulations of the religious discourse of anti-relativism is its degree of political influence. Even in the United States, this is not something to underestimate. Catholicism is currently both the largest single denominational affiliation in this country and the fastest growing, largely due to the influx of immigrants from Latin America. What the Church’s authorities think and stand

INTRODUCTION

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for is therefore going to be a very important determinant of the political life of this country in the future. Outside the United States, the political influence of the Catholic Church is so well established as to require little demonstration. Every time a pope makes a public statement, millions of people listen all over the world, and the resonance of these messages in the political life of individual countries is enormous. No other religious organization has the same degree of capillary diffusion, bolstered by a highly centralized organizational structure and an availability of economic and political resources comparable to those of a sizeable state. To examine and discuss the discourse advanced by this institution therefore constitutes an intellectually and politically worthwhile task in its own right. Even if this will not exhaust the range of different formulations of the discourse of anti-relativism advanced in the contemporary public sphere, it is certainly a necessary step in that direction. The analysis conducted in this book can therefore be seen as laying the foundations for a larger project to be continued and expanded in the future, while at the same time engaging with an interlocutor that is both sufficiently interesting and important to be confronted on its own terms. THE QUESTION OF THE ABSOLUTE

As I have already pointed out, beyond the strictly political interest of engaging with the Vatican’s discourse of anti-relativism in a debate on the conditions for the stability and viability of existing democratic regimes, such an endeavor also has a bearing on a number of more theoretical debates that are central to the contemporary discipline of political theory. Before moving on to outline my main argument, I will therefore spell out some of these issues in order to illustrate what is at stake theoretically, as well as politically, in this book. The first major theoretical debate that is at stake in a discussion of the relation between relativism, religion, and democracy concerns the philosophical foundation for the legitimacy of democratic regimes, and in particular whether any attempt to address this issue supposes a reference to a notion of the absolute. This question has been both posed and contextualized in a compelling manner by Hannah Arendt in her book On Revolution. Her starting point is the claim that, before modernity, the question concerning the foundations for the legitimacy of the political order did not

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INTRODUCTION

really emerge, because it was in a sense already resolved in advance. A hierarchical order of authority was assumed to be implicit in the natural order of things, and this prevented the question concerning the foundations for its legitimacy from being raised in a politically meaningful manner. At the beginning of modernity, Arendt contends, this assumption began to be called into question. Indeed, for her, the theory of the divine rights of monarchs already constituted a response to this problem, which consisted in making explicit something that had previously been assumed to be implicit: that the foundation for the legitimacy of the political order ultimately lay in the sanction received by the transcendent will of God. A conceptual absolute was therefore posited as the foundation for early modern theories of absolute monarchy. To be sure, modern revolutions emerged out of the rejection of divine right theories. However, precisely for this reason, Arendt suggests that they posed the question of the foundation for the legitimacy of the political order even more acutely. The solution that was initially adopted—especially in France, but also to some extent in the United States—was to posit a new “absolute,” as a substitute for the one that had been rejected: the collective will of the people in the place of the transcendent will of God. Arendt’s claim, however, is that this solution posed more problems than it actually solved, because the “people” proved to be an abstract entity, incapable of solving the concrete political question of who is to formulate publicly binding legislation. As a result, the idea of popular sovereignty opens up the dangerous possibility that a new and even more oppressive form of tyranny may be exercised against the people, in the name of the people itself. Arendt takes this to be at least part of the explanation for the failure of the French Revolution to achieve the stated goal of instituting the conditions for political freedom. Having identified the root of the problem in the attempt to substitute the old (“transcendent”) absolute with a new (“immanent”) version of it, she therefore poses the question of whether it is possible to found a political order without making reference to a notion of the absolute at all. The proposal she puts forward to address this challenge draws from a specific interpretation of the experience of the American Revolution, which she reads as having succeeded precisely where the French Revolution failed. Its core lies in a combination of the contractualist idea of a political order founded on reciprocal agreements among its members and the republican idea of a quasi-religious attachment to the founding moment itself.

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I will return to the details of this theory, as well as to its complex relation with the notion of democracy, in the course of the substantive discussion carried out in the ensuing chapters of this book. For the time being, what I am interested in extracting from Arendt is the specific problem she poses through her discussion of the vicissitudes of the notion of the absolute. This ultimately boils down to a question over whether a political regime can be founded without making reference to the idea of something that does not depend on anything else: in other words, whether political legitimacy requires an absolute foundation, or whether it is possible to do without it. This has been a central question in political theory at least since the beginning of the democratic age, and Arendt’s is by no means the only available answer. Indeed, contemporary democratic theories can be classified on the basis of the way in which they attempt to address this question. On the one hand, what I will be calling “rationalist” theories of democracy attempt to overcome the problems generated by the voluntaristic conception of the “people” implicit in early theories of popular sovereignty by employing the category of rationality to provide an autonomous set of foundations for the legitimacy of democratic regimes. What could perhaps be called “post-foundationalist” theories of democracy, on the other hand, attempt to circumvent the need for an absolute by questioning the assumption that a democratic order requires a philosophical foundation in the first place. The Catholic discourse of anti-relativism constitutes an alternative to both these strands of contemporary democratic theory. As we have seen, it is neither “anti-absolutist” nor “post-foundational” but resolutely affirms that democracies can only succeed in establishing a stable political order if they make reference to a set of absolute moral or political values, assumed to be derived from a transcendent source. From the point of view of the question under consideration, this can be seen as a way of challenging the very premise of most contemporary democratic theory by reasserting the need for the reference to a notion of the absolute from within a democratic framework. Examining this discourse and attempting to respond to it therefore offer the opportunity for addressing one of the central questions of contemporary democratic theory from a different perspective. By comparing the way in which rationalist and post-foundational theories of democracy can succeed in responding to a challenge that is raised for both by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, I hope to shed new light on the question of whether democracy can do without the reference to some notion of the

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absolute. A large part of this book will therefore be devoted to a comparative analysis of existing democratic theories from the point of view of their capacity to address this question. THE PARADOX OF DEMOCRACY OVERTHROWING ITSELF

The second substantive theoretical issue I intend to address through an engagement with the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism concerns a paradox that emerges from within the framework of democratic theory itself: that democracy may be overthrown by democratic means. As we have seen, the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism pivots essentially around this possibility, because the argument made against a relativistic conception of democracy is that it would not be capable of preventing such an outcome. If, for example, a majority of the people were to be convinced that they ought to relinquish their democratic rights, a relativist would seem to have no grounds for urging a defense of the democratic order against this expression of the people’s will. It is on these grounds that the Catholic Church claims it is necessary to complement the democratic principle with reference to a set of absolute moral or political values, by suggesting that this is the only way to immunize it against its potentially suicidal tendencies. As we have also seen, however, from a longer-term perspective, this argument can be understood as a version of a well-established theme within the tradition of anti-democratic rhetoric. Even Plato suggested that democracy would ultimately convert itself into a form of tyranny through a process whereby the people themselves relinquish their democratic rights to a demagogue. Stated formally, the problem seems to be that there is nothing within the democratic principle itself capable of preventing the demos from turning against democracy as such. If this were to happen, democracy would seem to be incapable of sustaining itself, unless it were complemented by some additional principle of legitimacy, limiting it from outside. This has obviously been a central problem within democratic theory, at least since the beginning of the democratic age. All the most important theorists of democracy have accordingly had to grapple with it in one form or another, because what is at stake is whether democracy is capable of sustaining itself on its own, or requires being supported by an external set of premises.

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Rousseau was able to circumvent this problem by supposing that the people could never will anything against their own interests. This conviction, however, relied on such a stringent set of assumptions concerning the conditions under which the “general will” was to be formulated that it was never held to be politically pertinent. Especially in the aftermath of the French Revolution, a large part of the theoretical effort of nineteenthcentury liberalism consisted precisely in the attempt to limit the power that the people would exercise over themselves in a democratic context, in order to prevent it from slipping out of hand and turning against itself. The problem with this solution to the paradox of popular sovereignty is that it poses a further question concerning the grounds for restricting the power of the people over themselves in the first place: can the limits on the democratic exercise of political power be justified democratically? From this point of view, the problem presented by the possibility of democracy overthrowing itself merely appears to be translated into the problem of whether democracy is capable of establishing limits on its own exercise of power, without relying on an external principle of legitimacy. The Catholic Church was by no means the first to claim that the democratic principle ought to be limited for its own sake. However, when it did begin to make this claim, it provided a clear criterion for doing so: the absolute will of God was posited as the foundation for a set of natural laws that were supposed to provide guidelines to the democratic power of the people, in the interest of good government and the preservation of the democratic order itself. Nineteenth-century liberals were necessarily ambivalent about this idea, because of their acceptance of the notion of natural law, on the one hand, and their skepticism of the attempt to ground political legitimacy on religious foundations, on the other. Contemporary political theory remains divided along these lines. On the one hand, there are those who believe that democracy must draw from outside itself the grounds for limiting its own power. This strand of thought includes both Catholics and liberals, whose consensus over the idea of natural law has evolved into a specific conception of human rights as absolute checks on the democratic exercise of political power. On the other hand, radical democrats insist on the idea that democracy may contain within itself the grounds for limiting its own power. In practice, this strand of thought has revolved around the idea that, instead of being seen as external checks on the democratic exercise of political power, certain fundamental rights must be seen as constitutive of the democratic principle itself.

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Engaging with the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism may therefore also offer the opportunity for addressing this controversy within the field of contemporary democratic theory. By examining different possible responses to it, I will be led to address the question of whether an unfettered conception of democracy is indeed self-defeating, as the Catholic critics contend. By implication, this will allow me to pose the question of whether democracy is capable of establishing adequate limits on its own exercise of power autonomously or whether it requires being complemented by the reference to an external source of legitimacy. THE ISSUE OF POST-SECULARISM

Finally, a third theoretical issue I will also address through my engagement with the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism concerns the question of the relationship between democracy and religion. This is an issue that has recently been attracting a lot of attention within the field of political theory, under the banner of the notion of “post-secularism.” At root, the debate stems from the recognition that, contrary to previous expectations, the assumption that modernity would coincide with a progressive erosion of religious belief seems to have proved false. On the contrary, religion appears more vital than ever, not only in the private domain of individual belief, but also as a political factor to be reckoned with. As a reaction to this, political theory has been confronted with the question of how to come to terms with this “return of the religious” in contemporary politics. To the extent that political institutions and projects were predicated on the assumption that religion would somehow disappear, or at least be relegated to the marginal domain of the private sphere, it appears necessary to rethink the very foundations of our way of approaching political problems. The way in which contemporary political theorists have approached this question is however, in my opinion, rather narrow. Essentially, the debate over the notion of post-secularism has revolved around a dispute over the appropriate scope for the expression of religious belief in the democratic public sphere. Contributors to this debate disagree on the extent to which religious arguments ought to be accepted in a democratic context, but the overall way of approaching the question remains the same. The reason I find this way of approaching the question limited is that it fails to address the actual content of the arguments made by religious organizations in the contemporary public sphere. Thus, in a sense, it is as if the

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participants in this debate all adopted the haughty position of referees with respect to the arguments made by religious organizations in the contemporary public sphere, without realizing that what is at stake are the basic rules of the game itself. For, if contemporary political theorists took notice of what religious organizations are actually saying, they would realize that for them postsecularism doesn’t simply mean that the scope for the appropriate expression of religious belief in the public sphere ought to be reevaluated. What is being challenged is the assumption that the foundation for publicly binding legislation ought to be secular in the first place. This latter point is something that the political theorists who have taken part in the debate on the notion of post-secularism have largely taken for granted. However, since they do not engage with the actual content of the arguments made by religious organizations, it is not something that has been justified explicitly. Simply to say that anything else would be incompatible with the democratic principles of freedom and equality is not sufficient because, as we have seen, the argument made by the Catholic Church through its critique of relativism is precisely that democracy needs to make reference to a transcendent criterion of legitimacy in order to be sustainable on its own terms. From the point of view of the contemporary debate on the notion of post-secularism, the project of discussing the Catholic discourse of antirelativism can therefore be seen as a way of engaging with the actual content of at least one of the arguments made by several religious organizations in the contemporary public sphere on its own terms, rather than adopting the haughty position of referee with respect to them. Such a form of engagement between secular and religious points of view is something that has often been called for by contemporary theorists of the notion of post-secularism, but it has rarely actually been engaged in. From the point of view of the ongoing debate concerning the relationship between democracy and religion, this book can therefore be seen as a way of responding to that call by actually addressing what some contemporary religious authorities have to say concerning the role and place for religion within a democratic society. CHAPTER OUTLINE

In light of this exposition of the set of questions this book will attempt to address, I now move on to outline its overall argument. Since the reasoning proceeds in stages, and there is always more than one issue at stake at the

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same time, I will follow the order of the individual chapters, outlining the central argument of each in order to show its place and function within the whole. I hope this will provide the reader with a sort of map of the discussion to follow that will help him or her follow the main lines of the reasoning even when the details begin to come into the forefront. The History of the Catholic Discourse of Anti-Relativism

The first chapter is devoted to a reconstruction of the history of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. Its function is therefore to spell out, in a greater degree of detail than could be done up this point, the essential arguments on which this discourse relies, and thereby to clarify the central object of discussion with which the rest of the book is concerned. The analysis is based on a study of the corpus of encyclical letters and Vatican councils promulgated by the Catholic Church over the past two centuries. Within this corpus, I have sought to isolate the specific occurrences of the term “relativism” and to relate them to the broader set of claims and intellectual projects in which they are embedded, in order to establish the specific meanings that are progressively attached to the term and the political and intellectual function its critique is made to serve. The central argument advanced is that the term “relativism” has historically served the function of mediating the relationship between Catholicism and the two political forms the Church has historically assumed to be distinctive of modernity—liberalism and democracy. The term first began to be employed in the second half of the nineteenth century from within the framework of the so-called “intransigentist” doctrine that was developed as a reaction to the French Revolution and the political upheavals of the first half of the century. From the start, therefore, the discourse of antirelativism was associated with a concern to reassert the political authority of the Catholic Church, as a counterpoint to the perceived destructive tendencies of the democratic principle of popular sovereignty and the liberal call for the separation of church and state. In particular, the function that the term was initially made to serve was to establish a distinction within the political landscape of modernity between the aspects that the Catholic Church could come to terms with and those that it couldn’t. Drawing on the Augustinian conception of the distinction between the “city of God” and the “city of Man,” the Church sought to distinguish between two aspects of modernity: a good one and a bad one.

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The former was identified with the greater awareness of the special dignity of humanity and of the element of progress in human history. The negative aspect of modernity, on the other hand, was assumed to reside in the challenge to the absolute sovereignty of God manifested by the authority of the Catholic Church over the political domain. In the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, this challenge was assumed to take the form of two philosophical doctrines in particular: the doctrine of “immanentism,” which was assumed to consist in the negation of the existence of a transcendent domain beyond that perceivable by human faculties; and the doctrine of “indifferentism,” which was assumed to consist in the idea that there are multiple, equally valuable ways of accessing the truth. When the notion of relativism first began to be employed in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was defined in terms of the conjunction of these two doctrines. From the start, therefore, it functioned essentially as a label for all the negative aspects of modernity that the Church could not come to terms with, despite its historical mission of advancing the cause of the “city of God” within the context of human history. The argument that was made against relativism in this context was that it leads to unacceptable political consequences. As we have already seen, today this argument is usually made in terms of the idea that “relativism leads to totalitarianism.” In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, an essentially analogous point was made with reference to the experience of the French Revolution by constructing a chain of implications between the doctrine of relativism, the principles of popular sovereignty and political liberalism, and the so-called terror regime that supposedly resulted from the French Revolution. The contemporary idea that relativism “leads to totalitarianism” can therefore be seen as an adaptation of the central argument that underscored the intransigentist critique of modernity employed by the Catholic Church in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The other essential dynamic in the history of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism is its relation with the discourse of anti-communism. When the notion of relativism first began to be employed by the Catholic Church during the second half of the nineteenth century, the prospect of communist revolution was still perceived as a relatively distant threat on the horizon. The more immediate enemies of the Catholic Church were liberalism and democracy. Hence the critique of relativism occupied a more prominent position within the context of the official discourse of the Catholic Church than the critique of communism. Indeed, the first formulations of

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the latter function essentially as a way of wrapping up the political reductio ad absurdum of relativism, by suggesting that it would ultimately lead to the abolition of all forms of political authority and private property. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and with something similar threatening to take place in many other countries of Europe, the critique of communism assumed a much more important place within the framework of the official discourse of the Catholic Church. Indeed, as the focus of the political struggle shifted from the opposition between the ancien régime and modernity to that between capitalism and socialism, the critique of communism tended to overshadow the discourse of anti-relativism within the official rhetoric of the Catholic Church. In particular, within the context of the Cold War, the critique of relativism had to be underplayed, since it had originally been associated with a critique of liberal democracy that was now the side the Church had decided to throw its lot with, against “atheistic communism.” After the collapse of the Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe, however, the conditions were created for a recovery of the political dimension of the discourse of anti-relativism, since democracy reemerged as the principal focus of the political struggle, and the Catholic Church found itself deprived of what had been its principal enemy for the past few decades. The contemporary rise to prominence of the discourse of anti-relativism within the framework of the official discourse of the Catholic Church is therefore related to the end of the Cold War: in the new political scenario that was created, the Church resurrected the discourse of anti-relativism in order to carve out a new political role for itself as the guarantor of the absolute moral principles democracies supposedly need in order to survive. The classical themes of nineteenth-century intransigentism—a concern for order and authority and especially the opposition to the principle of secularism—were therefore fused with the twentieth-century concern with avoiding a relapse into totalitarianism by positing relativism as the root of all contemporary dangers and the reference to a religious conception of absolute truth as the only antidote against it. Grounds for a Public Critique

On the basis of the historical reconstruction provided in the first chapter of this book, the second is dedicated to what I call a “public” critique. By this I mean that I propose to treat the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism

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as a contribution to a public debate on the relationship between relativism and democracy, and to examine it on those terms. In this way, I seek to establish whether the claims it makes are rationally compelling from the point of view of a disengaged observer that is willing to be swayed by valid arguments, or whether they are only convincing from a point of view that already shares its essential premises. In particular, this chapter is structured around the discussion of five key terms that are central for the contemporary formulation of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism: “relativism,” “truth,” “authority,” “freedom,” and “totalitarianism.” In each case, I examine the function that the term plays within the framework of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, bringing out some of the underlying assumptions, conceptual slippages, and elements of tension that may serve to cast some doubt on the persuasiveness of the argument as a whole. In the context of this introduction, I will only outline the claims advanced with respect to three of these key terms in order to give a sense of the way in which the analysis will proceed. With respect to the notion of relativism itself, the first claim advanced is that the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism tends to blur the distinction between relativism and nihilism. Relativism is treated as if it amounted to a negation of the existence of moral values as such by being inscribed within the terms of an artificial binary: the idea that either moral values are absolute or they are no values at all. What this binary excludes is the only truly democratic option: that human beings establish their own moral values autonomously, through a process of reciprocal confrontation with one another. The implication that follows from this is that the values established democratically are indeed relative because they depend on the conditions in which they have been formulated; however, this does not mean that they are nonexistent, because they can still serve to bind human behavior even if they are not absolute. By treating relativism as a form of nihilism, the Catholic Church is able to suggest that it represents a threat to the survival of contemporary democracies because it undermines the grounds for establishing limits to the democratic exercise of political power. Against this contention, however, I suggest that relativism can be more properly understood as a meta-ethical position that involves taking a second-order stance with respect to one’s own moral commitments. If relativism is understood in this way, the stated grounds for the Church’s objection collapse, because relativists can still take a principled stand against the enemies of democracy. The only difference is

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that relativism brings out the element of choice, and therefore arbitrariness, that is present in this stance. Hence, far from abolishing it, the ultimate effect of relativism is to situate morality within the framework of the nexus between freedom and responsibility rather than the framework of obedience to a higher authority. The second notion discussed in chapter 2 concerns the antidote proposed by the Catholic Church for preventing the supposedly disastrous political consequences of relativism: the idea of absolute moral truth. Accepting, for the sake of argument, that relativism would indeed lead to such disastrous political consequences, I point out that the reference to a notion of absolute moral truth does not resolve the problem, but may actually serve to exacerbate it. The basic reason is that the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism fails to take into account the problems raised by the question of the interpretation of truth. Even assuming that such a truth existed, this would not be enough to know what its content is. The same problems that emerge in connection with the notion of relativism can therefore be shown to reemerge in connection with the issue of the interpretation of truth. Moreover, once the reference to an idea of absolute truth is introduced, there is a risk that political conflicts might assume an even more intractable nature, because between two conceptions of truth no compromise is possible. The opposite of truth is error, and it makes no sense to try to come to terms with error. Thus conflicts in the name of truth display a natural tendency toward degenerating into violence, since every party can only take it as its duty to impose its conception of truth on others, or at least prevent them from doing any harm. The history of the so-called wars of religion, in particular in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, is briefly discussed in order to substantiate this point. Finally, the last notion examined in chapter 2 is that of totalitarianism. In this respect, the point I advance is that the connection established between the notion of relativism and that of totalitarianism is too tenuous. The reason is that the Church’s argument does not really rely on a concrete historical analysis of the actual conditions that led to the emergence of this kind of political regime: the claim is simply that, from a logical point of view, relativism is incapable of providing absolute guarantees that democracy will not transform itself into a form of totalitarianism. This, however, is not sufficient to establish that relativism leads to totalitarianism, because an additional set of conditions that do not stem from relativism is also required.

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Indeed, through a consideration of the work of a number of authors who have actually studied the historical processes that led to the emergence of totalitarian regimes, such as Hannah Arendt and Claude Lefort, I point out that while both have recognized that there is a connection between the erosion of the previous markers of certainty and the emergence of totalitarianism, neither has concluded that the link between the two is either necessary or automatic. Rather, the claim is that totalitarianism has emerged as the outcome of the attempt to reintroduce political certainties into a situation in which they had previously been undermined. Neither the National Socialists nor the Bolsheviks, for example, were relativists: on the contrary, they both had pretty clear ideas as to what absolute political truth amounted to. This appears to shed an eerie light on the contemporary project to reassert a reference to truth as an antidote to the evil consequences of relativism. The point I want to make, however, is not that the reference to an idea of truth in politics necessarily leads to totalitarianism. Such a mechanical inversion of the argument made by the Catholic Church against relativism would be equally simplistic. Rather, the point I want to suggest is that the political use of the notion of totalitarianism itself is problematic, because it is situated at such a high level of abstraction as to be perfectly reversible. In one way or another, any political position could be criticized by saying that it leads to totalitarianism. This is tied to the fact that the way in which the notion is employed by the contemporary Catholic discourse of anti-relativism seems to have deprived it of any concrete political content. Effectively, the notion of totalitarianism has been reduced to a figure of absolute evil. Employing it therefore implies a moralistic approach to politics, which assumes the good can be neatly separated from evil and the two opposed to each other. This dualism is a characteristic feature of Catholic social thought, and explains many of the most embarrassing political mistakes the Church has committed over the course of its history. The obvious example, which will of course need to be discussed at greater length in what follows, is the Church’s ambivalence with respect to both Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany (at least for the first part of their respective history). What I will attempt to show in the historical part of the analysis is that what made this possible, even though the same regimes were later both condemned by the Church as totalitarian, was precisely that during the interwar years the Church continued to interpret the world in terms of the binary opposition between good and evil. Since

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the grounding assumption was that Soviet-style communism represented absolute evil, the Church, like many other conservative forces of the time, hesitated with respect to Fascism and National Socialism, because it saw in them a potential bulwark against the greater evil of communism. The Rationalist Response to the Catholic Discourse of Anti-Relativism

In the light of the public critiques of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism advanced in chapter 2, the last two chapters of the book examine some potential responses to it from a democratic perspective. In chapter 3, I examine what I consider likely to be the dominant response within the field of contemporary democratic theory, based on a form of neo-Kantian rationalism. This response agrees with the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism that if democracy were founded on relativism it would indeed be self-defeating. However, it contends that democracy does not necessarily need to draw its substantive moral values from religion, because it can succeed in founding them autonomously on the basis of the necessary presuppositions of reason itself. In this sense, rationalism can be understood as an attempt at tracing a middle course between the two conceptual poles posited by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism: religious absolutism on the one hand and philosophical relativism on the other. Two prominent authors who have attempted to develop such a position within the field of contemporary political theory are Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. The former has notoriously relied on a “universal pragmatics” of language that leads him to postulate as presumptively rational the outcome of an ideally expanded deliberative procedure that approximates the conditions of an “ideal speech situation.” The latter, on the other hand, has extracted two substantive “principles of justice” from an analysis of what could be rationally agreed to by a set of “reasonable” individuals in the hypothetical conditions of an “original position.” It is therefore primarily with reference to the work of these two authors that I seek to discuss the contemporary strand of neo-Kantian rationalism within the field of political theory. Although I will find useful insights in both their works, I will ultimately be led to the conclusion that neither is capable of offering a fully convincing response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. The basic reason is a version of the objection already made by Hegel against Kant’s attempt

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to found a substantive morality exclusively on the basis of the necessary presuppositions of reason: namely, that reason is incapable of establishing the validity of its own presuppositions entirely a priori, and is accordingly forced to import its substantive content from an “outside” that escapes it, or at least precedes it. My contention is that, depending on how this “outside” is understood, neo-Kantian rationalism falls back either on a disavowed form of dogmatism, which puts it on the same plane as the religious absolutism it is meant to replace, or on a disavowed form of philosophical relativism, which reproduces all the problems rationalism was supposed to avoid in the first place. Thus, in the final analysis reason alone proves incapable of providing an adequate foundation for a sustainable middle course between the two poles of the binary posited by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, remaining trapped within the terms of this polarity. To substantiate this thesis, chapter 3 provides a critical analysis of Habermas’s and Rawls’s respective theories of democracy, suggesting that the former illustrates how the attempt to ground a substantive set of moral values on the basis of the necessary presuppositions of reason itself can fall back on a disavowed form of dogmatism, while the latter shows how the same attempt can fall back on a form of philosophical relativism. Together, these two analyses are therefore meant to give an illustration of the overall metaethical horizon within which neo-Kantian rationalism remains inscribed. The discussion of Habermas begins by pointing out that his conception of communicative rationality can provide the grounds for a potential response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism because the notion of an “ideal speech situation” contains a reference to a set of substantive moral values that can be used to both orient and limit democratic deliberation, thereby presumably preventing it from overthrowing itself by democratic means. From this perspective, democracy takes the form of a constitutionally instantiated process of reflexive self-interpretation of the conditions required for approximating the ideal of communicative rationality, which is “kept on the rails” by its orientation to a set of substantive moral values, assumed to be implicit in this ideal. The principal objection I make against this potential response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism is that Habermas is ultimately incapable of providing a rational justification for his conception of communicative rationality itself. Showing this requires a sustained engagement with his Theory of Communicative Action, which I cannot reproduce in detail

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here. However, the core of the objection is that what Habermas presents as a “universal pragmatics” of language focuses in reality on a very specific—and indeed culturally determined—kind of language use: that is, the exchange of criticizable validity claims oriented toward reaching a rational understanding. The arguments Habermas provides to justify the assumption that this is the “most fundamental” kind of language use are ultimately unconvincing. One strategy he employs relies on the distinction between “illocutionary” and “perlocutionary” speech acts drawn from the philosophy of language of J. L. Austin, which Habermas employs to suggest that all competent uses of language must be implicitly “oriented toward reaching an understanding,” because the achievement of any speech act’s perlocutionary goals (that is, any goals beyond the one of communicating a certain content) depends on the interlocutors understanding its illocutionary meaning (that is, the linguistic content communicated by the speech act). This argument is however shown to rely on a confusion between two different senses of a statement’s being oriented toward reaching an understanding, which ultimately begs the question Habermas was supposed to answer in the first place. For to assume that one’s interlocutors are capable of understanding the illocutionary meaning of a speech act is not the same thing as to assume that all meaningful speech acts must necessarily raise a set of criticizable validity claims, capable of being redeemed by rational deliberation. An alternative strategy Habermas also employs to establish the same point relies on the construction of a whole philosophy of history based on the idea of a progressive “rationalization of the life-world,” which ultimately leads him to posit the exchange of criticizable validity claims oriented toward reaching a rational understanding as the immanent telos of all competent uses of language. This argument is however unconvincing because Habermas does not seem to provide any rational grounds for justifying his philosophy of history itself. All he suggests to this effect is that his notion of a progressive “rationalization of the life-world” can be understood as the result of a transposition of Jean Piaget’s and Lawrence Kohlberg’s conception of the progressive stages of individual cognitive development onto the plane of universal history. This, however, clearly begs the question of the validity of Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s respective theories of individual cognitive development to begin with, as well as of the legitimacy of transposing presumptive insights concerning individual cognitive development onto the domain of universal history.

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In the final analysis, therefore, Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality seems to be able to avoid the specter of circularity only by falling back on a dogmatic reaffirmation either of the linguistic priority of the exchange of criticizable validity claims oriented toward the achievement of a rational understanding, or of a philosophy of history that posits such a mode of communication as the immanent telos of all competent uses of language. In either case, however, Habermas’s theory does not seem capable of providing a valid substitute for the kind of religious dogmatism it was supposed to replace in the first place, but only a potential alternative that remains situated on the same conceptual plane. The discussion of Rawls, on the other hand, begins with an analysis of the way in which Rawls defines the hypothetical construct of an “original position,” in order to probe the validity of the argument sustaining his two principles of justice. My principal contention in this respect is that, in order to ensure that the parties in this position can indeed reach an agreement over his “principles of justice,” Rawls is forced to presuppose that they already share a substantive conception of the good. In particular, he assumes that all the parties in the original position are “rationally self-interested” and oriented toward the pursuit of certain “primary goods” assumed to be instrumental in the pursuit of any substantive conception of the good. The notions of self-interest and the orientation toward the pursuit of primary goods are accordingly not justified by the argument from the original position, but rather presupposed by it. The reason this appears problematic is that, on close inspection, the two principles of justice that are assumed to constitute the core of Rawls’s theory do not seem to amount to anything much more than a restatement of the substantive conception of the good that the parties in the original position were assumed to share to begin with. For both are based on a logic of maximization of minimum conditions that is already implicit in the idea of rational self-interest, and the “basic liberties” and “social and economic goods” to which they apply are arguably merely specifications of the notion of “primary goods” that is already implicit in the construction of the original position. Thus in the final analysis, Rawls’s argument from the original position seems to presuppose rather than justify the principles of justice it is supposed to provide rational grounds for. In order to address this objection, in his later writings Rawls was led to increasingly emphasize a theme that was implicit in the formulation of his theory of justice from the start, but that was given a much greater

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prominence later—namely, that the normative presuppositions implicit in the hypothetical construct of the original position are part of a specific “political culture” that the citizens of contemporary liberal-democratic regimes can be broadly assumed to share. Hence Rawls contends that the original position can be understood as a means for “clarifying” and “systematizing” a set of normative presuppositions that “we” (that is, the members of contemporary liberal-democratic societies) can be broadly assumed to already share: this is the core of the idea Rawls refers to through the notion of “reflective equilibrium.” While conceding that such an appeal to the notion of “reflective equilibrium” makes Rawls’s justification for his theory of justice much more coherent and compelling, my contention is that this ultimately makes it fall back on a form of culturally determined relativism. For if the ultimate ground for the defense of the normative presuppositions inscribed in the hypothetical construct of the original position is that these belong to a specific “political culture” that the citizens of contemporary liberal-democratic regimes are assumed to already share, it follows that Rawls’s justification for his theory of justice can have no persuasive power beyond this very specific cultural and political context—which is another way of conceding that the scope of its validity must remain relative to the context in which it is assumed to be inscribed. The overall conclusion that emerges from this analysis is therefore that Habermas’s and Rawls’s respective attempts to ground a substantive set of moral values on the basis of a neo-Kantian conception of reason illustrate in a paradigmatic fashion the possible outcomes of such a form of rationalism. For while Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality ultimately proves to fall back on a disavowed form of dogmatism that puts it on the same plane as the kind of religious absolutism it was supposed to replace, Rawls’s theory of justice ultimately falls back on a form of cultural relativism that reasserts the self-limitation of the justificatory power of reason it was meant to avoid in the first place. In either case, what proves to be unavailable is precisely the middle course between relativism and religion that was sought for to begin with. In chapter 4, I attempt to put forward an alternative response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, which challenges the key assumption that the form of rationalism considered in chapter 3 still has in common with it, namely, that the reliance on a form of philosophical relativism must necessarily constitute a problem for democratic theory. Before doing this,

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however, chapter 3 concludes by providing some reasons to explain why such an attempt is not based on a further analysis and discussion of Rawls, but rather relies on insights drawn primarily from the thought of another author: the great Austrian jurist and political theorist Hans Kelsen. The key point is that, even if Rawls’s theory of justice can be shown to fall back on a form of cultural relativism, this is not really the principal basis on which Rawls constructs his theoretical edifice. Rather, his theory seems to rely on a restriction of the domain of application of relativism, inasmuch as it attempts to infer the legitimacy of its two core principles of justice from what the members of contemporary liberal-democratic societies are assumed to agree on. This implies that it must be predicated on the assumption of a certain degree of cultural homogeneity between the members of a given cultural group (even if a certain measure of pluralism is also accepted, as long as it does not touch on the basic principles themselves). The argument I develop in chapter 4, on the other hand, attempts to make relativism itself into the basis for the legitimacy of democratic institutions. This implies that it cannot rely on what the members of a given cultural group are assumed to share, but must rather be predicated on the recognition of the legitimacy of irreducible disagreements within cultural groups, as well as between them. Defense of a Relativist Conception of Democracy

Chapter 4 is devoted to the discussion of a different response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, which I find more compelling than the rationalist one discussed in the previous chapter. Instead of attempting to substitute the religious conception of absolute truth with an alternative set of values, supposedly derived from the category of rationality itself, this response challenges the assumption that a conception of democracy predicated on a form of philosophical relativism must necessarily be self-defeating. On the contrary, it contends that it is possible to construct a theory of democracy deriving its legitimacy from a form of philosophical relativism that is also politically sustainable on its own terms, without needing to rely on any external or transcendent (that is, ultimately religious) sources of legitimacy. The primary inspiration for advancing this view comes from the work of the great Austrian jurist and political theorist Hans Kelsen. Although emphasizing the pertinence of this author’s thought for contemporary democratic theory may be said to constitute a contribution in itself (since,

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especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, his writings on democracy remain relatively unknown, compared to his theory of law), this chapter will not consist exclusively in an exposition, or even an interpretation, of his thought. For even though Kelsen did consider some critiques raised by religious commentators against his theory of the connection between relativism and democracy, he never explicitly addressed what I take to be the core of the objection on which the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism is predicated. In order to address this objection, it will therefore be necessary to both extrapolate from and complement what Kelsen has written explicitly on this topic. The exposition proceeds in three parts. In the first, I begin by providing a formal definition of relativism that overcomes the problems pointed out in chapter 2 concerning the way in which this notion is ordinarily employed by its critics, while also distancing this notion from the premises of the authors discussed in chapter 3. More specifically, for the purposes of the discussion, relativism is defined as a second-order (that is, meta-ethical) standpoint consisting in the consciousness that all first-order moral judgments depend on a set of prior categories and assumptions, which cannot themselves be justified absolutely. It follows that first-order moral judgments are necessarily relative to the set of premises and categories on which they depend, and therefore that moral judgments can be true (or valid) for some, without necessarily being so for everybody else too. As I point out, this definition of relativism ought to be distinguished both from a form of moral nihilism and from a form of moral absolutism. It is different from moral nihilism because it does not deny the possibility—or even the validity—of moral judgments. On the contrary, such a definition of relativism supposes the possibility of such judgments, because it consists in circumscribing the range of their validity (otherwise there would be nothing left to relativize in the first place). From this it follows that it is a mistake to assume that the adoption of a relativist standpoint must necessarily lead to a form of moral apathy or indifferentism. Rather, the adoption of such a standpoint implies that judging subjects must take responsibility for the moral standards they employ, and therefore that morality must ultimately be situated within the framework of the nexus between freedom and responsibility, rather than within the framework of obedience to a higher authority. On the other hand, the reason why the definition of relativism I propose ought to be distinguished from a form of moral absolutism is that

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it is not itself posited as a moral judgment, but rather as a second-order (that is, meta-ethical) standpoint concerning the conditions of validity of such judgments. From this it follows that such a definition is not vulnerable to the standard objection according to which any affirmation of relativism must necessarily be involved in a performative contradiction. For the relativist claim and the type of judgments it refers to are situated on different conceptual levels, and therefore cannot enter into contradiction with each other. The second part of the chapter builds on this definition of relativism to show how it can function as the ground for the justification of a specific conception of democracy. This justification consists in three main arguments extrapolated from Kelsen’s writings, which connect the notion of relativism as I defined it to (1) a notion of freedom understood as a right not to be subjected to coercive exercises of power one has not consented to, (2) an idea of equality understood as the denial of the intrinsic superiority of any substantive conception of the good or the right over any other, and (3) a form of tolerance understood as the recognition of the legitimacy of disagreement and therefore conflict between such rival conceptions. These three normative values are subsequently shown to provide a sufficient philosophical basis for constructing a coherent and politically sustainable conception of democracy, which is not vulnerable to the key objection raised by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. The argument connecting the notion of relativism to that of freedom is based on the assumption that the exercise of coercive power requires a justification that is at least in principle recognizable as valid by those on whom the power is meant to be exercised. However, since relativism as it has been defined implies that what is true for those seeking to exercise coercive power need not also be true for those on whom it is meant to be exercised, such a justification—and therefore the exercise of power it is meant to justify—can only be legitimate if it is consented to by the latter party. Similarly, the argument connecting the notion of relativism to that of equality is based on the assumption that discrimination between different substantive conceptions of the good or the right supposes a criterion, which must be recognized as valid from the point of view whereby the discrimination is meant to be carried out. However, relativism as it has been defined implies that, from the point of view from which relativism is being enunciated, no substantive conception of what is good or right can be considered absolutely valid. Thus, from this perspective no substantive

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conception of the good or right can be considered intrinsically superior to any other. Finally, the recognition of the legitimacy of conflict between substantive conceptions of the good and the right follows logically from what has been stated. For if relativism implies that there is no absolute criterion for discriminating between substantive conceptions of the good or the right, it must also imply that any persistent disagreement or conflict between them cannot be perceived as the sign that at least one of them must be wrong. Thus disagreement and conflict appear as part of the essential texture of morality and therefore as something to be valued in themselves. The third and final part of the chapter is dedicated to showing that the conception of democracy that follows from the political institutionalization of the three values outlined is capable of withstanding the key objection raised by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, because it is philosophically and politically sustainable on its own, without needing to rely on any external or transcendent (that is, ultimately religious) sources of legitimacy. The core of this demonstration lies in pointing out the internal and therefore necessary relationship that exists between such a conception of democracy and a form of constitutionalism imposing concrete limits on the democratic exercise of political power. From this it follows that the same antidote that the Catholic Church recommends to prevent the possibility that a democratic regime might potentially overthrow itself—that is, the imposition of a set of constitutionally enshrined limitations on the democratic exercise of political power—need not rely on a set of absolute moral or political values. For the specific conception of democracy that I attempt to justify on the basis of a form of philosophical relativism proves to be inherently constitutional and therefore self-limiting in the required sense. To be sure, in the context of the development of this argument, I will concede that such a justification of the connection between democracy and constitutionalism leaves open the possibility that a democratic regime could in principle succeed in either abrogating or amending even the constitutional limitations it had previously imposed on itself, thereby reopening the possibility of overthrowing itself by democratic means. My contention, however, is that in this respect a conception of constitutional democracy founded on a form of philosophical relativism fares no worse that the religiously inspired one recommended by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism.

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The reason is that the relevant term of comparison cannot be a situation in which all the members of a given polity are absolutely committed to democracy. For by the arguments supplied above, a hypothetical situation in which all the members of a given polity were philosophical relativists wouldn’t have to face this difficulty either. Thus the relevant question is whether the specific conception of constitutional democracy that can be justified on the basis of a form of philosophical relativism would do any worse than one justified on the basis of a set of absolute moral or political values in confronting the threat posed by the existence of a significant number of principled enemies of democracy within it (which, by the logic of the arguments supplied above, must necessarily be assumed to be philosophical absolutists). From this perspective the anti-relativist case mounted by the Catholic Church appears rather weak. For what difference can it make to an absolutist enemy of democracy whether its supporters understand their commitment to it as based on a relativistic philosophy or on an alternative set of absolute moral and political values? Indeed, in this respect I will put forward some reasons for suggesting that a relativistic conception of democracy may ultimately be more adequate for dealing with the potential challenge represented by the existence of internal enemies of democracy, compared to one based on the reference to a set of absolute moral values, since a relativistic philosophy confronts moral absolutism on a different plane, by challenging its certainties from within. It follows that it can seek to include its enemies within the democratic framework and therefore accustom them to it by practice, rather than excluding them a priori. To be sure, there can be no guarantee that such a strategy of democratic inclusion will be successful under all possible circumstances. However, in this respect I will also point out that the idea itself of an absolutely secure and therefore risk-free democracy—which appears to be the implicit point of reference of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism—may ultimately turn out to be itself a chimera. For it appears to imply that a democratic regime ought in principle to be defended and therefore effectively enforced even in a situation in which an overwhelming majority of members of a given polity were firmly opposed to it. To the extent that democracy is supposed to be a form of government founded on the principle of collective self-government, this appears somewhat absurd. The conclusion I reach is therefore that a consistent democrat ought to be democratic about his or her commitment to democracy—which implies

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accepting that democracy only really makes sense in a society of democrats. In a society where such a condition doesn’t hold, this leaves democrats with the practical task of trying to convince others of the attractiveness of their standpoint—whether on the basis of a form of philosophical relativism or an alternative set of absolute moral values. But in any case, it cannot lead to the conclusion that relativism itself is the problem. For as has been shown, the rejection of democracy itself cannot be grounded in such philosophical premises, but rather presupposes a form of philosophical absolutism. On the basis of this conclusion, in the final remarks of the book I return to the three substantive issues raised at the beginning of this introduction in order to illustrate the bearing of the analysis carried out on the relevant debates within the field of contemporary political theory, as well as some of its more concrete political implications.

1 THE DISCOURSE OF ANTI-RELATIVISM IN THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the principal object of this book. By reconstructing the history of the discourse of anti-relativism within the political thought of the Catholic Church, I hope to bring out the key arguments on which this discourse has relied, as well as the theoretical and political purposes it has been made to serve. All the ensuing chapters will then be framed as responses to the arguments reconstructed in this context. It is thus essential to put forward a clear picture from the start. The historical approach has been judged necessary because, as we will see over the course of the following analysis, the Catholic discourse of antirelativism constitutes a complex and multifaceted thematic whole, which has been employed in different contexts and for a plurality of purposes throughout the Church’s history. It will therefore be necessary to bring out the progressive evolution of this discourse and the way in which its sedimented layers of meaning have been constantly reorganized in order to address a shifting set of concerns before a more abstract synthetic statement of the central argument can be provided in the last section of this chapter. The method employed is that of conceptual history, in a broad sense. By this I mean that, taking the body of encyclical letters and Vatican councils produced by the Catholic Church over the past two centuries as a terrain

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of study, I have sought to identify and isolate the specific occurrences of the term “relativism.” In each case, I have tried to determine the specific meaning attached to the term, its relation to the wider discursive and historical context in which it is situated, and especially the theoretical and political functions it has been made to serve. In this way, I have attempted to unearth some of the deeper semantic layers and conceptual concerns that underscore the contemporary formulations of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. To my knowledge, no such history of the Catholic discourse of antirelativism has yet been written. This is surprising, given the prominence this discourse has recently acquired both within the framework of the Church’s political thought and also, more broadly, among advocates of organized religion and conservative critics of democracy in general. The present chapter can therefore also be read as a contribution to the historiography of Catholic social doctrine: a body of discourse that is both highly relevant from a political point of view and still relatively unstudied, especially within the field of contemporary political theory.

THE CONCEPTUAL ORIGINS OF THE CATHOLIC DISCOURSE OF ANTI-RELATIVISM: THE POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF POPE LEO XIII The Encyclical Humanum Genus

The first explicit mention of the term “relativism” in an official document of the Catholic Church occurs in the encyclical letter Humanum Genus promulgated by Pope Leo XIII in 1884. Before then, the term had only been employed very rarely, and exclusively in academic journals, as a means to criticize certain forms of epistemological or meta-ethical skepticism. Leo XIII was the first to use it to refer to a broader social and political problem, and therefore to endow it with the importance it later acquired within social and political theory in general. The specific theme with which the encyclical was concerned was that of the freemasonry, as is indicated by its subtitle: “Condemnation of the Moral and Philosophical Relativism of the Freemasonry.” This is significant because, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the association between the freemasonry and the constitutive political values of modernity was still something that could be taken for granted: the role of the so-called secret

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sects in spreading the values of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution throughout Europe was widely assumed to have been crucial, and various popes before Leo XIII had already condemned it explicitly. The fact that the reference to the notion of relativism began in connection with a condemnation of the freemasonry therefore already gives an indication as to the principal historical function that the discourse of antirelativism was to serve, not only in the context of Leo XIII’s political theology, but also throughout the history of the Church’s later reappropriations of it: to mediate the Church’s relationship with what it has historically taken to be the distinctive political forms of modernity—liberalism and democracy. The arguments that Leo XIII advances to criticize what he calls the “moral and philosophical relativism of the freemasonry” are in fact essentially analogous to those that had traditionally been made against these political forms in the context of the “intransigentist” rhetoric developed by his predecessors, especially in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In this respect, for instance, Leo XIII writes: How insufficient such a teaching [that is, relativism] is, how wanting in soundness and how easily moved by every impulse of passion, is sufficiently proved by its sad fruits, which have already began to appear. For, wherever, by removing Christian education, this teaching has begun more completely to rule, there goodness and integrity of morals have begun quickly to perish, monstrous and shameful opinions have grown up, and the audacity of evil deeds has risen to a high degree. . . . In this way they [that is, the freemasons] prepare the way for not a few bolder men who are hurrying on even to worse things, in their endeavor to obtain equality and community of all goods by the destruction of every distinction of rank and property.

What we find here is essentially the same chain of implications that can be found in more well-known statements of the Church’s intransigent critique of modernity, such as the encyclical Mirari Vos promulgated by Pope Gregory XVI in 1832, or the (in)famous Syllabus of Errors promulgated by Pope Pius IX in 1861. The key idea is that the denial of the sovereign authority of God must lead to a dissolution of the moral order of society, and therefore to a form of “anarchy” that can only be resolved through the imposition of some kind of “tyranny,” undermining the basic requirements of the Christian conception of natural law and the “common good.”

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This becomes even clearer when Leo XIII moves on to discuss what he takes to be the political consequences of the “moral and philosophical relativism of the freemasonry.” The first thing he states is that “they [that is, the freemasons] lay down that all men have the same right, and are in every respect of equal and like condition; that each one is naturally free; that no one has the right to command another.  .  .  . According to this, therefore, power is held by the command or permission of the people, so that, when the popular will changes, rulers may lawfully be deposed and the source of all rights and civil duties is either in the multitude or in the governing authority when this is constituted according to the latest doctrines.” In the ideological and political context of the time, this can be interpreted as a more or less explicit reference to the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which was taken to have provided the intellectual foundation for the French Revolution, and consequently for the Terror regime that had followed from that. Later in the same encyclical, Leo XIII also writes: “By a long and persevering labor, the freemasons also endeavor to bring about this result— namely, that the teaching office and authority of the Church may become of no account in the civil State; and for this same reason they declare that Church and State ought to be altogether disunited. By this means they reject from the laws and from the commonwealth the wholesome influence of the Catholic religion; and they consequently imagine that States ought to be constituted without any regard for the laws and precepts of the Church.” This, in turn, can be interpreted as a direct reference to the way in which the Catholic Church had traditionally understood the notion of “liberalism,” which centered on two key assumptions: that liberalism involves the idea of a separation of the church from the state, and that individuals have a right to pursue their own religious convictions, independently of the guiding authority of the Catholic Church. The notions of popular sovereignty and liberalism therefore prove to be the principal political targets Leo XIII was implicitly aiming at through his condemnation of relativism. The key objection that is made against these notions is that their combination must lead to a dissolution of the grounds for authority within society, and therefore to a form of anarchy, which must ultimately convert into a form of tyranny—as is made clear from the following passage: From the disturbing errors which we have just described the greatest dangers to States are to be feared. For, the fear of God and reverence for divine laws being taken away, the authority of rulers despised, sedition

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permitted and approved, and the popular passions urged on to lawlessness, with no restraint save that of punishment, a change and overthrow of all things will necessarily follow. . . . And history has unfortunately already given us ample illustration of the kind of tyrannous violations of natural law men are at risk of undergoing when they fall prey to such errors.

As I already mentioned, from the point of view of the Church’s previous indictments of modernity in the aftermath of the French Revolution, there is nothing particularly new about this condemnation of the doctrines of liberalism and popular sovereignty. However, this fact itself raises the question of the reason why Leo XIII felt the need to introduce a new term at all. For in the context of the Catholic Church’s doctrinal framework—which is based on the assumption that Tradition is a locus fidei on the same level as Scripture itself—any terminological innovation must necessarily carry a very significant weight. Thus the fact that Leo XIII decided to formulate his critique of liberalism and popular sovereignty in terms of a concept that had never been employed before is something that requires a specific explanation. My contention is that in order to understand what lay behind this, it is necessary to situate the encyclical Humanum Genus within the context of Leo XIII’s wider theological and political project. It is therefore to a discussion of that wider project that I shall now turn. The Wider Theological and Political Project of Pope Leo XIII

From the beginning of his pontificate, Leo XIII had been convinced that the policy of a blanket rejection of modernity pursued by his predecessors was becoming unsustainable, because it ran the risk of marginalizing the Catholic Church from the political life of the present age. He therefore set out to define a new role for the Catholic Church within the political framework of the modern state, without at the same time renouncing the intellectual core of the “intransigentist” doctrine, which had already been established. The formulation of a critique of “relativism” served as a doctrinal support for this political project. Essentially, what Leo XIII was able to do through it was to establish a distinction between the aspects of the modern world that the Catholic Church

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could accept and those that it could not. This operation relied heavily on the Augustinian distinction between the “city of God” and the “city of Man,” which Leo XIII refers to in the very beginning of the encyclical Humanum Genus: The race of man after its miserable fall from God, separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other of those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. This twofold kingdom St. Augustine keenly discerned and described after the manner of two cities, contrary in their laws because striving for contrary objects. . . . At every period of time each has been in conflict with the other, with a variety and multiplicity of weapons and of warfare, although not always with equal ardor and assault. At this period, however, the partisans of evil seems to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons.

As the distinctive feature of the doctrine of the freemasonry, the notion of relativism was therefore first introduced within the framework of the official vocabulary of the Catholic Church as a label for the combined forces of the Augustinian city of Man: that is, in other words, as a label for everything, within modernity, that the Church considered opposed to the salvation of mankind, and that it was thereby bound to struggle against. The implication is that all the errors that had previously been condemned by the intransigentist doctrine were assumed to be condensed within it. This is confirmed by the next part of the encyclical, where Leo XIII spells out the distinctive features of what he has called the “moral and philosophical relativism of the freemasonry.” The fundamental doctrine [of the freemasons], which they sufficiently make known by their name, is that human nature and human reason ought in all things be mistress and guide. Laying this down, they care little for the duties of God, or pervert them by erroneous or vague opinions. . . . For they deny that anything has been taught by God; they allow no dogma of religion or truth which cannot be understood by human intelligence, nor any teacher who ought to be believed by reason of his authority.

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This is essentially a restatement of what the Catholic Church had traditionally taken to be the gravest philosophical error of modernity, variously referred to as “naturalism,” “rationalism,” and especially “immanentism.” Later in the same document, Leo XIII also writes that: “If those who are admitted as members [by the freemasons] are not commanded to abjure by any form of words the Catholic doctrines, this omission, so far from being adverse to their designs is more useful for their purposes. . . . For they thereby teach the great error of this age: that a regard for religion should be held as an indifferent matter, and that all religions are alike. This manner of reasoning is calculated to bring about the ruin of all forms of religion, and especially of the Catholic religion, which, as it is the only one that is true, cannot, without great injustice, be regarded as merely equal to other religions.” This passage clearly implies a reference to the other great pillar of the intransigentist critique of modernity: the attack against what the Church had historically referred to as “indifferentism,” that is, the idea that “man may, in observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation and arrive at eternal salvation.” The two traditional critiques of the notions of immanentism and indifferentism are therefore incorporated within the framework of the first formulation of the discourse of anti-relativism. Indeed, in the absence of a formal definition of the notion of relativism itself, it appears as if the term is understood precisely as the conjunction, or synthesis, of these two traditional errors. My contention is that, within the context of Leo XIII’s overarching theological and political project, this condensation served the purpose of restricting the domain of application of the Church’s intransigentist critique of modernity. By focusing the Church’s critical attention on a single term, ultimately traceable to an expression of the active impulse of the city of Man in human history, Leo XIII was able to implicitly carve out space for the recognition that there also exist other aspects of the modern world that are not tied to relativism or the freemasonry, with which the Church can come to terms. Hence, paradoxically, the focalization on the notion of relativism succeeded in opening up the conceptual space for the possibility of a compromise with the aspects of modernity that had been left out from this critique. This is also confirmed by the content of another encyclical promulgated by Leo XIII less than a year after Humanum Genus, in which he attempts

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to expound a positive vision of the political project to be pursued by the Catholic Church. Relying even more explicitly on the Augustinian idea that the role of every good Christian is to distinguish between the elements of the city of God and the city of Man within the given historical situation, he writes: Our eyes are not closed to the spirit of the times. We repudiate not the assured and useful improvements of our age, but devoutly wish affairs of State to take a safer course than they are now taking. . . . Therefore, when it is said that the Church is hostile to modern political regimes and that she repudiates the discoveries of modern research, the charge is a ridiculous and groundless calumny. Wild opinions she does repudiate, wicked and seditious projects she does condemn, together with that attitude of mind which points to the beginning of a willful departure from God. But, as all truth must necessarily proceed from God, the Church recognizes in all truth that is reached by research a trace of the divine intelligence.

From the point of view of the later political history of the Catholic Church, this was an extremely important statement, because it effectively overcame the Church’s self-imposed limitation on having anything to do with the political life of the modern world. Instead of condemning it outright, the new mission that Leo XIII prescribed for Catholics was to find within the modern world the elements that could further the Christian project of salvation. This posed the foundation for the participation of Catholics in the political life of the modern, secular liberal and democratic states as agents of the Catholic Church. From the point of view of the more focused history of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism carried out in this chapter, this is relevant because it shows that the Church’s change of attitude with respect to modernity, and therefore implicitly liberalism and democracy, was made possible through the introduction of the notion of relativism within the framework of the previous intransigentist critique of modernity. It is this term that sustained the distinction between the aspects of modernity that the Church could accept and those that it could not, thereby carving out the space for the possibility of a compromise with what was left out. In the remaining sections of this chapter, we will see that, over the course of its recent history, the Catholic Church has made a number of further

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compromises and accommodations with the political forms of modernity, always in pursuit of the goal of preserving a measure of political influence that would enable it to fulfill its historical mission of contributing to the progressive advance of humanity toward the goal of final redemption. The one principle it has never been willing to compromise on or come to terms with, however, is precisely that of relativism. This notion has therefore progressively been posited as the bedrock of what the Church has always stood against, precisely because it was originally defined in terms of the conjunction of the two great pillars of the Church’s intransigentist critique of modernity: immanentism and indifferentism.

BETWEEN ANTI-RELATIVISM AND ANTI-COMMUNISM: FROM THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION TO THE END OF THE COLD WAR Relativism and Communism as Two Competing Enemies of Catholicism

After its first employment in the encyclical Humanum Genus by Leo XIII, the notion of relativism remained a key vector in the mediation of the Church’s relationship with the political forms of liberalism and democracy throughout the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. During this period, the Church sought to find ways of regaining a measure of its prior political influence by penetrating the political structures of modern societies, without nonetheless accepting their basic intellectual premises. In this context, the discourse of anti-relativism offered a means for articulating how far the Catholic Church could go in its policy of compromise with modernity, without renouncing its basic theological and political convictions. This can be seen, for example, in Pius X’s encyclical from 1905, Il Fermo Proposito, devoted to the question of the legitimacy of the Italian Catholic Action movement, which had been proposed as a strategy of recolonization of the Italian state (lo stato legale) on the basis of a mobilization of a social network of Catholic associational structures (lo stato reale), in spite of the non expedit decree that still forbade Italian Catholics from participating in formal elections. The encyclical begins by apparently endorsing this strategy: “The present constitution of the Italian State offers indiscriminately to all the right

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to influence public opinion. Catholics can certainly use this to their advantage, with due respect for the obligations imposed by the law of God and the precepts of the Church. In such a way they can prove themselves as capable as others (in fact, more capable than others) to cooperate in the material and civil welfare of the people.” Almost immediately after, however, he adds: “While pointing out the true nature of the Catholic Action, we cannot minimize the grave danger to which the clergy may find themselves exposed because of the conditions of the time.” This offers the basis for a familiar condemnation of all the doctrinal errors of modernity, in the context of which Pius X also mentions the concept of relativism as “the most pernicious of all doctrines,” inasmuch as it threatens to undermine “the moral principles that hold society together.” In this respect, for instance, Pius X writes: When the greatest and most fundamental truths have been overturned or weakened, it is easy to see what will become of both public and private morality. . . . There will immediately be no knowledge as to what constitutes justice and injustice, or upon what principle morality is founded. And, in truth, the teaching of morality which alone can find favor, is that which is sometimes called “civil,” “independent,” or “free,” namely, that which does not contain any religious belief. . . . The evil is moreover increased by the dangers which threaten both domestic and civil society. For, men are by the will of God born for civil union and society, and the power to rule is so necessary a bond of society that, if it be taken away, society must at once be broken up. . . . And, this is precisely what is being deliberately planned and put forward by many associations of communists and socialists today.

This passage reiterates the same basic intellectual sequence that had already been established by Pope Leo XIII in the encyclical Humanum Genus: the spread of a form of moral relativism is assumed to lay the conditions for the degeneration of society into a form of disordered anarchy, which in turn opens the way for the emergence of a new kind of tyranny founded exclusively on the exercise of brute force. The only real difference is that in this passage the historical example used to give substance to the looming threat of tyranny is not the Terror regime that is supposed to have resulted from the French Revolution, but rather the “many associations of communists and socialists” assumed to be deliberately planning “a change and overthrow of all things.”

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This can be explained historically by the fact that, over the few decades that had elapsed between the promulgation of the two documents, organized communism had progressively succeeded in imposing itself as a political force to be reckoned with. At the same time, however, it is clear that the principal political conflict that Pius X was still concerned with is that between Christianity and the modern liberal and democratic states. For from a perspective that was still oriented toward the possibility of a return to the ancien régime, it was the principles of the separation of the church from the state and the unrestricted sovereignty of the people that were perceived as doing the most damage. Hence communism was simply identified as one of the potential consequences of the relativism assumed to be implicit in liberal democracy. This estimation of the relative danger posed by relativism and communism was, however, profoundly modified by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Suddenly, atheistic communism emerged as a very real historical possibility alongside liberal democracy, and the confrontation between the organized forces of capital and labor was thrust into the center of the political scene, to a large extent displacing the previous concern with the opposition between modernity and the ancien régime. As a consequence, the Church found it necessary to reorganize its priorities, devoting more weight and attention to the critique of communism, at the expense of the emphasis that had previously been laid on the discourse of anti-relativism. Indeed, for a time that spanned from the immediate aftermath of the First World War up to the end of the Second World War, the focalization on communism as the most immediate threat confronting organized Christianity almost completely overshadowed the discourse of anti-relativism within the political thought of the Catholic Church. This focalization on communism as the new principal intellectual enemy of the Catholic Church was, however, to assume a rather different significance during the interwar years and the Cold War. It is therefore worth examining some of the official documents produced by the Church during these periods, since this will serve to provide a sort of a contrario justification of the principal thesis I have been seeking to advance up to this point: namely, that the discourse of anti-relativism has historically served the purpose of mediating the Church’s relation with the political forms of liberalism and democracy.

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The Catholic Church During the Interwar Years: The Pontificate of Pius XI

The political stance adopted by the Catholic Church during the interwar years is characterized by a notorious and profound ambiguity. On the one hand, the Church still perceived liberalism and democracy as a serious threat for Catholicism. On the other hand, it also perceived the rising tide of socialism as an even more dangerous threat. With the intensification of the crisis of parliamentary democracy during the late 1920s and early 1930s, this increasingly pushed the Catholic Church to see in the various kinds of authoritarianism that were emerging across Europe a more reliable bulwark against the impending threat of socialist revolution than that provided by liberal democracy itself. This new outlook took the form of a series of concordats signed by Pius XI with Mussolini’s Italy in 1929, Hitler’s Germany in 1933, and Franco’s Spain in 1938. To be sure, the Vatican itself never went as far as to explicitly endorse either Fascism or National Socialism as political forms. On the contrary, it expressed grave doubts about them, especially as Mussolini and Hitler succeeded in consolidating their regimes in Italy and Germany. The concordats the Church signed with them were, however, justified with reference to the necessity of defending European societies against the “greater threat” of socialist revolution. At the doctrinal level, this took place through a reorganization of the priorities of the traditional intransigentist critique of modernity, which began to lay more emphasis on the danger of socialist revolution than on the critiques of liberalism and democracy. This can be observed, for instance, in the encyclical Divini Redemptoris promulgated by Pope Pius XI in 1937, which provides a good illustration of the doctrinal framework that underscored the Church’s political stance during the interwar years. The starting point is the relatively standard claim that the roots of the contemporary social and political crisis must be sought in the active impulse of “evil” in human history, which is explicitly tied to the “modern revolution” threatening to undermine the political authority of the Catholic Church. From this premise, however, Pius XI immediately moves to the suggestion that the clearest manifestation of this danger is represented by “bolshevistic and atheistic communism,” which, for him, aims at “upsetting the social order and undermining the very foundations of the Christian civilization.”

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Although, as I have already pointed out, the claim that modernity would ultimately culminate in the “absolute evil” of communism had already been an integral part of Pius X’s critique of relativism, what is striking here is that all the intermediary terms which had previously mediated the conceptual transition between them are cut out. This suggests that there is a direct line of implication between the original rebellion against the sovereign authority of God embodied in the modern revolution and the absolute political evil of communism. Indeed, neither the notion of popular sovereignty nor the notion of liberalism is ever mentioned explicitly in this encyclical letter; and wherever reference to them is made implicitly, it is always instrumental to the further indictment of communism itself. Most of the rest of Pius XI’s encyclical is devoted to a demonstration of the nefarious political consequences of communism, primarily with reference to the experience of Bolshevik Russia: “But the law of nature and its Author,” he writes, “cannot be flouted with impunity. . . . Terrorism is the only possible substitute, and it is terrorism that reigns today in Russia, where former comrades in revolution are exterminating each other. Terrorism, having failed despite all to stem the tide of moral corruption, cannot even prevent the dissolution of society itself.” The overall effect of this reorganization of the Church’s priorities is therefore to simplify the critique of modernity and make it totalizing once more, by assimilating it to the critique of communism. Within the context of the overall political strategy pursued by the Catholic Church during the interwar years, this can be interpreted as a way of polarizing the political field for the purpose of justifying the policy of making alliances with the authoritarian regimes of the interwar years. In effect, Christians were told that modernity constitutes a homogenous unit that is immediately and directly responsible for the absolute evil of communism. Liberalism and democracy are therefore implicitly accused of complicity with it, and a binary opposition is set up between the allied forces of modernity on the one hand and Christianity on the other: “For the first time in history we are witnessing a struggle, cold blooded in purpose and mapped out to the least detail, between man and all that is called God.” Within the terms of this opposition, no space is left for any policy of compromise with the political institutions of modernity. Hence the discourse of anti-relativism, which had previously served as the doctrinal framework for it, was also left aside. The focalization on the critique of communism was judged to better serve the policy of a radical rejection of modernity that

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the Church chose to adopt during the interwar years. This suggests that it was not only because communism was perceived as a more radical threat than liberal democracy that the discourse of anti-relativism was effectively eclipsed at this time, but also because the Church’s position with respect to these political forms underwent a significant reevaluation too. If this interpretation of the factors that underscore the eclipse of the discourse of anti-relativism during the interwar years is accepted, then it can be taken to offer an a contrario confirmation of the central thesis I am seeking to advance over the course of this chapter: that this discourse has historically served the purpose of mediating the Church’s relation with liberalism and democracy. For what I have been effectively saying is that just as this discourse was originally developed for the purpose of opening up the possibility of a compromise with the political institutions of modernity, it was almost entirely abandoned as soon as the Church sought to disentangle itself from these political forms during the interwar years. The Catholic Church During the Cold War: The Pontificate of Pius XII

Although the Church’s position with respect to the Fascist and the National Socialist regimes began to change toward the late 1930s—as the consolidation of the logic of totalitarianism inevitably restricted the scope for its exercise of political influence within them—its position with respect to liberalism and democracy remained essentially unchanged until the end of the Second World War. Indeed, despite repeated requests, especially by the United States, the Vatican refused to formally declare its support for the socalled Allied front throughout the whole duration of the conflict, sticking instead to a policy of rigorous neutrality. It was only in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, when the contours of the looming Cold War between the two principal powers on the Allied front were beginning to take shape, that the newly elected Pope Pius XII decided to formally take sides in favor of the so-called Western liberal democracies. This meant that the reevaluation of the Church’s stance with respect to these political forms was not tied to a questioning of its historical opposition to communism. On the contrary, the radicalization of the critique of communism was a condition for the Church’s endorsement of liberal democracy. A new alliance was therefore forged between the Western

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liberal democratic regimes and the Catholic Church on the basis of a shared commitment to the principles of anti-communism. Within the framework of this new political configuration, the discourse of anti-relativism remained in the background relative to the critique of communism, since many of the themes that had previously been associated with the discourse of anti-relativism—the critique of liberal democracy and of the lack of moral standards of contemporary societies—overlapped in troubling ways with the kinds of critiques of capitalist democracies that were increasingly also made by communist propaganda. Unfortunately, this is not something I will be able to elaborate upon in much detail in this context. However, what is relevant for our present purposes is that at this time it became very important for the Catholic Church to distinguish itself from these strands of anti-capitalist discourse. Hence the discourse of antirelativism was effectively silenced throughout the duration of the Cold War in order to avoid any ambiguity over the side that the Church had chosen to endorse. This was achieved through a remolding of the themes traditionally associated with the discourse of anti-relativism that incorporated them within the framework of the critique of communism. This can be observed, for example, in the radio address delivered by Pope Pius XII on Christmas Day 1955, which contains a section explicitly devoted to an exposition of “the thought of the Catholic Church with respect to the doctrine of communism.” While this section begins by stating that “the Catholic Church rejects communism as a social system in virtue of Christian doctrine, and in particular of the notion of natural right,” the pope also immediately adds: At the same time, we also warn Christians . . . not to settle for an anticommunism founded on the defense of a conception of freedom that is empty of content. On the contrary, we exhort them to edify a society in which the security of man rests on the moral order of which we have many times exposed the necessity and the correspondence to human nature. Now, Christians (to which this message is particularly addressed) should know better than others that the son of God made man is the only solid foundation for such a moral order.

In this passage it is possible to recognize many of the key themes traditionally associated with the discourse of anti-relativism: the idea that human

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freedom may function as a destructive force for the social order unless it is guided and restricted by a solid conception of morality, and that the only foundation for such a conception of morality can be the faith in Jesus Christ. The key point, however, is that these themes are incorporated into the critique of communism, by being presented as ways of making the opposition to it deeper and more concrete. In many ways this is exemplary of the intellectual strategy employed by the Catholic Church during the Cold War: while apparently pretending to step back from the conflict and advance criticisms of both sides, it consistently subordinated the critiques of capitalism and liberal democracy to the discourse of anti-communism, so as to make clear which one was to be considered the most immediate enemy by Catholics. This further confirms the idea that, aside from the relationship with liberal democracy, the other key factor that explains the relative prominence of the discourse of anti-relativism in the political thought of the Catholic Church is the degree to which communism has been perceived as an immediate threat. To sum up, in this section I have showed that while during the first part of its history the discourse of anti-relativism enjoyed a relative preeminence with respect to the discourse of anti-communism, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and throughout the duration of the Cold War, the confrontation with communism took the center stage, effectively overshadowing the discourse of anti-relativism. We will also see in subsequent sections how the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which significantly decreased the extent to which communism was perceived as an immediate threat, posed the conditions for a recovery of the discourse of anti-relativism as the principal axis of the Church’s political thought.

ANTI-RELATIVISM WITHIN CATHOLICISM: FROM THE CRITIQUE OF MODERNISM TO THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL Relativism in Christianity

Although in the previous section I showed that during the Cold War the discourse of anti-relativism was overshadowed by the focalization on communism as the most immediate threat for the political interests of the Catholic Church, this does not mean that this discourse was abandoned entirely during this period. Rather, what I now mean to show is that this discourse

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went through a parallel phase of development at this time by being put to a different use: instead of being employed for mediating the Church’s relations with the political forms of the outside world, it began to be employed as a conceptual weapon for dealing with internal dissidence within the Catholic Church itself. The connection with the political goal of reasserting the principle of authority was therefore maintained; however, the domain of application of this discourse was restricted to the framework of Catholicism itself. This is visible, for example, in the encyclical Humani Generis promulgated by Pope Pius XII in 1950, whose explicit purpose is condemning various “false opinions threatening to undermine the foundations of Catholic doctrine.” Consider, for example, the following passage from this document: In theology some want to reduce to a minimum the meaning of dogmas; and to free dogma itself from terminology long established in the Church. . . . They assert that when Catholic doctrine has been reduced to this condition, a way will be found to satisfy modern needs, that will permit of dogma being expressed also by the concepts of modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or existentialism or any other system. . . . It is evident from what We have already said, that such tentatives not only lead to what they call dogmatic relativism, but that they actually contain it.

In this passage, the notion of relativism is still clearly being used as a label to refer to the synthesis of all the errors condemned by the Catholic Church. Moreover, the connection with the notion of modernity as the incriminated source of all these errors is also maintained. However, the domain of application of the critique has changed: the referent has ceased to be the political form of liberal democracy and has become the notion of dogma, specifically as it applies to the internal politics of the Catholic Church. Thus the discourse of anti-relativism is here being employed as a way of reasserting the principle of the Vatican’s authority within the Catholic Church, against the perceived threat of theological positions that call it into question. Of course, the 1950s were not the first time that the Catholic Church had to face internal as well as external challenges to its own magisterial authority. However, before this time, the critique of these tendencies had been carried out in different terms. The notion of heresy refers precisely to the idea of choice or disagreement, which the Church has always been

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very determined to clamp down on throughout its history. In the context of modernity, however, the emphasis that had previously been laid on this concept progressively diminished, largely because of its association with the Church’s previous inquisitorial practices, which had become the object of great scorn during the epoch of the Enlightenment. The term that began to be progressively used to refer to the specific set of heresies prevalent in the context of modernity was “modernism.” The history of the Church’s opposition to this notion is at least as rich and complex as the history of the discourse of anti-relativism I am attempting to reconstruct in this chapter. However, it is not something we can get into in any detail in this context. What is relevant for our present purposes is that, starting in the 1950s, the reference to the notion of modernism also begins to be played down, and the critique of internal dissidence within the Catholic Church is increasingly formulated in terms of a refutation of theological or dogmatic relativism. This suggests that the themes previously associated with the critique of heresy and especially of dogmatic and theological modernism were channeled into the discourse of anti-relativism during the period when this discourse was restricted to the domain of the internal relations of the Catholic Church. This represented an important development for the history of this discourse, because it meant that it was actually enriched at this time, acquiring new layers of meaning it had previously not been associated with. In particular, the incorporation of the themes previously associated with the critiques of heresy and modernism served to reassert the connection with the notion of religious dogma and therefore implicitly with the idea of absolute truth, which had previously remained in the background, when relativism was still understood as the fusion of the doctrines of immanentism and indifferentism. Indeed, it is perhaps possible to say that while the previous emphasis of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism had been primarily political, it was the employment of this discourse as a weapon to censure internal disagreement within the Catholic Church during the period of the Cold War that shifted its emphasis more clearly toward the epistemological dimension. This does not mean that the political dimension was abandoned, but rather that it was made more complex, because the political point began to be made through an epistemological one. This has remained a central feature of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism to this day.

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The Doctrinal Innovations Introduced by the Second Vatican Council

The Second Vatican Council of 1962–65 marked a moment of radical renewal in the self-understanding of the Catholic Church, with respect to its relations both with its own members and with the outside world. This transformation inevitably had a profound effect on the conditions for the formulation of the discourse of anti-relativism. Indeed, in the following section I will claim that it was in large measure as a reaction against this council that the discourse of anti-relativism first began to be restored to a position of prominence within the framework of the Church’s political thought in the second half of the twentieth century. In order to understand the reason why that was the case, however, it is necessary to start from an account of the doctrinal innovations introduced by this council in the first place. As we will see, these came close to undermining the conditions for a perpetuation of the discourse of anti-relativism altogether. The extent to which the Second Vatican Council marked a new beginning in the history of the Catholic Church is disputed. However, what is beyond doubt is that it reformulated a number of key aspects of Catholic doctrine in a way that profoundly affected the later history of the Church. In particular, what I am going to focus on in the analysis is the change that was operated at the level of the method employed for analyzing and discussing the Church’s relations with the modern world. This consisted essentially in an endorsement of the notion of the “signs of the times,” which had already been employed by Pope John XXIII as a justification for calling the council to meet in the first place. Instead of taking its role to be that of condemning the errors of the contemporary age, the Church was invited to focus on the specific elements within it that could contribute to the advancement of humanity toward the ultimate goal of final redemption, making it its task to further and foster those elements. This new method still relied on an Augustinian conception of history. However, instead of focusing on the active impulse of evil in human history, it focused on the progressive or providential element within it and sought to make it the Church’s task to contribute to that. Within the context of the council’s internal deliberations, this methodological shift was referred to as the passage from a “deductive” to an “inductive” method. The reason is

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that, as we have already seen, the way in which the Church had previously sought to condemn the errors of the modern age was essentially by “deducing” them from the active impulse of evil in human history, thereby tying them together in a sort of logical chain that amounted to a political reductio ad absurdum. The “inductive” method, on the other hand, was based on the idea that the Church’s role was to scrutinize the providential “signs of the times” within the given historical situation and extrapolate the Church’s role and mission from those. This is made clear by the following passage, which occurs at the beginning of the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes, promulgated by the Second Vatican Council: Inspired by no earthly ambition, the Church seeks but a solitary goal: to carry forward the work of Christ under the lead of the befriending Spirit. And Christ entered this world to give witness to the truth, to rescue and not to sit in judgment, to serve and not to be served. . . . To carry out such a task, the Church has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel. Thus, in language intelligible to each generation, she can respond to the perennial questions which men ask about this present life and the life to come, and about the relationship of the one to the other.

With respect to the other documents examined up to this point, the change in both tone and substance manifested in this passage is remarkable. The council explicitly affirms that the Church ought to be “inspired by no earthly ambition” and that it should be on this earth “to serve and not to be served.” Even more importantly, it asserts that its function should be “to rescue and not to sit in judgment.” From the point of view of the history of the discourse of anti-relativism, this is significant because it effectively renders obsolete all the previous disquisitions that focused on the condemnation of the errors of modernity. Although, as we have seen, the original function of the discourse of antirelativism had actually been to circumscribe the domain of application of the Church’s intransigentist critique of modernity, it was also obviously affected by this rearticulation. The reason is that the Second Vatican Council did not intend to simply resurrect the leonine strategy of seeking to make space for a compromise with modernity. It rather sought to reconceptualize the very framework of the Church’s relationship with modernity by suggest-

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ing that its primary function should be serving it by helping to advance the most progressive tendencies present within it. There was therefore no real space for the discourse of anti-relativism within the framework of the new theological synthesis introduced by the Second Vatican Council, and in fact the term itself is never even mentioned in any of the documents this council produced: just like all the other errors that had previously been condemned by the Catholic Church, the concern with it had been rendered obsolete by the idea that the Church ought to focus on trying to advance the most progressive tendencies at work within modernity, according to the notion of the “signs of the times.” The Reaction to Vatican II

Far from marking the death of the discourse of anti-relativism, the methodological shift introduced by the Second Vatican Council paradoxically contributed to its later reappropriation precisely because it came close to undermining the conditions for its perpetuation altogether. The reason is that the discourse of anti-relativism became the principal conceptual tool that was used by the critics of the council for the purpose of circumscribing its significance and imposing limits on the innovations that were perceived as potentially dangerous. To understand this, it is necessary to take into account that the Second Vatican Council had a very powerful impact on the internal dynamics within the Catholic Church. On the one hand, it had the effect of releasing a lot of previously compressed energies among the most progressive currents present within it, which led to an efflorescence of new movements and organizations pushing for further reform. On the other hand, the most conservative members of the clergy reacted very negatively, reading the Second Vatican Council as a capitulation in the face of the pressures of the modern world. These internal divisions seriously threatened to undermine the unity of the Church and gravely worried the highest authorities of the Vatican. Without delegitimizing the council itself, a decision was therefore made to circumscribe its significance and impose limits on the range of its doctrinal implications, with the intent of recomposing the unity of the Catholic Church behind the guiding authority of the Vatican itself. It is within this framework that the discourse of anti-relativism acquired a renewed significance as a strategy for reasserting the principle of authority within

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the Catholic Church against the perceived destructive effects of the Second Vatican Council. This is visible already in an encyclical letter written by Pope Paul VI in 1963, when the Second Vatican Council was still in session. The specific topic with which this encyclical is concerned is the concept of “renewal” (aggiornamento), which had originally been posited by John XXIII as the guiding thread for the council’s mission. After a lengthy introduction, in which he confirms the legitimacy of the council and of the concept of aggiornamento, Paul VI asserts that this concept must nonetheless be inscribed within a set of clear “guidelines” in order to achieve the results for which it was intended. Hence the sovereignty of the council over its own deliberations (which had been willingly given as much as possible by John XXIII) was effectively restricted by the intimation that “we must first of all establish certain norms according to which the work of reform is to be effected.” The rest of the encyclical is devoted to an exposition of the “norms” that are supposed to function as “guidelines” for the council’s deliberations. The pope begins by saying that although aggiornamento literally means “renewal,” the Church cannot afford to introduce any “new” elements within the framework of its doctrine that are inconsistent with its original founding principles. The reason adduced is that the historical function of the Church is articulating “in a language intelligible to each generation” the original message delivered to it by Jesus Christ, for the purpose of contributing to humanity’s advance toward the goal of final salvation. Thus, although a measure of renewal in the form of this message is said to be acceptable and sometimes even required, its essential content must remain always the same. On the basis of this distinction between “form” and “content,” Paul VI goes on to state that even though it is part of the Church’s mission to “adapt” the original message received from Jesus Christ to the historical exigencies of the time, there are nevertheless certain views and positions that the Church will never be able to come to terms with, because they are fundamentally incompatible with it. And it is in this connection that he mentions the concept of relativism, as a sort of label for all the aspects of the modern mentality that the council must steer clear from in order to remain consistent with the founding principles of Catholicism itself: Sometimes even the apostolic desire of approaching the secular milieu or of making oneself acceptable to modern mentality, especially that

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of youth, leads to a rejection of the forms proper to Christian life and even of its very dignity. . . . This phenomenon of adaptation is noticeable in the philosophical field, as well as in the practical field, where it is becoming more and more uncertain and difficult to point out the line of moral rectitude and right conduct. . . . Relativism, which justifies everything and treats all things as of equal value, assails the absolute character of Christian principles. . . . But let us repeat it once again for our common admonition and profit: The Church will rediscover her renewed youthfulness not so much by changing her exterior laws as by interiorly assimilating her true spirit of obedience to Christ and accordingly by observing those laws which the Church prescribes for herself with the intention of following Christ.

In this passage, the concept of relativism is clearly being used as a warning of the dangers that the Church might encounter if it imports too much from the external world without properly discriminating between the elements that may indeed contribute to the fulfillment of the Christian plan of salvation and those that would have the effect of hampering it. Thus relativism is confirmed as an irreducible locus of alterity with respect to the Catholic faith: a label for everything that the Church cannot come to terms with, even when it understands its mission as that of identifying within the framework of modernity the aspects that are most suited to promoting progress. This makes its function much closer to what it had originally been for Leo XIII: to make a distinction within the modern world between the elements that the Church can come to terms with and those that it must refuse. The only difference is that, while in the context of Leo XIII’s overall theological and political project this distinction had originally served the purpose of carving out a space for the possibility of a compromise with modernity (by restricting the domain of application of the previous intransigentist critique), in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council the same distinction served the purpose of imposing limits on this process (by reminding the Church of the aspects of modernity that remained irreconcilable with the Catholic faith). Another way of putting the point is therefore to say that, starting at the beginning of the 1960s, the leonine framework that had originally been associated with the discourse of anti-relativism was resurrected as a way of countering the perceived dangers implicit in an excessively reformist reading of the Second Vatican Council. Indeed, in light of the doctrinal

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innovations that had been introduced by this council, even just to continue focusing on the condemnation of a specific error in this way implied a challenge to its authority, because it meant refusing the proposed shift to an inductive method focused on the notion of the signs of the times. In the years that followed the closure of the council in 1965, the discourse of anti-relativism was consolidated in this anti-conciliar function, progressively becoming the principal language employed by the conservative wing within the Church to criticize the openness to reform that was judged responsible for the crisis that Catholicism was undergoing. In 1976, for example, the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre wrote an influential dissenting pamphlet titled J’Accuse le Concile, in which he explicitly accused the Second Vatican Council of having given in to a form of doctrinal relativism. All the classical themes from the Church’s previous formulations of this discourse were summoned and put in service of this condemnation. Consider, for instance, the following passage from the pamphlet: Who will be able to determine the dividing-line between good and evil when the criterion of morals in accordance with the Catholic truth revealed by Christ has been set aside? . . . This statement is based on a certain relativism and a certain idealism. On one hand, it considers individual and changing situations of our times and seeks new guiding lines for our activities. . . . On the other hand, as this declaration is not based on the rights of truth that alone can supply a solution that is true and unshakeable in every event, we inevitably find ourselves confronted by the gravest difficulties.

From the point of view of the Church’s previous formulations of the discourse of anti-relativism, this passage does not seem to add much that is conceptually new. However, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, this very continuity assumes a great political significance, because it effectively implies a rejection of the council’s proposed innovations and therefore amounts to a criticism of the council itself. Although Lefebvre would later be excommunicated for his decision to ordain four new ultra-conservative bishops against the express prohibition of the pope, his views remained extremely influential within the Catholic Church, where they progressively became the backbone for a current of neo-intransigentism that coalesced around opposition to the Second Vatican Council. Since the critique of relativism has been one of the principal

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conceptual weapons employed by this strand of Catholicism, it is in this sense that I claim that the Second Vatican Council contributed in a backhanded way to the contemporary rise to prominence of the discourse of anti-relativism: precisely because it introduced a new theological synthesis that effectively made this discourse obsolete, the roots of its contemporary revival must be sought in the critical reaction that was generated against the Second Vatican Council right from its immediate aftermath. THE RETURN TO PROMINENCE OF THE DISCOURSE OF ANTI-RELATIVISM AFTER THE COLD WAR: THE POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF JOHN PAUL II

Although the internal dynamics related to the struggles between reformists and conservatives within the Catholic Church played an important role in the recovery of the discourse of anti-relativism in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, it was actually an external historical event that contributed most to its reappropriation as the principal axis of the Church’s political thought: the collapse of the Soviet regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe after 1989. This event posed the conditions for a recovery of the discourse of anti-relativism for at least two different reasons: First, it deprived the Catholic Church of its principal political enemy, thereby putting it in a position of requiring a new focus to structure its political engagement. Second, it projected liberal democracy once again as the most prominent (indeed, virtually unchallenged) form of political expression of modernity. As we have already seen, the discourse that had previously been employed by the Catholic Church to come to terms with this political form, before its focalization on communism, revolved around the critique of relativism. To some extent, therefore, the recovery of the discourse of antirelativism in the aftermath of the Cold War can be seen as a return to the doctrinal framework from before 1917, when liberal democracy was perceived as the principal political threat to Catholicism. This logic of substitution is however by no means sufficient to fully explain what lies behind the contemporary rise to prominence of the discourse of anti-relativism as the principal axis of the Church’s political thought. To obtain a more complete picture, it will be necessary to situate this recovery within the context of the political and theological projects pursued by Pope John Paul II, the pope who presided over the end of the Cold War and was directly responsible for recalibrating the Church’s attention on the

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issue of relativism in its aftermath. The remaining part of this section will therefore be devoted to a discussion of the factors that underscored John Paul II’s recovery of this discourse and the way in which he contributed to its further development. The First Part of John Paul II’s Pontificate: From Election to the End of the Cold War

Elected after the brief pontificate of John Paul I, who had promised a continuation of the process of reform but died in uncertain circumstances only a few months after assuming office, John Paul II represented a victory for the conservative front within the Catholic Church. Of Polish origin, he had been brought up in the context of the rigidly counter-Reformist ecclesiastical tradition of his native country, radicalized by the stern confrontation with the Socialist regime in the aftermath of the Second World War. During the Second Vatican Council he had distinguished himself as a member of the so-called conservative minority, actively taking part in the negotiations aimed at tempering the council’s reformist spur. Immediately upon assuming office, he demonstrated a clear determination to carry through with this conservative project, making moves to centralize the structure of authority within the Catholic Church, suppressing all forms of internal dissent, and condemning the most liberal interpretations of Vatican II. The first encyclical he promulgated in 1979 explicitly declared that the period of “confusion” and “contestation” that had followed the Second Vatican Council was over, and that the Church ought to focus its attention on the eradication of the forms of “ethical permissiveness” that had been allowed to penetrate within it. In terms of the relations with the outside world, the first part of John Paul II’s pontificate was characterized by an escalation of the confrontation with the communist regimes, portrayed as a condensation of all the most destructive tendencies implicit in modernity. In many of his early encyclical letters, this attack took the form of a condemnation of “totalitarianism,” a term that had been closely associated with anti-Soviet propaganda since the beginning of the Cold War, and that the pope used almost interchangeably with the notions of “socialism” or “communism.” In light of this outspoken opposition, when the Soviet regimes finally collapsed, after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, John Paul II’s international prestige was greatly heightened. In the popular press, he was widely identi-

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fied as “the pope who defeated communism.” Paradoxically, however, this success forced him to recalibrate the terms of his political message, because it deprived him of one of its essential conceptual referents: the identification of communism as the embodiment of all the most destructive tendencies assumed to be at work in the modern world. The strategy he adopted consisted in an apparent retreat from the domain of international politics in favor of a renewed emphasis on the dimension of morality. This enabled the Catholic Church to disentangle itself from the fate of a specific political project and to carve out a new role for itself within the unipolar world as the critical conscience of liberal democracy. It is important to point out, however, that this renewed focus on the dimension of morality did not imply an abandonment of the concern with political matters as such, but rather a different way of approaching politics: through the lens of morality. This is testified to by the fact that the Church increasingly chose to intervene in the politics of individual countries as the advocate of certain specifically moral causes, such as the opposition to abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, and certain kinds of scientific research. The recovery of the discourse of anti-relativism can be inscribed within this framework, because it is what enabled the Vatican to claim that, without a solid anchoring in a set of absolute moral values, liberal democratic regimes would run the risk of undermining the conditions for their own viability. In this way, the Catholic Church sought to present itself as the guarantor of the truths that these kinds of regimes supposedly need in order to survive. Hence, through the recovery of the discourse of anti-relativism, the Church’s historical opposition to the principle of popular sovereignty was converted into an internal critique, which appeared more appropriate for the ideological climate that prevailed in the aftermath of the Cold War. The Second Part of John Paul II’s Pontificate: The Encyclical Veritatis Splendor

The doctrinal elaboration that underscored this reconfiguration can be observed in the text of the encyclical Veritatis Splendor, written in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet regimes and in many ways one of the founding documents of the contemporary rise to prominence of the discourse of anti-relativism. Its starting point is the claim that, while undoubtedly representing a great victory for humanity, the recent changes that had occurred at the level of the world’s geo-political organization had

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also occasioned a sense of “genuine crisis,” within both humanity at large and Christianity in particular, because they had called into question many of the certainties and points of reference that had previously served to structure the political and spiritual lives of human beings. An “authoritative intervention” was therefore said to be required to help human beings find their bearings in the context of a new and rapidly changing situation. The approach employed by John Paul II to address this challenge follows the characteristic pre-conciliar methodology of seeking to identify the “root causes” of the contemporary crisis. From this point of view, the issue he focuses on right away is relativism: As a result of that mysterious original sin committed at the prompting of Satan man is constantly tempted to turn his gaze away from the living and true God in order to direct it towards idols. . . . Man’s capacity to know the truth is also darkened, and his will to submit to it is weakened. Thus, giving himself over to relativism and scepticism, he goes off in search of an illusory freedom apart from truth itself. But no darkness of error or of sin can totally take away from man the light of God the Creator. In the depths of his heart there always remains a yearning for absolute truth and a thirst to attain full knowledge of it.

Situated at the very beginning of the encyclical, this passage shows that the notion of relativism is given an extremely important position within the framework of John Paul II’s new doctrinal synthesis. The other thing that is worth noting is the connection this passage establishes between the notion of relativism and a specific conception of freedom in which it is separated from a relationship with the idea of truth. This is significant because it demonstrates the pope’s intention to reformulate the Church’s traditional critique of relativism in terms making it more resonant with the prevailing intellectual and political climate in the aftermath of the Cold War. The assumption he takes for granted is that, after the collapse of the Soviet regimes, the value of human freedom emerged as the dominant intellectual and political reference point for humanity. For this reason, he attempts to reformulate the Church’s critique of relativism in terms of this principle. In order to do this, John Paul II relies on the classical idea, long established within the Christian tradition, that “genuine” freedom should be understood as consisting not in a license to do “whatever one wants” in

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pursuit of one’s interests and desires, but rather in the willful conformity to the moral law, ultimately assumed to have been dictated by God. The way in which this idea had usually been formulated in the tradition of Catholic moral theology is in terms of a conflict between the notion of “autonomy” and the recognition of “authority.” However, John Paul II redefines these terms in order to appropriate the value of autonomy for Christianity: relying on the idea that, according to the Christian tradition, man was created “in the image of God,” he argues that when man submits to the authority of God, he is not really submitting to anything external to him, but rather to the highest and most noble part of his own intrinsic nature. From this, in turn, he deduces that obedience to God is not incompatible with autonomy but rather required by it. What the Church had traditionally referred to using this term is instead identified as a form of relativism, which at one point John Paul II explicitly defines as a doctrine that “ends by detaching human freedom from its essential and constitutive relationship to truth.” Hence the characteristic dualism that had historically been associated with the discourse of antirelativism is projected into the notion of freedom itself, resulting in a distinction between, on the one hand, the “genuine” conception of freedom as autonomy advocated by the Catholic Church and, on the other hand, the “relativistic” conception of freedom, deprived of any constitutive relationship to the idea of truth. Following established tradition also in this respect, the central argument that John Paul II makes against this relativistic conception of freedom is that its practical consequences are unacceptable. At the level of individual morality, it is assumed to be incapable of providing any guidance to human beings concerning the way they ought to behave, and it is therefore assumed to leave them helpless and disoriented, but also—what is worse— prey to their most evil and destructive impulses: Pilate’s question: “What is truth” reflects the distressing perplexity of a man who often no longer knows who he is, whence he comes and where he is going. Hence we not infrequently witness the fearful plunging of the human person into situations of gradual self-destruction. . . . All around us we encounter contempt for human life after conception and before birth; the ongoing violation of basic rights of the person; the unjust destruction of goods minimally necessary for a human life.

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The crucial assumption in this passage is that man’s exercise of his own freedom requires guidance because otherwise it is prone to assuming a selfdestructive character. Since the only possible grounds for such guidance is further implicitly assumed to be a notion of absolute truth, the implication is that tempering the value of freedom with the reference to a notion of absolute truth is a necessary condition for its sustainability in the first place: deprived of such a referent, freedom is assumed to degenerate merely into an excuse for the violation of the rights of others. Moreover, since the Catholic Church is assumed to be the privileged depositary of such a notion of absolute truth, it follows that Catholicism is posited as the necessary moral complement of the idea of freedom itself: the only available guarantee that it will not degenerate into its opposite. In the following paragraphs, the same logic is also applied more specifically to the political domain, where the concrete translation of a relativist conception of freedom is assumed to be an absolutist conception of democracy: “If there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into openly or thinly disguised totalitarianism. . . . This is the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism.” From the point of view of the history of the development of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, this passage is extremely significant for at least three separate reasons. First, it makes the conceptual connection between the critique of relativism and the political form of democracy explicit. In the previous sections of this chapter, I have already pointed out that one of the most important functions of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism had historically been to mediate the Church’s relation with the political form of democracy. Here, however, the link becomes explicit: the central claim is that, like freedom, democracy requires “guidance,” because if it is grounded merely in a form of philosophical relativism, it is deprived of any sense of the necessary moral limits that must be imposed on the people’s exercise of power over themselves and therefore runs the risk of converting into its opposite. Second, the passage also ties the critique of relativism to the critique of political absolutism. This may appear surprising since, logically, relativism is normally considered the conceptual opposite of absolutism and since, historically, the Catholic Church had been directly involved in the development and justification of the idea of absolute sovereignty. What lies

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behind this apparent contradiction, however, is a deeper transformation in the Church’s understanding of its political function. At the time when the Church had defended the notion of absolute sovereignty, the Christian faith was still considered the foundation for the exercise of political power, according to the idea of the divine right of monarchs. In the new democratic context, the Church has come to recognize that the foundation for the exercise of political power is essentially human, and it has accordingly sought to redefine its role as that of providing external guidance for human politics. The critique of absolutism has therefore become a way of reaffirming the necessity of imposing limits on the democratic exercise of political power. Finally, the third reason why the passage is extremely significant from the point of view of the history of the development of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism is that it also explicitly introduces the notion of totalitarianism within the framework of this critique. In the analysis conducted above, we have already seen that, in the previous formulations of this discourse, the argument that had been employed to refute relativism had already consisted in a political reductio ad absurdum aiming to show that it would ultimately lead to consequences unacceptable also for the relativists themselves. The specific term that had been employed for illustrating this point was that of “communism,” taking for granted that this represented an inversion of the natural law and an attack on all the sound principles of good government. In the aftermath of the Cold War, however, this term must have seemed both too outdated and too compromised with the Church’s previous political commitments to fulfill the same function. A new term was therefore required to wrap up the political reductio ad absurdum of relativism. Because of the possibility of framing it as a synthesis of all the worse aspects of the traditional enemies of liberal democracy—not only Soviet-style communism but also National Socialism and Fascism—the notion of totalitarianism proved adequate for the task. In the encyclical Veritatis Splendor it is used essentially as a label for the idea of an absolute political evil that must be prevented at all costs. Concretely, therefore, the argument made against relativism in this encyclical is that if contemporary democracies were to accept it as their grounding philosophy, they would run the risk of falling back into a form of totalitarianism. This is made clear by the following illustrative passage:

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Totalitarianism arises out of a denial of truth in the objective sense. If there is no transcendent truth, in obedience to which man achieves his full identity, then there is no sure principle for guaranteeing just relations between people, the force of power takes over, and each person tends to make full use of the means at his disposal in order to impose his own interests or his own opinion, with no regard for the rights of others.

The only antidote that the pope identifies against this potential danger is grounding the democratic principle in a solid conception of truth capable of imposing limits on the power exercised by man over man. In turn, the only foundation for such a conception of truth is assumed to be the divine will of God itself. Hence the encyclical concludes with a passionate call for a recognition of the sovereign authority of God over the political domain, which is presented as a condition for the sustainability of contemporary democracies: “Only God, the Supreme Good, constitutes the unshakable foundation and essential condition of morality. . . . Thus, upon this truth is it possible to construct a renewed society and to solve the complex and weighty problems affecting it.” With the argument developed by John Paul II in this encyclical taken as a whole, it is therefore possible to find within it all the distinctive elements of the contemporary discourse of anti-relativism, which has since been elevated by Benedict XVI into the core of the Church’s political message: the connection with a specific conception of freedom and therefore democracy, the emphasis on the importance of the imposition of moral limits on the exercise of political power, the claim that if such limits are not imposed democracy might convert itself into a form of totalitarianism, and finally the idea that the only possible foundation for such limits is a divinely ordained conception of absolute truth. Next I discuss how all these themes were weaved into an even more elaborate and tighter whole by John Paul II’s successor, while being elevated to the central position they occupy today. THE ELEVATION OF THE DISCOURSE OF ANTI-RELATIVISM INTO THE PRINCIPAL AXIS OF THE CHURCH’S POLITICAL THOUGHT

Before being elected pope in 2005, Cardinal Ratzinger served as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, the institution that replaced the

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Vatican Inquisition and currently functions as the principal body responsible for the elaboration of Catholic doctrine. His collaboration with John Paul II when the latter was still in office was therefore very close. Upon assuming the pontifical office himself, however, Benedict XVI escalated the discourse of anti-relativism to an even greater importance within the framework of the Church’s political discourse as a whole. As I pointed out in the introduction, already in the last sermon he gave as cardinal before the conclave, he spoke of a “dictatorship of relativism” as the principal political “threat” confronting contemporary societies. In his writings and public pronouncements as pope, the discourse of antirelativism became pervasive, and was employed almost as a catch phrase to explain the roots of all contemporary ills, both within and outside the Catholic Church. Corresponding to a broader tendency in the development of the means through which official Catholic doctrine has been communicated, however, Benedict XVI’s most important pronouncements on this topic are not contained in encyclical letters, but rather in other kinds of public statements and apostolic writings. In order to reconstruct the doctrinal framework on which this pope’s insistent and frequent denunciations of relativism were predicated, the following analysis will accordingly rely on a broader set of primary sources. In particular, I will be focusing here on three specific documents, published both before and after Ratzinger’s election as pope: first, the text of a speech he delivered at a meeting of the Presidents of the Doctrinal Commissions of the Bishops’ Conferences of Latin America in Guadalajara in 1996, titled “Relativism: The Central Problem for Faith Today”; second, the transcript of Ratzinger’s much-publicized debate with Jürgen Habermas that took place in Munich shortly before his election in 2004; and finally, the text of an academic article titled “What Is Truth? The Significance of Religious and Ethical Values in a Pluralist Society,” originally published in the Catholic review Communio in 1992, but subsequently reprinted in a volume of his collected writings as pope. Relativism as the Central Problem for Faith Today

The title of the speech delivered by Cardinal Ratzinger at the plenary meeting of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in Guadalajara in 1996 already gives an indication as to the place occupied by the notion of relativism

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within the future pope’s overarching theological vision: relativism is seen as “the central problem for faith today.” This speech is however also interesting because it begins by providing a sort of “genealogy” of the contemporary rise to prominence of the concern with relativism within Catholic social thought: In the 1980s the theology of liberation in its radical forms seemed to be the most urgent challenge for the faith of the church. . . . The fall of the European governmental systems based on Marxism turned out to be a kind of twilight of the gods for that theology of redeeming political praxis. Precisely in those places where the Marxist liberating ideology had been applied consistently, a radical lack of freedom had been produced, the horror of which now appeared out in the open before the eyes of world public opinion. . . . For this reason, the political events of 1989 have also changed the theological scenario. . . . The failure of the only scientifically based system for solving human problems could only justify nihilism or, in any case, total relativism.

The contemporary significance of the question of relativism is here traced back by Ratzinger himself to the collapse of the Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe. This offers further confirmation of the thesis I have already sought to advance, according to which one of the factors that explains the relative prominence of the discourse of anti-relativism within the political thought of the Catholic Church is the degree to which communism is perceived as an immediate threat, overshadowing the concern with relativism. Within the economy of Ratzinger’s speech, however, this genealogical premise also has a rhetorical function: by positing relativism as a substitute for the discredited ideology of Marxism, Ratzinger wants to make it clear from the start that the two must be seen as equally dangerous “threats” from the point of view of Catholicism. Another interesting aspect of the discussion of relativism contained in this speech concerns the positive definition of the term that Ratzinger offers at the beginning: “Relativism has become the central problem for faith at the present time. No doubt it is not presented only with its aspects of resignation before the immensity of the truth. It is also presented as a position defined positively by the concepts of tolerance and knowledge through dialogue and freedom, concepts which would be limited if the existence of one valid truth for all were affirmed.”

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While clearly building upon the connection established by John Paul II between relativism and freedom, this definition also carries it a couple of steps further. First, it ties the notion of relativism to that of tolerance. This introduces the dimension of cultural pluralism into the discussion of relativism, which had previously been either ignored or left in the background. As we have seen, in fact, for the greatest part of its history, the notion of relativism had been used to refer to problems stemming from within an essentially Christian cultural framework: either the denial of the existence of a transcendent God (immanentism) or the affirmation of the impossibility of accessing absolute truth (indifferentism). The question of the relation between Christianity and other cultural or religious units had not really been addressed by the encyclical letters or official Church documents employing this term. With Ratzinger, it is situated at the core of the discussion of relativism, since he recognizes that the increased occasions for cross-cultural contact provided by the modern world may have the effect of reinforcing the perception that a conception of absolute truth uncoupled from the mediation of each individual’s specific cultural categories is unattainable. The other significant aspect of Ratzinger’s positive definition of relativism is that, compared to John Paul II’s, the political dimension is brought much more to the forefront. To be sure, the substance of Ratzinger’s arguments in this respect is not very different from John Paul II’s. However, he formulates them much more clearly. In particular, the link between the notion of relativism and a specific understanding of the concept of democracy becomes the centerpiece of Ratzinger’s discussion: Relativism appears to be the philosophical foundation of democracy. Democracy is in fact supposedly built on the basis that no one can presume to know the true way, and it is enriched by the fact that all roads are mutually recognized as fragments of the effort toward that which is better. All roads seek something common in dialogue, and they also compete regarding knowledge that cannot be compatible in one common form. . . . A system of freedom ought to be essentially a system of positions that are connected with one another because they are relative as well as being dependent on historical situations open to new developments. Therefore, a liberal society would be a relativist society. Only with that condition could it continue to be free and open to the future.

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In this passage, democracy and liberalism are treated as interchangeable, and relativism is posited as the philosophical “foundation” for both. The reasoning adduced is that if “no one can presume to know the true way,” the only way in which human beings can succeed in arriving at publicly binding decisions is through a process of reciprocal confrontation with one another, in which “all roads are mutually recognized as fragments of the effort toward that which is better.” Any appeal to a higher principle of truth would presumably destroy this presumption of equality, because it would automatically introduce a discrimination between the intrinsic value of different opinions. Interestingly, the argument Ratzinger makes in this respect is not that liberal democracy therefore ought to be rejected out of hand. Indeed, he even writes that “in the area of politics, this concept is considerably right. There is no one correct political opinion.” This may seem surprising, since it appears to run counter to the whole tradition within Catholicism asserting that there is an absolute truth applicable to the domain of politics. In reality, however, Ratzinger’s claim ultimately functions as a more sophisticated way of establishing the same conclusion that had already been advanced by John Paul II. The concession is that “in the area of politics . . . there is no one correct opinion.” This is taken as grounds for accepting the legitimacy of democratic procedures as a method for formulating political decisions. However, Ratzinger also immediately adds that relativism should not for this reason be converted into “something absolute,” because the political domain is merely one sphere of human action among others. Alongside and above it there may exist other truths that need to be made to bear against the relativism applicable to the political domain. Paradoxically, therefore, Ratzinger is here attempting to use the Christian idea of a hierarchy between different spheres of human action to relativize the relativistic conception of democracy itself: What is relative, the building up of a liberally ordained coexistence between people, cannot be something absolute. Thinking in this way was precisely the error of Marxism and the political theologies. However, with total relativism, everything in the political area cannot be achieved either. There are injustices that will never turn into just things (such as, for example, killing an innocent person, denying an individual or groups the right to their dignity or to life corresponding to that dignity) while, on the other hand, there are just things that can never be unjust.

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Therefore, although a certain right to relativism in the social and political area should not be denied, the problem is raised at the moment of setting its limits.

From this passage it is evident that Ratzinger does not deny that there exists an absolute truth applicable to the political domain. Indeed, it is precisely for this reason that he claims that the relativistic conception of democracy must itself be relativized: because he assumes that relativism is only part of the truth applicable to the political domain and therefore ought not to be treated as something absolute. Concretely, this becomes a way of posing the question concerning the limits to be imposed on the relativistic conception of democracy, a question for which, as we will see, Catholicism is posited as the only possible answer. The critique of relativism is therefore ultimately tied to a critique of democratic absolutism that poses the conditions for the presentation of Catholic doctrine as the necessary foundation for the limits that need to be imposed on the democratic exercise of political power. This theme is however developed at much greater length in the context of Ratzinger’s debate with Habermas than in the rest of the speech I have been analyzing up to this point, which instead moves on to focus primarily on the problem of interculturality from a theological point of view. It is therefore to an analysis of that text that I shall now turn. Ratzinger’s Debate with Habermas

The title of Ratzinger’s contribution to the debate with Habermas is worth commenting on: “The Pre-Political Moral Foundations of the Free State” indicates that Ratzinger does not intend to situate his contribution at the conceptual level of the political theory of the state, but rather at what he calls the “pre-political” level of the moral foundations for political freedom. This should not, however, be interpreted as a way of suggesting that the religious message of Catholicism has no political significance. On the contrary, it implies a specific way of addressing political issues through the lens of morality, which has the effect of further underscoring the relativization of the political domain, and therefore ultimately subordinating it to the requirements of moral (that is, religious) truth. This is also confirmed by the precise definition Ratzinger offers of the domain of the political at the start of the text: “It is the precise task of

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politics to subordinate power to the criterion of law, thereby regulating the meaningful use of power.” The implicit assumption here, which Ratzinger then goes on to make explicit in the next paragraph, is that power exercised outside the framework of law is “violence,” and therefore that the fundamental problem with which political theory ought to be concerned is that of the way to regulate the exercise of power among human beings. From the start, this makes politics into a matter of imposing limits. Accordingly, the first question that emerges for Ratzinger from the perspective of political theory is that of the intellectual foundations for the limits to be imposed on the exercise of power among human beings: “The task of subordinating power to the criterion of law prompts a further question: how does law arise, and how ought law to be, in order to serve as a vehicle of justice and not simply as the privilege of those who happen to possess the power to make laws? Here we have two questions: the genesis of law and the criteria inherent in law.” The first answer Ratzinger considers to these questions is the idea that laws can be considered legitimate in a democratic context because they are willed by the same people to whom they are supposed to apply. This is essentially the Rousseauian argument for popular sovereignty, which, as we have seen, was considered the root cause of all political catastrophes by the whole strand of doctrinal intransigentism from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Instead of dismissing this idea out of hand, however, Ratzinger begins by recognizing that “democracy’s guarantee that all can work together to shape the law and the just distribution of power is the fundamental reason why democracy is the most appropriate of all political models.” This appears significant, because it implies an explicit endorsement of the democratic form itself, which hadn’t yet been provided in such clear terms by any of Ratzinger’s predecessors as pope. On the other hand, Ratzinger also immediately adds that “nevertheless, I believe that one question remains open. Since absolute unanimity among men is a utopian idea, the only instruments whereby a democracy can make decisions are delegation and majority rule. . . . The problem is that even majorities can be blind or unjust. History makes that absolutely clear.” This appears to be a way of saying that, while the Church can in principle accept the legitimacy of democracy as a political form, the democratic principle cannot be considered the only answer to all political problems. By emphasizing the well-known practical limitations to the realization of

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the Rousseauian ideal, Ratzinger points out that democracy doesn’t completely abolish the exercise of power of man over man. The initial question concerning the limits to be imposed on this exercise of power is therefore shown to reemerge also within the context of a broadly democratic polity. In other words, democracy is not considered sufficient to address the problem of the regulation of political power, and an additional principle is called for in order to justify the limitation of the democratic principle itself. This is essentially the same problem that Ratzinger had already posed at the end of his speech in 1996 before the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. In order to understand the way in which he attempts to address it in the context of his debate with Habermas, it is necessary to take a step back and consider some of the categories Ratzinger had already introduced in his article “What Is Truth? The Significance of Religious and Ethical Values for a Pluralist Society,” published in 1992. The reason is that this article provides the background for the argument Ratzinger defended in the context of his debate with Habermas. Two Conceptions of the Grounds for Democracy

The starting point of this article is a distinction between two competing conceptions of the philosophical foundations for the idea of democracy itself: relativism and what Ratzinger calls the “metaphysical and Christian thesis.” The former is defined as the idea that the only kinds of truths applicable to the political domain are those produced immanently by that domain itself. The metaphysical and Christian thesis, on the other hand, is assumed to be based on the opposite view: “that truth is not a product of politics (the majority), but is antecedent to political activity and sheds light on it. . . . It is not praxis that creates truth, but truth that creates praxis.” Each of these two alternative philosophical premises is then traced back to the work of a specific author. Interestingly, the author Ratzinger pinpoints to illustrate the relativist conception of democracy is the same one I will also be primarily referring to in a later chapter of this book in order to defend this conception: the Austrian jurist and political theorist Hans Kelsen. This is how Kelsen’s views are described by Ratzinger: “For him, the relationship between religion and democracy is only negative, since one particular characteristic of Christianity is that it teaches absolute truths and values, and this is the exact antithesis of the necessary skepticism of

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a relativistic democracy. Kelsen understands religion as a heteronomy of the person, whereas democracy retains the autonomy of the person. This also means that the core of democracy is freedom, not the good, for that is something which puts freedom at risk.” The metaphysical and Christian thesis, on the other hand, is traced back genealogically to the philosophy of Plato, whom Ratzinger credits with having first asserted that “all sovereignty must be service, i.e. a conscious act whereby one renounces the contemplative height that one has attained and the freedom that this height brings. . . . Anything else, is a mere scuffling with illusions, in a realm of shadows—and that is in fact what most of political activity is.” Such reflections, Ratzinger adds, “bring Plato close to the fundamental biblical idea that truth is not a product of politics.” This reference to a pre-Christian pagan author in order to illustrate the thesis that Ratzinger will ultimately want to defend against the relativistic conception of democracy may appear surprising. However, I have already pointed out that the Catholic Church’s critique of relativism draws a lot from Plato’s discussion of democracy in the famous chapter 8 of The Republic. Through his mention of Plato, Ratzinger is therefore only making explicit a reference that has been essential for the Church’s political doctrine throughout the period we have been considering. In fact, the critique that Ratzinger then proceeds to advance of the relativistic conception of democracy is essentially analogous to that put forward by Plato in The Republic: that since it undermines the grounds for any moral restraint of the people’s behavior, and in particular of the power they are allowed to exercise over one another, it ultimately sows the seed for the emergence of a form of tyranny that knows no external limits and therefore runs against all sense of justice. The only difference is that, in order to sharpen the thrust of this critique and bring out its contemporary relevance, Ratzinger replaces the notion of tyranny with that of totalitarianism. Accordingly, in the sentence immediately following the description of the relativistic conception of democracy, Ratzinger adds: “if the relativists genuinely believe this, they are in fact flirting with totalitarianism even though they seek to establish the primacy of freedom, for they make the majority into a kind of divinity against which no further appeal is possible.” What we see being reproduced here is the claim that “relativism leads to totalitarianism,” which also constituted the core of John Paul II’s critique in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor. However, the explicit connection with

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Plato enables Ratzinger to further clarify the reasoning that underscores this objection: his point is that a conception of democracy founded on relativism contains no a priori limits to the power that the people are allowed to exercise over one another and therefore is always open to the risk of being overthrown from within and converted into a form of tyranny. Another way in which Ratzinger formulates this argument later in the same text is through the claim that the relativistic conception of democracy is predicated on a conception of freedom that is ultimately “empty,” in the sense that it does not contain any necessary reference to a substantive conception of truth or justice. This emptiness is considered problematic because it means that there is nothing within the idea of freedom itself that prevents it from being used in a “self-defeating” manner: It is not by chance that those who aim at totalitarian rule begin by introducing an anarchic freedom for individuals and a situation in which each one’s hand is raised against all others: by introducing order into this situation, they are enabled to present themselves as the true saviors of mankind. . . . However, if the individual freedom presented here as the highest goal lacks content, it dissolves into thin air, since individual freedom can only exist when freedoms are correctly ordered. Thus, freedom requires content.

Here Ratzinger is clearly referring to the idea also advanced by John Paul II, according to which, from a Christian perspective, freedom can only be considered a genuine value if it is linked to the notion of absolute truth in such a way that it is ultimately the conformity with God’s transcendent will which defines the content of what it means to be free. In this respect too, however, Ratzinger goes a step further than his predecessor, because he addresses the question of the specific nature of this absolute truth that Christians posit as an alternative to relativism. The context in which this question is discussed in most detail is the second part of Ratzinger’s debate with Habermas, to which I shall therefore now return. The Defense of the Notion of Natural Law

The centerpiece of Ratzinger’s discussion concerning the nature of absolute truth is a defense of the classical notion of natural law. Ratzinger asserts that, historically, whenever the Church’s claim to proprietorship over

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absolute truth has been challenged, the idea it has always fallen back on in order to ensure at least the possibility of dialogue with rival theories has been that of natural law. Two examples are cited in particular: “The first was the dissolution of the borders of the European and Christian world that occurred when America was discovered. . . . In this situation Francisco de Vitoria elaborated the already existing concept of the ius gentium, that meant a law antecedent to the forms of Christian law, a law whose task was to regulate the correct mutual relationships of all peoples.” The second example Ratzinger mentions concerns the natural law theories developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in response to the crisis caused by the schism of Protestantism: “Once again it proved necessary to elaborate a common law antecedent to dogma, or at least a legal minimum based no longer on Christian faith, but on nature, on human reason. . . . Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf and others developed the idea of natural law as a rational law that transcends confessional boundaries and permits reason to work as the instrument whereby common law may be posited.” Through these examples, natural law is therefore identified as a sort of bedrock that Christians can fall back on in order to find common ground with people who don’t share their religious views. In this respect, however, Ratzinger concedes that the specific conception of natural law to which the Catholic Church has traditionally referred “is an instrument which has become blunt,” because the prior notion of nature on which this conception was predicated has ceased to be considered acceptable to the modern mentality: “The idea of natural law presupposed a conception of ‘nature’ in which nature and reason interlock. The victory of the theory of evolution has meant the end of this view of nature.” His response to this hypothetical objection, however, is not to discard the notion of natural law entirely, but rather to look for the elements of it that may still be acceptable for the modern mentality. In particular, the claim he advances is that although the theory of evolution has rendered obsolete the idea that nature constitutes a rational system as a whole, it has not yet excluded the idea that nature might contain some rational elements within it: most notably, human beings. This is the basis for Ratzinger’s defense of a doctrine of human rights as the last salvageable element of the classical conception of natural law: “By natural law on the deepest level and in the modern period was meant rational law. Its last surviving element is human rights. These are incomprehensible without the

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presupposition that man as such, in virtue of the simple fact that he belongs to the species ‘man,’ is a subject of rights.” What emerges, therefore, is that the specific conception of absolute truth, which for Ratzinger constitutes the “pre-political moral foundation for the free state,” and which he accordingly wants to oppose to a purely relativistic conception of democracy, ultimately resolves in a notion of human rights understood as a form of natural law. This at the same time confirms the importance that had already been given to this notion by the Church in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and inscribes it in a new conceptual framework. The political function of the notion of human rights comes to provide a concrete content to the conception of freedom on which democracy is predicated, thereby imposing limits on the democratic exercise of political power, and therefore preventing it from degenerating into a form of totalitarianism. This conception of the relationship between human rights and democracy, in turn, enables Ratzinger to reaffirm the importance of a reference to God within the political domain in the last part of his contribution to the debate with Habermas, by posing the question of the ultimate source for the legitimacy of these human rights. Already at the start of this text, Ratzinger had given an indication of his thesis in this respect, since he had written that “contemporary consciousness may perhaps be content to hold that these rights possess a self-evident quality and ask no further questions. But even this self-limiting of questions possesses a philosophical character.” In a later text, written just a few years after, when he was already pope, Benedict XVI was much more explicit: “The value of human dignity which takes precedence over all political action and decision-making inevitably refers to the idea of a Creator.  .  .  . Only He can establish values that are grounded in the essence of humankind and that are inviolable.” In light of this statement, the overarching purpose of Ratzinger’s contribution to the debate with Habermas becomes clear: as a counterpoint to the relativistic conception of democracy, Ratzinger wants to defend an idea of human rights ultimately founded on the authority of the divine Creator. This conception of human rights is not posited by Ratzinger as an alternative to the idea of democracy altogether. On the contrary, for him, the divinely ordained human rights must be understood as a complement to democratic institutions, whose function is to impose limits on the democratic exercise of political power and thereby prevent it from undermining itself.

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In a sense, God is posited by Ratzinger as the ultimate guarantor of the legitimacy of democracy itself: the only solid grounds on which it can be prevented from degenerating into a form of totalitarianism. It is in this sense that his political theory can be seen as resolving into a new form of political theology, which says that the ultimate source of the legitimacy of democratic institutions is located in the person of God himself. The implication is that democracy can only be considered legitimate to the extent that it is a Christian democracy. FRANCIS I: A DOCTRINAL REVOLUTION?

As is well known, Pope Benedict XVI took the unprecedented decision of abdicating his position in February 2013. The man that replaced him is the argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who decided to adopt the name of Francis I. This decision, as well as a number of other public statements made by the pope immediately upon assuming office, has generated high hopes, especially among the most progressive wings of the Catholic Church, for the possibility of a profound “renewal” of the Church’s doctrine and internal organization. Already in the text of the first apostolic exhortation, addressed to the members of the clergy just a few months after taking office, for instance, Francis I spoke of an “ecclesial renewal which cannot be deferred,” and in this context he asserted that “I dream of a ‘missionary option,’ that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world.” Indeed, later in the same document the pope even stated: “Since I am called to put into practice what I ask of others, I too must think about a conversion of the papacy. It is my duty, as the Bishop of Rome, to be open to suggestions which can help make the exercise of my ministry more faithful to the meaning which Jesus Christ wished to give it and to the present needs of evangelization.” To be sure, at the time of writing, it is too early to assess what this announced “conversion” in the Church’s “customs, ways of doing things . . . language and structure” amounts to concretely. However, what is becoming increasingly clear is that, from a strictly doctrinal point of view, there are likely to be far fewer substantive changes than some may have been led to expect. Rather, this pope’s goal seems to be to effect a change at the level

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of the style in which the Church’s official doctrine is communicated, while leaving the core of the inherited doctrine essentially untouched. This emerges if we consider a little more closely the text of the apostolic exhortation in which Francis I talks of this “ecclesial renewal which cannot be deferred.” For as soon as the pope moves on to spell out what it is supposed to consist of concretely, he begins to refer to the idea of a “missionary style” of pastoral ministry. In this context, for instance, Francis I states: “When we adopt a pastoral goal and a missionary style which would actually reach everyone without exception or exclusion, the message has to concentrate on the essentials, on what is most beautiful, most grand, most appealing and at the same time most necessary.” He later also adds that “instead of seeming to impose new obligations, [we] should appear as people who wish to share other people’s joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet. It is not by proselytizing that the Church grows, but by attraction.” The theological foundation Francis I provides for this transformation at the level of “missionary style” is the idea, which had already been asserted by the Second Vatican Council, that “in Catholic doctrine there exists an order or a ‘hierarchy’ of truths, since they vary in their relation to the foundation of the Christian faith.” For, from this, the pope deduces that “in preaching the Gospel a fitting sense of proportion has to be maintained. . . . For example, if in the course of the liturgical year a parish priest speaks about temperance ten times but only mentions charity or justice two or three times, an imbalance results, and precisely those virtues which ought to be most present in preaching and catechesis are overlooked. The same thing happens when we speak more about law than about grace, more about the Church than about Christ, more about the Pope than about God’s word.” In this respect, however, Francis I specifies that such a “hierarchization” in the communication of the Church’s traditional doctrine is not meant to imply that any substantive part of it ought to be abandoned or ignored. On the contrary, he insists: “Just as the organic unity existing among the virtues means that no one of them can be excluded from the Christian ideal, so no truth may be denied. The integrity of the Gospel message must not be deformed. What is more, each truth is better understood when related to the harmonious totality of the Christian message; in this context all of the truths are important and illumine one another.” What emerges from this analysis is that the new pope’s proposed “renewal” of the Church’s “customs, ways of doing things  .  .  . language and

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structure” is rather self-consciously situated at the level of the emphasis placed on some aspects of Christian doctrine at the expense of others, but that this does not involve challenging—or even seeking to renegotiate—any aspect of this inherited truth. This is reflected almost paradigmatically in the attitude adopted by Francis I with respect to the principal doctrinal legacy that interests us in this context, that is, the condemnation of moral relativism as a potential threat for the stability and viability of contemporary societies, on which Benedict XVI had insisted so much. Like many other aspects of this legacy, this is something that the new pope has attempted to restyle in order to give it a more attractive image, without however challenging its fundamental presuppositions. In the first speech he gave to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See just a few days after being elected, for instance, Francis I tied an explicit reference to what is perhaps the most famous condemnation of moral relativism formulated by his predecessor to his own choice of name as pope: As you know there are various reasons why I chose the name of Francis of Assisi, a familiar figure far beyond the borders of Italy and Europe, even among those who do not profess the Catholic faith. One of the first reasons was Francis’ love for the poor. How many poor people there still are in the world! And what great suffering they have to endure! . . . But there is also another form of poverty. It is the spiritual poverty of our time, which afflicts the so-called richer countries particularly seriously. It is what my much-loved predecessor, Benedict XVI, called the “tyranny of relativism,” which makes everyone his own criterion and endangers the coexistence of peoples. And that brings me to a second reason for my name. Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace. But there is no true peace without truth! There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others.

This statement reiterates—in a condensed form—almost all the most important themes of Benedict XVI’s critique of relativism: the analysis of the conditions for civil peace and prosperity, the link with the idea of tyranny or dictatorship, and finally the importance of a reference to the idea of truth, implicitly understood as referring to the Christian doctrine of natural law.

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To this, however, Francis I also adds a link with another theme that had not been addressed with as much emphasis by his predecessor: “poverty.” Indeed, such an emphasis on poverty—as both a spiritual and a material phenomenon—has been one of the principal vectors of Francis I’s restyling of the Catholic Church’s missionary image. The traditional Catholic concern with relativism as a threat for the stability and viability of contemporary societies has therefore been inscribed within a broader condemnation of poverty, within which relativism is presented as the specific kind of poverty that particularly affects the “so-called richer countries.” This can also be observed in several other instances in which Pope Francis I has employed the notion of relativism. For example, the apostolic exhortation mentioned above also contains a section in which the pope outlines how the new “missionary style” he speaks of can be applied to “some contemporary challenges of today’s world.” Most of this section is devoted to a discussion of economic issues, among which Francis I focuses in particular on “the new idolatry of money,” “a financial system that rules instead of serving,” and “an inequality that spawns violence.” However, later in the same section, Francis I goes on to consider some “cultural challenges” that also beset contemporary societies, and in this context he states: In many places, the problem is that of widespread indifference and relativism, linked to disillusionment and the crisis of ideologies which has come about as a reaction to any-thing which might appear totalitarian. This not only harms the Church but the fabric of society as a whole. We should recognize how in a culture where each person wants to be bearer of his or her own subjective truth, it becomes difficult for citizens to devise a common plan which transcends individual gain and personal ambitions. . . . In the prevailing culture, priority is given to the outward, the immediate, the visible, the quick, the superficial and the provisional. What is real gives way to appearances. In many countries globalization has meant a hastened deterioration of their own cultural roots and the invasion of ways of thinking and acting proper to other cultures which are economically advanced but ethically debilitated.

What we find in this passage is another restatement of almost all the key themes from Benedict XVI’s formulation of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, complemented only with a reference to some of the more

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prominent issues in the contemporary debate on political economy: the issues of consumerism, globalization, and cultural imperialism. The key point, however, is that from a strictly doctrinal point of view none of the underlying premises of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism is being challenged or even renegotiated. Similarly, what Francis I asserted to the Bishops of the Episcopal Conference of Poland in the context of their ad limina visit to the Vatican in February 2014 looks like something that could have been pronounced by John Paul II: “Regarding the fact that there is also a certain decline in various aspects of Christian life, discernment is required, a study of the causes and of the ways to confront these new challenges, such as, for example, the idea of unlimited freedom, hostile tolerance or distrust of the truth, or discontent toward the Church’s just opposition to the pervading relativism.” On close inspection, in fact, it emerges that analogous references to the challenge or threat represented by moral relativism in contemporary societies are present in almost all public pronouncements of Pope Francis I, although they tend to be somewhat less emphasized, relative to the prominent position this theme occupied within the framework of John Paul II and Benedict XVI’s doctrinal pronouncements. The overall (although of course still preliminary) conclusion that can be drawn from this is that Pope Francis I’s announced “renewal” of the Catholic Church’s “missionary style” does not extend as far as calling into question any fundamental aspects—or even the centrality—of this discourse of anti-relativism within the framework of official Catholic doctrine. On the contrary, the discourse is being confirmed as one of the central rhetorical tools that the Church uses to foster a defense of absolute moral values in the context of contemporary societies, even if the degree of emphasis it is accorded has been diminished relative to other themes that are now increasingly coming to the forefront. SYNTHETIC PRESENTATION OF THE CENTRAL ARGUMENT OF THE CATHOLIC DISCOURSE OF ANTI-RELATIVISM

In light of the historical reconstruction presented in the previous sections of this chapter, to conclude, I will now attempt to put forward a synthetic exposition of the central argument that emerges from the documents that have been examined. Since, as I have pointed out, the remaining chapters of this book will be framed as responses to this argument, such an overall

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picture will become the principal point of reference for the discussion to follow. Taking the body of discourse I have been examining as a whole, I will therefore attempt to extrapolate the key themes and claims that have been progressively consolidated since the first use of the notion of relativism in an official document of the Catholic Church in order to bring out the core of the objection that has been made against it, the conceptual presuppositions on which it depends, and especially the political function it has been made to serve. I hope this will also allow me to bring out why I think that the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism represents a significant challenge from the point of view of political theory, which is worth taking seriously on its own terms. The first thing that needs to be reiterated is that from a political point of view this discourse can be read as a critique of democracy. Historically, the Church’s relation with this political form has been profoundly ambivalent, because at least since the French Revolution of 1789 it was perceived as predicated on the principle of popular sovereignty, which was in turn considered incompatible with the idea of the absolute sovereignty of God over man. As this political form became increasingly dominant, however, during the second half of the nineteenth century, and especially in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Church sought to find ways of coming to terms with it, carving out a new role for itself within the democratic framework. The discourse of anti-relativism, which enabled the Catholic Church to present itself as the guardian of the absolute moral principles that these kinds of regimes supposedly need in order to survive, has been the principal means through which the Church has attempted to do this. Hence this discourse can be seen as the means through which the Church has converted its historical opposition to democracy into an internal critique: instead of focusing on the notion of popular sovereignty, it has increasingly focused on the notion of relativism in order to claim that democracy can be accepted as long as it is made compatible with a recognition of the existence and sovereign authority of God over the political domain. The core of the argument that has been made in this respect is that a conception of democracy founded on a form of philosophical relativism would ultimately be self-defeating. The reasons that have been advanced to justify this claim can be summed up in two different ways. At root, the argument stems from a concern with the notion of authority. The assumption on which the argument is predicated is that the unity and stability of the social

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order depend on the recognition of a common authority, because this is the only way to keep the evil and destructive impulses of humanity in check. Without such a common authority, it is claimed, human beings would let themselves go in an unfettered pursuit of their basest instincts and desires, and this would call into question the unity and the stability of the social order, ultimately allowing it to fall prey to the logic of the rule of the strongest. This is assumed to apply also and especially to those exercising positions of power within society, because in the absence of a religious sanction the exercise of power by man over man is assumed to be able to rely only on brute force. This has to be held in check in order to prevent the political order from degenerating into tyranny. Hence the function of the notion of authority is ultimately taken to be that of guiding the exercise of power by man over man by imposing limits upon it. The other fundamental assumption that underscores this argument is that the principle of authority can only be sustainable on the basis of a recognition of some notion of absolute truth applicable to the behavior of human beings. The reason for this is that absolute truth is taken to be defined precisely by the fact that it is not accessible to human beings to tamper with: it is something external to them, which must be taken as given. It follows that it is only if human beings recognize something of this sort that they may be willing to restrain their behavior on the basis of an external check. From a Christian perspective it is also worth noting that such a notion of absolute truth, providing guidance and limits for human behavior, is taken to be comprehensible only in terms of the idea of a transcendent God, governing the universe, who has stipulated a set of commandments for humanity to obey. Hence, in the final analysis the assumption is that authority can only exist if it is derived from a transcendent source, aware of the interests and desires of humanity and capable of guiding and limiting them for their own good. From the combination of these two assumptions—that the stability of the social order depends on the recognition of the principle of authority, and that this principle in turn depends on the idea of an absolute truth derived from a transcendent source—it follows that the social order can be sustainable only on the basis of a common recognition of a transcendent truth. Any attack on such a notion is accordingly perceived as an attack on the grounds for the unity and stability of the social order itself. Now, as we have seen, the notion of relativism has historically been defined by the Catholic Church precisely as the negation of the idea that there

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exists a transcendent truth applicable to human affairs. From the very beginning, it was assumed to derive from the conjunction of the doctrines of immanentism and indifferentism. The first was assumed to imply the denial of the existence of God; the second was assumed to imply the denial that there exists any true way of following his commandments. Hence, together they amount to the negation of the conditions of possibility for the recognition of a common authority capable of restraining human behavior from above. The key objection that is made against relativism is therefore that it undermines the conditions for social unity and stability. This can be taken as a way of demonstrating that a conception of democracy founded on relativism would ultimately be self-defeating because it implies that society would necessarily degenerate into chaos, anarchy, and ultimately a form of tyranny founded only on the exercise of brute force. In other words, the key claim that is advanced by the Catholic Church through its critique of relativism is that human beings are incapable of establishing the grounds for their own coexistence within a social order autonomously: the exercise of power by man over man requires guidance and the only way to provide this is by subordinating it to the control of a divinely ordained authority. Another way of formulating the same argument lays more emphasis on a dynamic implicit in the logic of democracy itself. The key contention is that the notion of popular sovereignty as such contains no internal limits on the power that can be legitimately exercised by the people over themselves. For this reason it is claimed that, unless it is complemented by the reference to an external criterion of legitimacy, it is vulnerable to the paradox whereby democracy can be overthrown by democratic means. If, for example, the majority or perhaps even the whole of a people were to turn against the principle of popular sovereignty itself, there would seem to be no grounds within it to prevent it from destroying itself. For this reason, it is suggested that the principle of popular sovereignty needs to be complemented by the reference to an external criterion of legitimacy in order to be sustainable. In this respect, however, it is further argued that a philosophical outlook predicated on a form of relativism would be incapable of supplying such external limits to the principle of popular sovereignty because, as we have seen, relativism is defined precisely in terms of the negation of the possibility of establishing any set of values standing above the immediate interests and desires of the people themselves. Hence a conception of democracy founded on relativism is taken to be self-defeating

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because it appears to remain vulnerable to the paradox whereby democracy can be overthrown by democratic means. The way in which the advocates of the Catholic Church have attempted to substantiate this point has historically been through the construction of a chain of implications that leads from the idea of a political order founded exclusively on the unfettered power of the people over themselves to a form of tyranny or oppression, which is supposed to function as a reductio ad absurdum of the attempt to found a political regime independently of the reference to a higher criterion of truth. In the first formulations of this argument, the name that was given to this form of tyranny was “communism” or “socialism”; however, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the notion that has become more commonly adopted is that of “totalitarianism.” The claim that, if it is not complemented by the reference to a higher criterion of truth, democracy leads to totalitarianism has therefore become one of the central components of the contemporary formulations of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. The only possible foundation for such an external check on the democratic exercise of political power is further assumed to be the notion of absolute truth. In particular, the notion that the Church has historically referred to in order to articulate its conception of the necessary limits that need to be imposed on the exercise of power by man over man is that of a divinely ordained natural law. This is based on the assumption that there are certain principles implicit in the order of things themselves, which prescribe how human beings ought to govern themselves independently of their will. In the analysis conducted, I have also showed that over the course of the second half of the past century, the traditional Christian conception of natural law was progressively translated into a specific conception of human rights as the rights that pertain to all human beings in virtue of the special dignity assigned to them by God at the moment of creation. The implication that followed was that the notion of democracy was taken to be sustainable on its own terms only if complemented by a notion of human rights functioning as an external check on the democratic exercise of political power. Since, however, both the notion of natural law and that of human rights are ultimately assumed to derive their legitimacy from the sovereign will of God, as the Creator of the universe, democracy is considered sustainable only to the extent that the principle of popular sovereignty is complemented by the reference to a religious principle of legitimacy limiting it from out-

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side. This is the way in which the Church has managed to claim that religion is not incompatible with democracy but actually required by it: by suggesting that a transcendent conception of God is the only possible foundation for the absolute limits that need to be imposed on the democratic exercise of political power in order to prevent it from overthrowing itself. Conceptually, this can be interpreted as a critique of democracy because it effectively implies that the democratic principle of self-government needs to be subordinated to a requirement of consistency with a set of God-given commandments in order to be sustainable on its own terms. From a political point of view, however, this argument is what has enabled the Catholic Church to carve out a role for itself within the democratic framework, by presenting itself as the guarantor of the absolute truths that these kinds of regimes supposedly need in order to survive.

2 ELEMENTS FOR A PUBLIC CRITIQUE OF THE CATHOLIC DISCOURSE OF ANTI-RELATIVISM

On the basis of the historical reconstruction of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism carried out in the previous chapter, I will now move on to the task of critique. As mentioned in the introduction, I intend to pursue two different lines of critique. In this chapter, I will focus on the way in which the arguments that sustain the Church’s attack on relativism have been formulated in order to bring out some of the elements I find most problematic or unconvincing. In the next two chapters, I will then consider some alternative ways of conceptualizing the relationship between relativism and democracy in order to establish which can be considered most compelling. I call the specific type of critique I develop in this chapter “public” because it is based on the presupposition that the Church’s attack on relativism is intended as a contribution to an open debate on the relationship between politics and religion in a democratic context. This implies that the arguments on which it relies are not intended merely as ways of reaffirming the convictions of those who already agree with the Church’s position, but strive to actually convince the interlocutors that are willing to take them seriously, independently of their religious views. For the purposes of this discussion, I therefore intend to adopt the position of such a hypothetical

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interlocutor in order to evaluate whether the conclusions the Church seeks to substantiate are indeed made irrefutable by the arguments it adduces, or whether they only appear persuasive from the point of view of somebody who already agrees with them in the first place. The notion of “publicity” that is being referred to here clearly derives from the idea of “public reason” articulated and defended by John Rawls in his book on Political Liberalism. My contention, however, is that such a standard of evaluation, or at least something sufficiently similar to it, is also available from within the Catholic tradition too. As Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out in the context of his debate with Habermas, in order to frame its discussions with the outside (that is, non-Catholic) world, the Catholic Church has historically relied on a notion of lumen naturale, which was understood precisely as referring to a criterion of rationality shared by all human beings, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Since, presumably, the documents I have discussed in the previous chapter are intended as political interventions within a public sphere that is not populated exclusively by Catholics, it doesn’t appear illegitimate to evaluate them from the standpoint of this criterion. In particular, the analysis that follows will be structured around the discussion of five key terms that I think touch upon some of the most critical aspects of the Church’s discourse as a whole: the notions of relativism, absolute truth, authority, freedom, and, finally, totalitarianism. In each case, I will begin from an analysis of the specific way in which the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism proves to understand this term and the function it is made to play within the broader economy of the argument as a whole. On this basis, I will then attempt to bring out some of the background assumptions, conceptual slippages, and elements of tension on which the argument relies in order to highlight what I think are the weak points, or at least the elements that a disinterested but rational interlocutor should not feel compelled to accept. At the same time, this critical analysis will also allow me to start laying the foundations for the more positive conception of the relationship between relativism and democracy that I will try to defend in the last chapter of this book, because in each case I will contrast the Church’s way of understanding the term in question with an alternative view that I find more compelling from a democratic perspective. The authors I will use to begin the construction of this alternative vision are various, coming from different historical backgrounds and intellectual traditions: from Thomas

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Hobbes to Hannah Arendt and Norberto Bobbio. My contention, however, is that the aspects I will draw from their respective works all converge toward the specific theory of democracy that I will seek to defend in the last chapter of this book, primarily with reference to the works of Hans Kelsen.

THE DEFINITION OF RELATIVISM The Confusion Between Relativism and Nihilism

Various aspects of the way in which the Church has defined and employed the notion of relativism in the context of the formulation of its critiques are worth pointing out and discussing because they appear problematic. The first is that relativism has always either implicitly or explicitly been treated as a negative notion, that is, as the referent to a philosophical position predicated essentially on a negation. Initially, as we have seen, the object assumed to be negated was the existence of God itself, or in any case the possibility for human beings of knowing anything about him, since relativism was treated as a synonym for naturalism. Progressively, the object of the negation became the idea of absolute truth itself, particularly as applicable to the moral domain. Relativism therefore began to be treated as a synonym for nihilism. Various examples to confirm this can be found in the documents I have been quoting from in the previous chapter. Leo XIII, for instance, defined the core of the relativist doctrine as follows: “They deny that anything has been taught by God; they allow no dogma of religion or truth which cannot be understood by human intelligence, nor any teacher who ought to be believed by reason of his authority. . . . By this means, they reject from the laws and from the commonwealth the wholesome influence of the Catholic religion, and they consequently imagine that states ought to be constituted without any regard for the laws and precepts of the Church.” It will be noted that all the key terms in this definition are negative, in the sense of being predicated on a negation: relativism “denies,” “allows not,” “rejects,” and “imagines that states ought to be constituted without.” This is a recurrent feature of all subsequent definitions that will be employed by later popes in the ensuing years too. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, for example, Paul VI defined relativism as a doctrine that “overthrows the foundation of all truth and absolute law, both on the level of philosophical speculation and especially of Christian dogma.”

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Cardinal Ratzinger was therefore merely drawing a logical conclusion, almost half a century later, when in a lecture delivered before the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques he leveled out the conceptual difference between relativism and nihilism by asserting that “the strict relativism expressed in the absolutization of the majority principle is inevitably transformed at some point into nihilism.” Since then, the elision of the conceptual difference between relativism and nihilism has become commonplace in the Church’s official discourse: the two notions are normally treated as if they were interchangeable with each other. The reason I find this problematic is that it effaces the specificity of the concept of relativism itself. To relativize is not the same thing as to negate: the first puts its object into relation with something else, the second annuls it. The Church, however, appears to want to hang on to both meanings at the same time. It needs to hang on to the difference between relativism and nihilism because the position it wants to criticize is not merely the (rather marginal and arguably self-defeating) view that there are no truths, but also the (much more plausible) view that the truths which do exist are relative. On the other hand, it also attempts to level out this difference, because most of the arguments it actually puts forward are directed against the former view rather than the latter. It therefore seems to rely on the implicit assumption that if the idea that there are no truths is unacceptable, then the idea that truths are relative must be unacceptable too. This assumption is justified on the basis of the claim that truth can exist in a full sense only if it is absolute, because a relative truth is not really a truth after all. However, this claim actually begs the fundamental question, because it eliminates the possibility of sustaining a difference between relativism and nihilism by definitional fiat. What is still lacking is an argument for the idea that truths (and especially moral truths) can exist only if they are absolute. The consequence is that many of the arguments employed by the Catholic Church against relativism appear to miss their mark. For example, when Leo XIII writes that relativists “reject from the laws and from the commonwealth the wholesome influence of the Catholic religion, and consequently imagine that states ought to be constituted without any regard for the laws and precepts of the Church,” few actual relativists (and certainly not those who follow the specific version of relativism I will defend in the last chapter of this book) are likely to feel concerned. What relativism maintains is not that what the Church holds to be true is actually false, but merely that it is relative. This does not necessarily lead

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to the idea that the Church ought to be excluded from the possibility of exercising any influence in the political domain, but can rather be interpreted as grounds for maintaining that the exercise of this influence should be made compatible with the fact that there may also exist other conceptions of what truth amounts to in a political society that cannot be excluded either. Instead of negating or excluding, relativism therefore seeks to reconcile different conceptions of the truth and enable them to coexist with each other peacefully. The Church, however, systematically fails to take this difference into account, probably because it is much easier to criticize nihilism than relativism, both on philosophical and on political grounds. This point was advanced, in his characteristically witty manner, by Clifford Geertz in the lecture delivered before the American Anthropological Association in 1984 on the topic of “anti-anti-relativism.” Although the context and the domain of application are slightly different, many of the points Geertz raises in that lecture can be applied more or less directly to the Church’s specific version of the discourse of anti-relativism: What the anti-relativists want us to worry about, and worry about, and worry about, as though our very souls depended on it, is a kind of spiritual entropy, a heat death of the mind, in which everything is as significant, and therefore insignificant, as everything else. . . . As far as what actually goes on in the world, the image of vast numbers of [relativists] running around in so cosmopolitan a frame of mind as to have no views as to what is and isn’t true, or good, or beautiful seems to me largely a fantasy. . . . There may be some genuine nihilists out there, along Rodeo Drive or around Times Square, but I doubt very many have become such as a result of an excessive sensitivity to the claims of other cultures. At least most of the people I meet, read, and read about, and indeed I myself, are all-too-committed to something or other, usually parochial. The Confusion Between Relativism and Absolutism

Beyond the confusion between relativism and nihilism, the second feature of the Catholic Church’s definition of the concept of relativism that is worth pointing out and discussing, because it appears somewhat problematic, is the fact that relativism is effectively treated as an absolutist position, that is, as a claim that steps outside the relativity it ascribes to all other positions,

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understanding itself as an absolute truth. This is implicit already in the fact that relativism has always been treated as a doctrine by the Catholic Church. For, according to the Church’s own usage of the term, a doctrine is an articulation of some fundamental “dogma.” It was, however, also made explicit by Pope Benedict XVI in the speech he gave at the World Youth Day of 2005, since there he formally defined relativism as a doctrine that “absolutizes what is not absolute but relative.” On strictly logical grounds, this treatment of relativism as an absolutist position appears paradoxical because the notions of the relative and the absolute are in fact conceptual opposites. It isn’t very surprising, therefore, that such a definition turns out to be self-defeating. For the content of the claim “there is no absolute truth” clearly contradicts a presupposition of the claim itself, if this is posited as an absolute truth. Once again, Benedict XVI has been the clearest in formulating this objection: in the same speech where he defined relativism as a way of “absolutizing what is not absolute but relative” he also went on to say that this position is incoherent because it “contains a dogmatism of its own.” The very fact that this contradiction is so manifestly apparent, however, provides reason to doubt that anybody could have ever seriously defended such a conception of relativism in the first place. This poses, in another way, the question of whether the target that the Church claims to be attacking when it talks about relativism is not in the final analysis a straw man. This point too was expressed very pointedly by Clifford Geertz in the lecture on anti-anti-relativism: The notion that someone who does not hold your views holds the reciprocal of them, or simply hasn’t got any, has, whatever its comforts for those afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe in it very hard, not conduced to much in the way of clarity in the anti-relativist discussion, but merely to far too many people spending far too much time describing at length what it is that they do not maintain than seems in any way profitable.

As a matter of fact, the vast majority of theorists who have actually defended a conception of relativism have proved to be aware of the contradiction that would emerge in positing it as an absolutist position, and have accordingly taken care to specify that this is not the way it should be understood. One of the first to make this point clearly, for example, was Friedrich Nietzsche

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in the set of notes posthumously published as The Will to Power. To be sure, the reference to that text may at first appear somewhat confusing in this context, since Nietzsche does not really talk of relativism per se, but nihilism. To treat Nietzsche as a relativist would therefore seem to undermine the very distinction I have insisted on keeping. In reality, however, Nietzsche establishes a distinction between two kinds of nihilism. The first, which he refers to as “passive nihilism,” is defined as a “decline and recession of the power of the spirit” that shrinks away from the possibility of formulating moral judgments on the basis of the excuse that “there are no absolute moral truths.” “Active nihilism,” on the other hand, is defined as a “sign of strength,” which embraces the relativity of truth and takes this as grounds for affirming “its own” moral values and perspectives. For the purposes of this discussion, this latter kind of nihilism can be considered more akin to what I have been calling relativism, since it is explicitly defined in terms of the concept of relativity and categorically opposed to the kind of nihilism that simply denies the existence of truth as such. Concerning this latter kind of nihilism, Nietzsche goes on to write that “this may seem illogical . . . but the nihilist does not believe that one needs to be logical.” This can be interpreted as a way of responding to the standard objection according to which relativism is self-defeating. The response consists in pointing out that the objection only works on the basis of the presupposition that the relativist claim is posited as an absolute claim to truth in the first place. However, the possibility of assuming such an absolute standpoint is precisely what the relativist is questioning. Thus, from the relativist’s standpoint there is no inconsistency in denying the possibility of making absolute claims to truth, because the claim itself is not meant to be posited as an absolute in the first place. Another way of putting this is to say that for Nietzsche “active nihilism” is not a doctrine but something more akin to an attitude, expressed by the way one relates to the possibility of formulating moral judgments. In the last chapter of this book, where I will attempt to outline my own conception of the relation between relativism and democracy, I will try to capture this by arguing that relativism cannot be understood as a first-order moral judgment, but must rather be thought of as a meta-ethical position implying the adoption of a second-degree perspective on one’s own moral commitments. While not renouncing taking a stand and formulating moral judgments, therefore, the relativist is conscious that, from a second-order perspective,

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his stand and judgments remain relative to the specific cultural and discursive framework from which they emerge. This clarification of the distinction between the first- and second-order levels of moral judgment dispels the contradiction that is normally attributed to relativism because it shows that the two aspects assumed to be in conflict with each other are actually situated on entirely different conceptual planes. The Binary Opposition Between Absolute Values and No Values

The third feature of the way in which the notion of relativism is employed by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism that I intend to comment on is its inscription within the terms of a binary opposition with the idea of absolute moral truth. This is a direct result of the conjunction of the fact that relativism is treated both as a negative position and as an absolute position: the logical consequence is that truth (and in particular moral truth) is assumed to have to be either absolute or nonexistent. No intermediate possibility is envisaged, as if these were the only two available options. This binary is what enables the proponents of the Catholic discourse to move directly from the recognition that (their conception of) relativism is self-defeating to the idea that therefore absolute moral truths must exist. For example, in the previous chapter we have seen that in the article “What Is Truth? The Significance of Ethical and Religious Values for a Pluralist Society” Cardinal Ratzinger distinguished between two different conceptions of democracy: The first, which he identifies as relativist, is assumed to be based on the idea that there are no moral values applicable to the political domain a priori. The second, on the other hand, which he identifies as the “Christian and metaphysical thesis,” is assumed to be based on the idea that politics is preceded and therefore limited by a set of absolute moral truths. After having demonstrated to his satisfaction that the relativist conception of democracy is self-defeating (because it is incapable of specifying any determinate limits to the power that people may legitimately exercise over themselves), Ratzinger jumps to the conclusion that the Christian and metaphysical thesis must therefore constitute a necessary condition for the viability of a democratic system. What this binary logic arbitrarily excludes, however, is the possibility that moral values may have an intermediate status: neither nonexistent nor absolute.

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If, for example, the members of a democratic polity were to stipulate a set of limits to the power they are allowed to exercise over one another through the democratic procedure itself, the situation that would thereby be created would not be entirely devoid of values, because commonly recognized principles would have effectively been stipulated. However, these values would not necessarily have to be thought of as absolute, because the contracting human beings could remain conscious of their man-made origins and therefore accept seeing them as provisional and revisable entities. This is the core of the positivist understanding of the nature of the legal order I will attempt to defend in the last chapter of this book. For the time being, however, the key point I would like to put across is that the binary opposition implicit in the idea that truth (and in particular moral truth) is either absolute or nonexistent is neither a necessary nor a particularly convincing premise to organize a discussion of the relation between relativism and democracy. A good way of putting this point across might be to recall something written by John Dewey in a review essay of a book by the Catholic conservative essayist G. K. Chesterton, whose arguments are in many ways analogous to the ones underscoring the antirelativist rhetoric of the Catholic Church: The idea that unless standards and rules are timeless and immutable they are not rules and criteria at all is childish. . . . If there is anything confirmed by observation it is that human beings naturally cherish certain things and relationships, they naturally institute values. Having desires and having to guide themselves by aims and purposes, no other course is possible.

On the basis of this observation, Dewey goes on to suggest that the real historically meaningful opposition is not between absolute values and no values, but rather between the idea that values derive from a transcendent source and the idea that they have been made by human beings themselves. Faced with this opposition, Dewey subsequently argues, on pragmatist grounds, that the latter option appears preferable because it enables and encourages human beings to examine their own values critically and potentially change them in order to adapt them to the context and necessities of the time, instead of assuming that they are fixed and immutable and therefore beyond the reach of our critical powers.

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Interestingly, while making this point, Dewey also makes another claim that captures the core of the thesis I will seek to advance in the next section of this chapter: “It would require an extraordinary degree of pessimism to assume that vastly improved knowledge of nature, human nature included, cannot be employed or will not be employed to render human relations more human, just and liberal. The notion that such knowledge and such application will increase misunderstanding is a clear case of ‘reversed charge’ for results produced by dogmatic absolutism in appeal to extra-natural authority.” The point I find particularly interesting in this passage is the claim that anti-relativists may be accusing relativism of producing social and political consequences that are in reality the outcome of the continued reference to the idea of absolute truth. This is the intuition I will attempt to substantiate in the next section of this chapter. Before moving on to that analysis, however, a further feature of the way in which the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism employs the notion of relativism itself is worth pointing out and commenting on. The Connection Between Relativism and Indifferentism

In the previous chapter, we have already seen that, since its very first usages in official documents by the Catholic Church, the notion of relativism was conceptually tied to that of “indifferentism.” Indeed, what I have attempted to suggest is that, at least initially, relativism was defined in terms of the conjunction between the two capital errors of modernity, already condemned, for example, by Pius IX in his famous Syllabus: immanentism and indifferentism. The point I would like to advance in this respect is that the connection between the notion of relativism and this sort of indifferentism is arbitrary and not really defensible on logical grounds. The reason is the same as the one I have been attempting to put across, in different ways, throughout the whole of this section: that relativism does not imply an absence of moral commitments (otherwise there would be nothing left to relativize) but must rather be understood as a more complex attitude that involves taking a second-order perspective on one’s own values and commitments. The adoption of this second-order perspective may indeed have an effect on the dimension of moral motivation. However, there is no reason to suppose that this effect should run in the direction of a weakening of motiva-

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tion. On the contrary, by being made conscious that there is an irreducible element of relativity in one’s own moral outlook, the individual is made responsible for his own decisions and actions. The effect of moral relativism on the dimension of motivation for engaging in moral action is therefore to situate it within the framework of the concepts of freedom and responsibility rather than to annul it entirely. This is a point that has been formulated in different ways by many of the advocates of moral relativism. The one who has had the most vivid sense of the grave responsibility that is imposed on the individual as soon as he is deprived of the possibility of making reference to absolute moral values is however probably Max Weber. In his famous lecture “Science as a Vocation,” for example, the German sociologist and political theorist framed this as a question of moral “courage,” in living up to the challenge presented by the modern age: Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion. . . . One therefore has to choose between the religious dignity which this ethic confers and the dignity of manly conduct which preaches something quite different. According to our ultimate standpoint, the one is the devil and the other the God, and the individual has to decide which is God for him and which is the devil. And so it goes throughout all the orders of life. . . . What is hard for modern man, and especially for the younger generation, is to measure up to this workaday existence. The ubiquitous chase for “experience” stems from this weakness; for it is weakness not to be able to countenance the stern seriousness of our fateful times.

Far from betraying any inclination toward moral “apathy,” this passage is drenched in the conviction that the element of moral relativism implicit in the pluralization of value spheres characteristic of modern times imposes upon the individual the difficult task of choosing for himself the “God” he intends to worship, that is, stated without metaphor, of deciding without external guidance the specific conception of value he intends to remain  faithful to in his actions. For Weber, therefore, weakness of will is by no means the necessary consequence of the relativization of values previously held to be absolute. On the contrary, for him, it is a characteristic of those who fail to live up to the challenge represented by a situation in which individuals are forced to decide for themselves what it is right for them to do.

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THE IDEA OF ABSOLUTE MORAL TRUTH The Confusion Between the Utility and the Existence of an Absolute Moral Truth

We can now move on to examine the other pole in the binary opposition that the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism sets up between the notion of relativism and the idea of absolute moral truth. In this respect too, I will advance a number of related points. The first is that the refutations of relativism provided by the advocates of the Catholic Church do not in and of themselves prove that some kind of absolute truth exists or is available to human beings. These refutations are organized around two parallel claims. The first is that, from a logical point of view, relativism is untenable because the claim “there are no absolute truths” supposedly contradicts itself. I have already dealt with this objection in the previous section of this chapter. The second line of objection is that the adoption of a relativist standpoint necessarily leads to unacceptable political consequences: especially when taken as the philosophical foundation for democracy, it is supposed to imply a dissolution of the grounds for authority and ultimately also pose the conditions for the emergence of some form of totalitarian domination. Now the point that I would like to advance in this respect is that even if it were true that relativism led to these adverse political consequences (a claim that I will discuss and refute in more detail in the last section of this chapter), this would still not be sufficient to demonstrate that a set of absolute moral truths exists and is indeed available to human beings. At most, this argument proves that it would be useful, and therefore perhaps desirable, if such absolute moral truths existed and were available to human beings. However, utility is not sufficient to demonstrate existence, since what is good isn’t necessarily the case. The implicit assumption on which the Church’s argument seems to rely is that if it can be shown that something is good (and perhaps even necessary) for ensuring peaceful coexistence among human beings, then it must exist, because the world was created by an infinitely good and omnipotent God and must therefore necessarily contain all that it requires in order to adequately fulfill its purposes. In the encyclical Immortale Dei, for example, Leo XIII makes precisely this argument with respect to the notion of authority: since authority is necessary to ensure peaceful coexistence among

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human beings, God must have established the grounds for its institution, because his infinite goodness and omnipotence imply that God must necessarily have made provisions to ensure that everything human beings need to fulfill their purposes is available to them. The problem with this argument, when applied to the issue of the existence of absolute truth, is that it clearly begs the fundamental question: one has to already assume that an absolute truth exists (namely, that an infinitely good and omnipotent God has created the world) in order to prove that absolute moral truths exists. Since the existence of such absolute moral truths is precisely what is called into question by the relativists in the first place, this cannot constitute a cogent argument against them. To be sure, there is another way in which the Church’s argument might be interpreted that would overcome this problem. This refers to the longstanding tradition of thought according to which religious belief ought to be fostered and defended independently of its truth because it exercises an indispensable civic function. The first author to make this point in modern times was of course Niccolò Machiavelli in Discourses of the First Decade of Livy. Rousseau also made a similar point, at a more abstract and general level, in The Social Contract. Finally, Tocqueville famously applied it to the United States in his treatise Democracy in America. If read in this light, the Church’s critique of relativism could perhaps be interpreted as a way of making an exclusively political point, independent from metaphysical concerns as to whether absolute truth actually exists or not: this point would be that a society founded on relativist premises would be incapable of preserving its unity and especially its freedom, because a reference to some idea of absolute truth is necessary to ensure obedience to authority, which is in turn a necessary condition for social order and indeed for the preservation of freedom. Irrespective of metaphysics, therefore, the claim would be that politics itself requires an orientation to some idea of absolute moral truth. The problem with this interpretation is that it relies on a conception of the relation between politics and metaphysics that the Church has always wanted to reject: as I have attempted to make clear through the analysis conducted in the previous chapter, part of the purpose of the Church’s discourse of anti-relativism has always been to assert that politics cannot be separated from metaphysics (and therefore implicitly theology), but must rather be subordinated to it. This is the reason why the Church has historically always been extremely skeptical of the arguments for civic religion

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advanced by authors such as Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Tocqueville: because behind the bracketing of the question of the truth of religion it has always perceived the looming threat of atheism. Indeed, from the internal perspective of faith, the idea that one should believe in God because it is useful rather than because it is true can only appear blasphemous and absurd. For the Catholic Church it has always been essential that the message of Christ be considered true. If that assumption could be put aside, then faith itself would seem to lose all its significance. The paradox therefore is that this interpretation of the Church’s critique of relativism as an argument for civic religion ends up relying on what appears as an irreligious conception of religion from the perspective of Christianity itself. The Problems Raised by the Question of Concerning the Content of Absolute Moral Truth

A further problem that also emerges in connection with the Church’s use of the notion of absolute moral truth as an antidote to the supposedly adverse political consequences of relativism is that even if the issue of the existence of absolute moral truth could indeed be bracketed, this would still not be sufficient to establish its content. In other words, even if it could be taken for granted that absolute moral truth exists, the further problem that the Church’s discourse would still seem to ignore is that of its interpretation. To know that truth exists is not the same thing as to know what it is, nor does the former provide any reason to suppose that the latter will be readily available. The reason why this problem is never even posed by the Church’s advocates is probably that the Catholic Church understands itself as the ultimate locus of authority in matters of interpretation of faith. In this way, the problem of interpretation is cast aside through an appeal to the principle of authority. However, from the perspective of the problem under consideration, this clearly begs the fundamental question once again, since the Church’s appeal to authority is itself based on the claim that it has privileged access to truth in the first place. Once this assumption is put aside and the fact is confronted that there may exist a plurality of different interpretations of absolute truth, it emerges that the reference to this notion is not sufficient to avoid any of the adverse political consequences that the Catholic discourse ascribes to relativism. On the contrary, the reference to an idea of absolute truth may actually

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have the effect of exacerbating those consequences. This is the point we already encountered through Dewey’s comment about the “reversed charge,” whereby anti-relativists often accuse their opponents of producing social effects of which the reference to an idea of absolute truth is more likely to be the cause. The reasoning underscoring this claim is that the correct interpretation of truth may easily turn out to be a contentious matter that does not necessarily produce agreement. Even between individuals or groups that are equally convinced that an absolute truth exists, there may remain irreconcilable disagreements as to what the content of this truth amounts to. Thus the reference to an idea of absolute truth does not necessarily have an aggregating social effect, but may also become the cause of conflict. Moreover, the conflicts that emerge over the correct interpretation of absolute truth are likely to be more acrimonious and divisive than those conducted within a relativist framework, because between two competing conceptions of truth no compromise is possible. Truth is an all-or-nothing affair: something is either true or false, no intermediate position is possible. The effect of truth is therefore always to make a distinction between those who know it and understand it on the one hand and those who don’t on the other. Moreover, since the opposite of truth is falsehood, the judgment that somebody lies on the other side already implies a condemnation. It would be absurd to try to understand or tolerate error. Therefore, the natural attitude of someone who reasons in terms of truth is to condemn those who think differently and do the utmost to convert them. This is amply demonstrated by the history of the Catholic Church itself and has even been codified in a formal principle: extra ecclesiam nulla salus. From a political point of view, the consequence is that the confrontation between two opposed conceptions of absolute truth is most likely to result in violent conflict, this being the last available resort to convert the other when no other means of compromise is possible. And it is in this sense that I claim that the reference to an idea of absolute moral truth may actually have the effect of exacerbating social conflict rather than overcoming it. The Confusion Between the Notion of Natural Law and Human Rights

When pressed to give at least an indication as to the content of the specific conception of absolute moral truth they hold to be necessary to regulate

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human affairs, the notion that the advocates of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism most often refer to is that of natural law. This has been a central element of the Church’s political doctrine at least since the time of Thomas Aquinas; however, it became the object of a renewed emphasis at the end of the nineteenth century and in particular with the papacy of Leo XIII, who, as we have seen, was also responsible for introducing the notion of relativism within the framework of the Church’s official discourse. From the start, therefore, natural law was posited as the specific antidote for the supposedly pernicious political consequences of moral relativism. While this may not appear to do much in the way of addressing the problems I have already raised, the reference to the notion of natural law does pose a number of additional complications that are worth briefly commenting upon in this context. The central feature of the neo-Thomism that the Church originally sought to oppose to the perceived moral and political dominance of relativism was the assumption that the natural order itself contains a set of absolute normative commandments, willed by God and accessible to human beings through the faculty of reason. Nature was therefore assumed to constitute a rational and meaningful order, consciously designed in the pursuit of specific ends. The implication was that norms are not opposed to facts, but are rather derived from them in the first place: this is the essence of the classical Christian doctrine of natural law. Interestingly over the course of the twentieth century, this classical conception was problematized by the Catholic Church itself. The fundamental objection against it was formulated very cogently by Cardinal Ratzinger in the context of his debate with Jürgen Habermas, which I have already mentioned in the previous chapter: “The idea of natural law presupposed a concept of ‘nature’ in which nature and reason interlock. The victory of the theory of evolution has meant the end of this view of nature. According to this theory, which seems to go broadly unchallenged today, nature per se is not rational, although it does contain rational behavior.” In light of this recognition, the task that is assumed to befall the Catholic Church is to reformulate the original truth contained in the classical notion of natural law in a way that makes it comprehensible and acceptable to the modern mentality, predicated on the assumption that nature is constituted merely by a set of physical phenomena, interacting with one another, without any overarching purpose. The way in which Ratzinger has attempted to do this is by reformulating the traditional doctrine of natural law in terms of the notion of human rights. The latter have therefore progressively been posited

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as the new, more timely antidote to the pernicious political consequences assumed to be tied to relativism. Once again, the clearest formulation of the argument was provided by Cardinal Ratzinger in the context of his debate with Habermas: “By natural law on the deepest level and in the modern period was meant rational law. Its last surviving element is human rights. These are incomprehensible without the presupposition that man as such, in virtue of the simple fact that he belongs to the species ‘man,’ is a subject of rights.” As we have already seen in the previous chapter, the key claim here is that even though the theory of evolution has rendered obsolete the idea that nature constitutes a rational system as a whole, it has not yet excluded the idea that nature might contain some rational elements within it, most notably, human beings. On this basis, Ratzinger suggests that human rights can be considered the last remaining element of the classical conception of natural law that is still acceptable to the modern mentality. The implication of this argument is that the classical conception of natural law as a law implicit in the order of nature itself has not really been abandoned by the Catholic Church, but simply restricted to a doctrine of human rights, which are accordingly reinterpreted as a form of natural law in the classical sense. This emerges even more clearly from the encyclical Pacem in Terris, promulgated by Pope John XXIII, which was the first official document in which the Catholic Church explicitly accepted the validity of the notion of human rights: By the natural law every human being has the right to respect for his person, to his good reputation; the right to freedom in searching for truth and in expressing and communicating his opinions, and in pursuit of art, within the limits laid down by the moral order and the common good.  .  .  . Once this is admitted, it also follows that in human society to one man’s right there corresponds a duty in all other persons: the duty, namely, of acknowledging and respecting the right in question. For every fundamental human right draws its indestructible moral force from the natural law, which in granting it imposes a corresponding obligation.

In this passage, human rights are explicitly treated as a form of natural law, in the classical Thomistic sense. My contention, however, is that this way of defining the notion poses a number of conceptual problems, both from

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the point of view of its internal coherence and from the point of view of its capacity to respond to the concern raised by Ratzinger, which is the reason why the classical notion of natural law was challenged in the first place. To illustrate this, it might be useful to start by recalling the conceptual difference that has historically been assumed to exist between the notion of a right and that of a law. According to the classical tradition of Roman jurisprudence, a right (ius) is defined essentially as an entitlement: the capacity, or rather the liberty, of doing something. Such a notion does not presuppose any prior authority to be operative and may accordingly be assumed to exist in nature even if nature is not assumed to consist in a rational and meaningful order. A law (lex), on the other hand, involves a commandment: it is an obligation to do something and therefore a limitation on one’s freedom. Moreover, contrary to the idea of a right, such a notion presupposes the existence of a prior authority to legitimate it and enforce it and accordingly cannot exist in nature if this is not assumed to be an intrinsically rational and meaningful order. Traditionally, the Catholic Church had both recognized and upheld this distinction. This is the reason why its political doctrine was formulated in terms of the notion of natural law and not natural right: because the point was to reaffirm the importance of obedience to an absolute authority expressed through a set of commandments implicit in the order of nature itself. Indeed, when the notion of natural rights first began to be formulated at the beginning of modernity, and especially when it took the concrete political form of a series of declarations of human rights, the Church vigorously opposed it. Natural rights and especially human rights were seen (and this not only by their critics) as a threat to the absolute authority of the Catholic Church and its conception of natural law. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, this initial opposition was played down and, as we have seen, the classical doctrine of natural law was reformulated as a doctrine of human rights. Effectively, therefore, the notions of natural law and natural right were conflated with each other. This poses a problem, first of all, for the internal coherence of the notion of human rights themselves, because the original significance of the notion of a right is entirely effaced: intended as a guarantee of freedom, it has been made into a foundation for authority. It is not clear, therefore, what remains of the idea that human rights are entitlements once these are translated into absolute commandments assumed to be derived from a transcendent source.

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More importantly, however, what appears even more problematic is that the original reason why the classical notion of natural law was abandoned in the first place is not really addressed by this translation. By being understood as elements of natural law, human rights are assumed to be intrinsic in the nature of human beings themselves. In this way, nature is still implicitly assumed to constitute a rational and meaningful order: the only difference is that the assumption has been shifted from the natural order as a whole to the specific nature of man in particular. The conception of nature that was taken to be problematic has therefore not been overcome but simply displaced. Another way of putting this is that the Church’s contemporary emphasis on the notion of human rights as an antidote to the supposedly pernicious political consequences of relativism functions merely as a cover for the persistence of the reference to the classical notion of natural law, which the Church itself has nonetheless already rejected as problematic and unacceptable to the modern mentality. In light of this contradiction, it seems unclear, and indeed doubtful, whether the specific conception of human rights as a form of natural law is capable of providing an adequate alternative to the relativism the Church has been seeking to attack.

THE CONCEPT OF AUTHORITY The Relationship Between the Notion of Authority and That of Truth

The next aspect of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism I will focus on and examine critically concerns its use of the concept of authority. This is closely tied to the Church’s use and defense of the concept of truth. Indeed, as I have already pointed out, the whole body of Catholic discourse devoted to the critique of relativism can be read as a way of reaffirming the importance of the concept of authority in the political domain. For this reason, it is worthwhile to establish precisely what the Church means by this concept and in what respect it can be criticized. When the notion of authority is mentioned in the documents where the Church addresses the issue of relativism, it is usually in connection with the problem of establishing the conditions for social unity and stability. As we have seen, relativism is assumed to lead to a dissolution of the grounds for social integration, while the reference to some idea of absolute truth is

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taken to be necessary to preserve it. The specific reason why truth is assumed to have this integrating social function, however, is that it is taken to be the only possible foundation for a system of authority among human beings, and no social order is taken to be possible without the existence of a unifying authority. Moreover, since both authority and truth are ultimately assumed to require the sanction of a transcendent God, the problem of social unity and stability becomes the grounds for a reassertion of the importance of a reference to the religious dimension in the political domain. Religion, authority, and truth therefore prove to be inextricably connected with one another, at the heart of the political vision that the Catholic Church seeks to oppose to relativism. It is this tight trinity that I shall attempt to penetrate and discuss critically over the course of this section. A useful starting point might be the typology of different conceptions of authority proposed by Hannah Arendt in the essay titled “What Is Authority?,” where Arendt demonstrates that the specific concept of authority on which the Catholic Church has historically relied draws primarily from a Platonic heritage, according to which the legitimacy of political rule is ultimately based on the access to a privileged domain of truth. The metaphors Plato uses to illustrate his conception of the grounds for the legitimacy of rule by the philosopher-kings are, for example, those of the “shepherd,” the “physician,” and the “helmsman.” In each case, a position of authority is therefore justified with reference to a presupposition that the person in authority has access to some superior knowledge that those subject to authority cannot as easily obtain. These are also the metaphors that the Church has traditionally used to justify its own position of authority. Thus its conception of authority proves to depend logically on the assumption that there exists some higher domain of truth pertinent to the organization of human affairs, to which the Church is further assumed to have a privileged access. Parallel to this platonic conception of authority, Arendt notes, there exists another conception, which derives from the Roman juridical tradition. This is not based on the idea of truth, but on the categories of contract law: two individuals can agree to sign a contract whereby one counts as the author of the actions of the other, and the latter can accordingly be said to act with authority over the former. This is, of course, the etymological origin of the term “authority” itself (which is accordingly of Latin heritage, not Greek), and this is also the specific sense in which Hobbes uses the term in the formula auctoritas non veritas facit legem.

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The argument Hobbes uses to justify this proposition in Leviathan is pertinent in this context because it has to do with the conditions for the establishment and preservation of social unity and stability. Hobbes’s claim is that the passage from the disaggregated state of the “multitude” (in which the “war of all against all” is taken to be inevitable) to the unified state of the “commonwealth” (which is taken to be the condition for peace and order among human beings) is possible only if the separate individuals sign a contract with one another whereby they all agree to count as the authors of the actions of a given third party. In this way a common authority is created which can keep them all “in awe,” because if anyone were to refuse to obey it, he or she would effectively be violating a contract with everybody else and thereby incur in the revenge of their several forces, allied with one another. From this analysis it accordingly emerges that there also exist two competing conceptions of the grounds for social order and stability, which run parallel to the two conceptions of authority identified and distinguished by Hannah Arendt. The first sees the social order as something inherent in the natural order of things willed by God and therefore as ultimately founded on some idea of religious truth. The latter, on the other hand, sees the social order as something artificial, created by human beings themselves, on the basis of their reciprocal agreements with one another, and therefore independently of any idea of religious truth. To some extent, this recognition is already sufficient to undermine the Church’s conception of the grounds for social unity and stability, because it shows that a social order can, at least in principle, be founded on a conception of authority that does not necessarily need to be tied to the notions of religion and truth. This calls into question the trinity posited by the Church as a condition for social order and stability: authority, religion, and truth. Once this trinity is called into question, the whole edifice of the Church’s argument with respect to the notion of authority also begins to appear doubtful, because one of the fundamental premises on which this argument relies—namely, that the reference to a religious conception of truth is a necessary presupposition of social order and stability—appears unjustified. A Democratic Theory of Authority

To point at Hobbes as a counterexample is, however, not sufficient to fully question the specific conception of authority on which the Church’s discourse of anti-relativism is predicated. In what follows, I will attempt to go

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further by also questioning an aspect that the Church’s conception appears to have in common with Hobbes’s. This will offer the grounds for advancing what I take to be a properly democratic conception of authority through a more sustained confrontation with the work of Hannah Arendt. The hope is that this will help to lay the grounds for the specific theory of democracy that I will then seek to oppose to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism in the last chapter of this book. The essential aspect that Hobbes’s conception of authority has in common with the Church’s is the assumption that social unity is only possible through the recognition of a common pole of exteriority, functioning as a sort of unifying pole among different individuals: in other words, that social unity requires the figure of a tiers totalisateur standing above the social order itself and keeping it together in virtue of the authority exercised over it. This is an assumption that I believe can be questioned, and that indeed must be overcome if the concept of democracy is to be taken seriously. To do this, a useful starting point is to examine a little more closely the notion of a social contract on which the two notions of authority I have been attempting to contrast are based. It is by now almost a commonplace that the notion of a social contract has been used over the course of its history to refer to two rather different ideas: on the one hand, the idea of a pactum unionis, whereby isolated individuals reciprocally contract with one another to form a social unit in the first place; on the other hand, the idea of a pactum subiectionis whereby an already constituted political entity agrees to submit to the authority of a government. Conceptually, these two notions are entirely distinct and independent from each other; however, the idea that the passage from the isolated state of the “multitude” to the unified state of the “commonwealth” is possible only through a process of submission to a higher authority standing above the social order itself effectively conflates the two. This is not exclusively a feature of Hobbes’s thought; it is also a presupposition of the way in which the Catholic Church has employed the notion of authority in the context of the formulation of its critique of relativism. The reason is that even though, as we have seen, the Church holds the social order to be something natural, it also believes that its unity can be preserved only by being subordinated to a higher authority assumed to stand above the social order itself. The element of commonality between Hobbes’s and the Church’s respective conceptions of authority can therefore also be understood as the conflation of the two different conceptions of the social

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contract: social unity is assumed to be possible only through subjection to a higher authority standing above the social order, and therefore the idea of a pactum unionis is effectively subsumed under that of a pactum subiectionis. What I would like to suggest, however, is that this conflation is neither logically necessary nor argumentatively justified: it is an arbitrary assumption introduced dogmatically for the purposes of justifying a specific political project, but which has no solid argumentative basis. The idea of a pactum unionis constituted horizontally through the reciprocal agreements among human beings is sustainable on its own and does not need to be tied to the idea of a pactum subiectionis introducing the vertical dimension of the distinction between rulers and ruled. The former idea can therefore be taken as the foundation for a conception of the social order that is constituted independently of the notion of authority itself, or rather, to put it in a different way, as the foundation for a different conception of authority, which does not work top-down but bottom-up. Such a conception of the grounds for the stability of a social order has been forcefully articulated and defended by Hannah Arendt both in her essay on “What Is Authority?” and in her book On Revolution. To discuss her work in a little more detail may therefore help to clarify it further and also preemptively respond to some potential objections. In the book On Revolution, Arendt identifies the United States as a concrete example of a society originally constituted through the reciprocal promises and agreements between the constituent members: It has been said that America’s debt to the idea of a social contract is so huge as to defy measurement. . . . Since the colonial covenants had originally been made without any reference to King or Prince, it was as though the Revolution liberated the power of covenant and constitution-making which had shown itself since the earliest days of colonization. The unique and all-decisive distinction between the settlements of North America and all other colonial enterprises was that only the British immigrants had insisted from the start to constitute themselves into “civil bodies politick.” These bodies, moreover, were not conceived as governments, strictly speaking; they did not imply the division into rulers and ruled. . . . What prompted the colonists “solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one another to covenant and combine ourselves into a civil body politick” . . . was the simple insight into the elementary structure of joint enterprise as such, the need for “the better

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encouragement of ourselves and others that shall joyne with us in this action” (as the Mayflower Compact has it).

To be sure, the historical accuracy of Arendt’s reconstruction of the early colonists’ experience, and especially her account of the reasons for their success, has been called into question. However, that is not what is at stake here. The interesting point Arendt puts forward is of a theoretical nature, and concerns the conceptual separability and independence of the two traditional conceptions of the social contract. The relevance of the passage is therefore that it shows that the assumption the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism shares with Hobbes’s conception of authority—namely, that social unity is possible only through a process of subjection to a higher authority assumed to stand above the social order itself—is not really justified. A stable and unified social order can, at least in principle, be constructed on a different basis: the reciprocal promises and agreements between the individuals concerned. This conception of a pactum unionis can therefore be taken as an alternative vision to the Church’s conception of the grounds for social unity and stability, which is arbitrarily excluded by the Catholic Church because it clearly undermines the premise that the reference to a higher locus of authority standing above the social order itself is a necessary condition for social unity and stability. If it is true that human societies can constitute themselves bottom-up, through the reciprocal promises and agreements among their members, then it appears to follow that the Church’s insistence on the idea that a reference to a pole of authority standing above the social order is a necessary condition for social unity and stability is merely a way of covering up the alternatives, perhaps to defend the specific positions of privilege and authority that depend upon it. To be sure, an objection that might be raised against this alternative conception of the grounds for social unity is that it is not really self-sufficient because the notion of a promise itself requires an external sanction and can only be considered credible if there already exists a higher authority to legitimate it. This is a version of the standard objection often made against all social contract theories, according to which there is an irreducible element of circularity in the idea of founding authority on the reciprocal promises of human beings, because the credibility of promises itself already supposes the existence of a prior authority to legitimate and enforce them in the first place.

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This objection would appear to be substantiated by the fact that even the British colonists, which Hannah Arendt takes as the paradigmatic example of her conception of a form of authority constituted bottom-up, felt the need to make reference to the higher authority of God in order to sanction their reciprocal promises to one another: the portion of the text of the Mayflower Compact that Arendt herself cites explicitly mentions that its signatories intended the compact to be signed “in the presence of God.” This would seem to call into question the self-sufficiency of the specific conception of authority Arendt seeks to posit as an alternative to the Christian idea that authority flows top-down from a transcendent source. For the former would seem to be logically dependent on the latter: they are reciprocal promises based on the commonly recognized authority of God. In fact, however, Arendt proves to have a response to this potential objection: “whereas the act of subjection accomplished by each individual in isolation stands indeed only ‘in the presence of God,’ the act of mutual promise by which people bind themselves together to form a community is by definition enacted ‘in the presence of one another’; it is in principle independent of religious sanction.” The key point here seems to rely once again on the distinction between the two kinds of social contract. Arendt is arguing that since the pactum subiectionis effectively deprives one party of all the means of controlling the other, it can only be considered credible and sustainable if there is a higher authority to guarantee it. Because the pactum unionis involves reciprocal advantages for both parties it does not require any higher authority to enforce it. For the purposes of the present discussion, the relevance of this point is that it shows that human societies can be constituted through a pactum unionis, without necessarily presupposing a higher authority to sanction the original pact itself. This confirms the point that I have already made: that the Church’s claim according to which the reference to a tiers totalisateur standing above the social order itself is a necessary condition for social unity and stability is unwarranted. Another objection that might be raised against this reference to Arendt as a way of bringing out the arbitrariness of some of the premises of the Catholic Church’s use of the concept of authority is that in the final chapter of her book On Revolution Arendt herself complicates her analysis of the reasons for the success and stability of the social contract model, introducing the idea of a “cult of the founding moment” as a necessary supplement to the idea of an order founded through the reciprocal promises and

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agreements of its members. This is tied to her idea that in Roman antiquity the concept of authority was understood not only as a contractual relation, but also as a means of preserving and augmenting the inherited tradition of the founding moment of the Roman republic itself. In this way, Arendt concedes, a religious dimension is indeed introduced into her conception of the grounds for the stability of the pactum unionis, because the Founding Fathers are thereby elevated somewhat above the plane of ordinary human beings, becoming the object of an almost religious reverence. Once again, therefore, it would appear that the model of a society constituted exclusively through the reciprocal promises and agreements of its members is not sustainable on its own, but requires an additional sanction tied to a different conception of authority—this time not exercised top-down, but rather backward, through the reference to a sacralized founding moment. My contention, however, is that this additional conceptual apparatus introduced by Arendt in the last part of her book On Revolution is not necessary to make the idea of a pactum unionis sustainable on its own. As Arendt herself points out, its function is primarily to establish a distinction between a purely democratic conception of the grounds for social unity and a republican one. The reason why she ultimately chooses to come down on the side of the latter is that this is more true to the historical experience of the United States, and it therefore may be considered one of the reasons for the success of the American Revolution in particular. From a more general perspective, however, there seems to be another way of getting around the concern that an order founded exclusively on the reciprocal promises and agreements among its members might turn out to be unstable. This is based on an embracing of the dynamic quality of the idea of a social contract itself: instead of being understood merely as a starting point and then sacralized into the object of a cult, the social contract can be understood as an iterated practice, constantly renewed through an ongoing process of negotiation among the members of a social order. In this way social unity would be paradoxically guaranteed by the fact that it can constantly be called into question, according to a set of procedures defined by the members themselves, but is also always open to being revised. This appears to be the idea defended by Norberto Bobbio in the writings where he has described democracy as a form of society founded on the routinization of the idea of the social contract. In the book The Future of Democracy, for example, Bobbio writes that “the topicality of social con-

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tract theories for a theory of democracy stems from the fact that democratic societies can be understood as societies in which the bulk of decisions are arrived at via negotiations which finish in agreements, in other words where the social contract is no longer a rational hypothesis, but a practical instrument of government in everyday use. . . . Proceeding from this premise, society becomes an artificial entity, a joint undertaking the plans for which need to be constantly formulated and reformulated, a project which is never definitive but needs to undergo constant revision.” If there is anything like a vision of human society and the grounds for its unity and stability that I think could be profitably opposed to the conception of the social order implicit in the Church’s use of the notion of authority, it would have to be something akin to the one articulated in this passage. Indeed, it is precisely this intuition—the idea of a society constituted bottom-up, without reference to any higher authority standing above the social order itself—that I will attempt to work out more fully in the last chapter of this book, where I will attempt to defend a conception of democracy founded on the idea of legal positivism. For the time being, however, it is necessary to first complete the critique of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism by moving on to consider another aspect: the way in which it employs the concept of freedom.

THE MEANING OF FREEDOM A Case of Conceptual Manipulation

To discuss the use made of the concept of freedom by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism is interesting because it illustrates a recurrent rhetorical strategy employed by the Church to deal with its intellectual opponents. This strategy consists in appropriating one’s opponent’s terms and redefining them in order to make them express one’s own position, thereby making it more difficult for the opponent to formulate his own. In this way, the outward appearance of a higher synthesis is produced; however, in reality, the disagreement is only displaced and made more difficult to perceive. To be sure, there are some deep theological grounds for such an operation implicit in Catholic doctrine, since the Church has always understood its mission to be that of adapting the original message delivered to it by Jesus Christ to the specific conditions of the age in order to help human beings understand it more fully and thereby move along the path toward final

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redemption. A certain plasticity in the vocabulary employed by the Catholic Church is therefore a logical consequence of its self-understanding. A distinction must nonetheless be drawn between such an attempt at linguistic adaptation (which, in the final analysis, is oriented toward the goal of furthering reciprocal understanding) and what I will call a case of conceptual manipulation (which, on the contrary, has the effect of confusing the meaning of terms and therefore of making it more difficult to reach an understanding). This idea that there may exist a manipulative use of concepts does not necessarily have to rely on a naturalistic theory, according to which terms have a fixed and necessary meaning. It is sufficient to recognize that the terms we use to communicate have a historical consistency, that is, a set of meanings and connotations that are accumulated over time and not open to being changed arbitrarily. The right to define one’s terms is therefore not absolute. There is always already a given semantic core to the terms we employ, which can certainly be modified and made more complex over time, but which cannot be reinvented arbitrarily, unless one’s intention is precisely to create confusion instead of striving toward understanding. The concept of freedom, for example, has historically been understood in the Western tradition in connection with the notion of autonomy, that is, with the idea that a free subject must be able to decide his own actions for himself, without suffering interference from extraneous forces of whatever kind. Of course, a lot of discussion has gone into defining what counts as a subject and an extraneous force in the first place. However, this or something close to it has been the inherited semantic core of the concept of freedom in the Western tradition. That this semantic core has a substance is proved by the fact that it has an opposite, something it is incompatible with: in the Western tradition, freedom has historically been understood as the opposite of obedience, that is, of having one’s actions determined by somebody else. One may of course freely decide to obey, but there the element of freedom lies in the fact that the subject chooses to have his actions determined by somebody else. This element of freedom would accordingly be removed the moment the subject ceased to want to obey and the determination of his actions by somebody else became coercive. Far from being extraneous to this tradition of understanding of the concept of freedom, the Catholic Church has contributed actively to its development. The concept of freedom of will on which the Christian faith has always been predicated refers precisely to the idea that the individual is

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responsible for choosing his own course of action. According to Christian moral theology, God is assumed to have established the moral law and to have instilled in man the capacity for knowing it through the faculty of conscience; however, in the final analysis, it is up to the individual to decide whether to conform to it in his actions. This is the basis for the doctrine that man will be judged for his actions and either punished or rewarded accordingly in the afterlife. The Christian concept of freedom of the will therefore proves to correspond to the capacity for choosing whether to act in conformity with the moral law posited by God or not. The core intuition here is precisely the same one I identified as corresponding to the semantic core of the concept of freedom in the Western tradition: to be free means to be able to determine one’s own behavior on one’s own, without interference from external forces. If God had designed human beings in a way that made them incapable of disobeying the moral law, they couldn’t really be considered free. Moreover, it is essential, from a Christian perspective, that human beings also be considered free when they decide to disobey the moral law, because that is the basis on which they can be held responsible for it and therefore judged in the afterlife. While the Church has traditionally considered this notion of freedom of the will very important at the level of morality, in the sphere of politics it has traditionally not considered freedom to be an equally important value. As we have seen in the first two chapters of this book, through the second half of the twentieth century, political freedom was primarily considered a dangerous idea, destructive of the social order. In the encyclical Quanta Cura—promulgated by Pius IX in 1864, and to which the notorious Syllabus of Errors was added as an appendix—the following proposition is, for example, condemned as incompatible with the Christian faith: “a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority, whether ecclesiastical or civil.” In this political sense, freedom is understood essentially as the capacity for human beings to collectively determine the laws to which they are supposed to be subject, in other words, to create their own political norms as a political entity. Its opposite is assumed to be the notion of authority, that is, the idea that human beings must receive their political norms from a higher source. Thus the reason why the Church has historically been opposed to the recognition of freedom as a political value proves to be that it has always relied on a conception of society according to which social unity

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and stability are only possible if all its members are subjected to a higher authority, assumed to be situated above the social order itself. I have already discussed this specific conception of authority in the previous section of this chapter; what I would like to point out now is that this conception was traditionally assumed to be opposed to the notion of freedom. This opposition is also the reason why the historical enemies of the Catholic Church could still unproblematically frame their arguments in terms of the concept of freedom: because the twentieth-century debate was organized precisely around this structuring opposition, the Church defending the principle of authority, on the one hand, and its opponents advocating for freedom, on the other. As we have also seen through the analysis conducted in the previous chapter, however, the return to prominence of the discourse of anti-relativism (which began in the last decades of the twentieth century) was tied to a reconsideration of the normative significance of the value of political freedom by the Catholic Church. The Vatican progressively came to accept freedom as a political as well as moral value, although it was made clear that this acceptance was conditioned on a specific understanding of the meaning of the term. This operation is most clearly visible in the work of the pope who brought it to completion: John Paul II. A large part of the encyclical Veritatis Splendor is devoted to a discussion of the concept of freedom. The argument proceeds by establishing a distinction between two different conceptions of the idea of freedom. What John Paul II calls the relativist conception of freedom is defined as the idea that freedom has “no content.” This is supposed to imply that human beings must be allowed to do “whatever they want” in the name of the principle of freedom, an idea that is judged to be “self-defeating” because it establishes no absolute limits to what individuals may legitimately do to one another and therefore runs the risk of “converting freedom into a form of oppression.” What John Paul II calls the Christian conception of freedom, on the other hand, is defined in terms of the precept attributed to Jesus Christ according to which “the truth shall make you free.” The pope explicates this precept by suggesting that the concept of freedom can only properly be understood by clarifying who is the self that is supposed to be self-determined according to the principle of autonomy. According to the Christian conception of man, John Paul II adds, human beings were created “in the image of God.” This means that God is not taken to be something external to man, but rather something intrinsically embedded in his own nature.

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From this, John Paul II deduces that when human beings obey the commandments of God they are not really submitting to an extraneous authority, but rather complying with the highest part of their own intrinsic nature. Thus to obey God’s commandments in the form of the moral law is not a form of unfreedom, but the realization of the principle of autonomy itself. Any other mode of behavior would imply being determined by the lower parts of our nature and therefore in a sense not being fully free. In this way, John Paul II effectively manages to overcome the conflict historically posited by the Catholic Church between the idea of freedom and that of authority. Obedience and freedom therefore become synonymous in John Paul II’s conception, as is illustrated clearly by the following passage: The modern concern for the claims of autonomy has not failed to exercise an influence also in the sphere of Catholic moral theology. While the latter has certainly never attempted to set human freedom against the divine law or to question the existence of an ultimate religious foundation for moral norms, it has, nonetheless, been led to undertake a profound rethinking about the role of reason and of faith in identifying moral norms. . . . The rightful autonomy of the practical reason means that man possesses in himself his own law, received from the Creator. Hence obedience to God is not, as some would believe, a heteronomy, as if the moral life were subject to the will of something all-powerful, absolute, extraneous to man and intolerant of his freedom.  .  .  . Others speak, and rightly so, of theonomy, or participated theonomy, since man’s free obedience to God’s law effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in God’s wisdom and providence.

While recognizing its astuteness, I nonetheless judge this argument to amount to a form of conceptual manipulation, because it effectively inverts the meaning traditionally ascribed to the concept of freedom. By its logic, to be free ultimately means to obey the will of God, encapsulated in the moral law. Obedience accordingly ceases to be the opposite of freedom and becomes its essential core. On the other hand, doing “whatever one wants” is posited as the opposite of the genuine concept of freedom. Thus what used to be the semantic core of the concept of freedom is now posited as its opposite. From a strictly theological point of view, this argument appears problematic because it would seem to imply that one cannot be considered

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genuinely free when one does not obey the moral law. This makes it difficult to sustain the doctrine that we will all be judged for our mistakes in the afterlife, since, as I have already pointed out, this doctrine depends upon the assumption that we are personally responsible for our choices, even when we end up doing something wrong. What I am most interested in pointing out in this context, however, is that the argument also appears problematic from a more broadly political point of view, because it effectively deprives the enemies of the Catholic Church of the terms to formulate their own position. To attack the Church’s appeal to the principle of authority in the name of freedom becomes impossible because this opposition itself has been rendered meaningless by the idea that freedom consists in obedience to the higher authority of God. The Church is thereby able to claim that it recognizes the principle of freedom as a political value too. However, if what one wants to contest is precisely the idea that social order ought to be created through obedience to a higher authority, one is left without terms to formulate one’s own position. To be sure, John Paul II does offer a term to refer to the view that freedom does not consist in obedience to a higher authority: relativism. As we have seen, however, this term is defined in such a way that it immediately turns out to be self-defeating. What is effectively carved out from the meaning of the concept of freedom is therefore precisely the idea that this term had originally been used to advance in the political domain: that human beings ought to be able to make publicly binding decisions collectively, through a process of reciprocal confrontation with one another in other words, that human beings ought to create their own moral values, instead of receiving them from a higher authority. This was the semantic core of the political concept of freedom, as it was traditionally understood even by the Catholic Church itself, but it is also precisely what has been made impossible to articulate by the Church’s redefinition of it. It is in this sense, therefore, that I consider this redefinition a case of conceptual manipulation: because, instead of seeking to further understanding, it confuses the meaning traditionally attached to the term in order to make it more difficult for the Church’s enemies to formulate their own position. In this respect, it might be useful to recall a powerful point that was already made by Isaiah Berlin, in his characteristically pithy manner, in his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Although the specific target of his critique was not the Church’s manipulative use of the concept of freedom in particu-

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lar, at least one famous passage from that essay appears applicable to it, in light of what I have attempted to bring out: Everything is what it is. Liberty is liberty, not equality, or fairness, or justice, or culture, or human happiness, or a quiet conscience. . . . I can, like the Russian critic Belinsky, say that, if others are deprived of it, if my brothers are to remain in squalor, poverty or chains, then I do not want it for myself, I reject it with both hands and infinitely prefer their fate. But nothing is gained by a confusion in terms. To avoid glaring inequality or widespread misery I am ready to sacrifice some or all of my freedom: I may do so willingly and freely, but it is freedom I am giving up for the sake of something else. The Inscription of Freedom Within a Hierarchical Structure of Value Spheres

A further problem that is also worth commenting on is tied to the idea that freedom requires a content, that is, that it is not only possible but also necessary to establish a priori what concrete kinds of behavior can count as exercises of freedom and what others cannot. From what I have already established thus far, it should be clear that this is a contradiction in terms: if to be free means to choose for oneself how one will act, then it is not possible to determine a priori what concrete kinds of behavior count as exercises of freedom, because that would mean that free acts are subordinated to a different logic from that of the autonomous will of the free subject. What I am interested in considering further, however, is the specific argument employed by the Catholic Church to justify this paradoxical idea that freedom must have a content. This argument is spelled out most clearly by Cardinal Ratzinger in the article “What Is Truth? The Significance of Ethical and Religious Values in a Pluralist Society.” In that context, the future pope addresses the issue head on by asserting that “if the individual freedom presented here as the highest goal lacks content, it dissolves into thin air, since individual freedom can only exist when freedoms are correctly ordered. Individual freedom needs measure, for otherwise it turns into violence directed against others. . . . Thus, freedom requires contents. We can define it as the safeguarding of human rights, but we can also describe it more broadly as the guarantee that things will go well both with society and with the individual.”

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The central claim here seems to be that freedom requires a content because otherwise it runs the risk of posing a threat for other values, in particular the value of peace (the opposite of “violence”) and of harmony (the idea that everything should “go well, both with society and the individual”). John Paul II can be interpreted as expressing essentially the same point when he asserts that a relativistic conception of freedom is self-defeating, because this basically means that such a conception of freedom could enter into contradiction with itself, if, for example, an individual or a group freely decided to forgo its own freedom, submitting to the tyranny of somebody else. The overarching assumption accordingly seems to be that all values must be able to be situated within an axiological order, regulating their reciprocal relations in a coherent and organized manner. Such a conception of the relation between value spheres corresponds to the Christian assumption that all value spheres are ultimately derived from the absolute authority of God, who has accordingly established their reciprocal relations in advance. To impose a content on the idea of freedom therefore proves to be a way of limiting it from inside in order to make it compatible with such a conception of the axiological order and therefore admissible within the overarching framework of Christianity. The problem with this assumption, however, is that it is introduced arbitrarily from outside: it does not stem from the internal logic of the principle of freedom itself. On the contrary, from this perspective, there seems to be no reason to suppose that freedom should be consistent with other values, such as peace or the idea that everything should “go well, both with society and the individual.” At the limit, there is not even any reason to suppose that freedom must be consistent with itself in the sense implied by John Paul II’s critique: if people were to decide to exercise their freedom in a way that prevents them from being free in the future, this would just mean that this specific exercise of their freedom would be their last, but not that it wouldn’t be an exercise of freedom in the first place. Thus it is not freedom that requires a content, but the Church’s project of inscribing it within its own hierarchical system of values, which introduces this necessity from outside. The paradox involved in the idea that the content of a free action can be determined logically a priori therefore proves to be not a consequence of the meaning traditionally ascribed to the concept of freedom itself, but rather the result of the Church’s own contradictory goals with respect to it. Once again, this point can perhaps be made by recalling a passage from Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Freedom”:

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To assume that all values can be graded on one scale, so that it is a mere matter of inspection to determine the highest, seems to me to falsify our knowledge that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another. . . . In the end, men choose between ultimate values; they choose as they do because their life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that are, at any rate over large stretches of time and space, and whatever their ultimate origins, a part of their being and thought and sense of their own identity; part of what makes them human.

This passage is pertinent in the present context because it clearly articulates a conception of value pluralism that does not inscribe freedom within an overarching system of values organized by a unitary logic. Conflicts between values are assumed to be possible, and in principle it is also recognized that freedom can enter into conflict with itself. This possibility, however, appears to be arbitrarily excluded by the Catholic Church in its justification for the claim that freedom requires content, since this proves to be based on the assumption that freedom must be inscribed within an overarching order of values that are all reciprocally consistent with one another and hierarchically organized in terms of a unitary logic. In the last chapter of this book, I will attempt to ground a conception of democracy in similar intellectual premises: my defense of relativism will be based on the assumption that in a democratic society conflicts between values not only can but must be assumed to be possible. I should, however, make clear right away that in that discussion I will not accept Berlin’s definition of the concept of freedom as definitive. The reason is that the overarching purpose of Berlin’s argument in “Two Concepts of Liberty” was to dissociate the concept of freedom from that of democracy in service of a Cold War aim of discrediting the socialist’s claim to be fighting for freedom. What I will attempt to show, on the other hand, is that the philosophical premises which underscore Berlin’s value pluralism can actually function as the foundation for a justification of the democratic principle. This will require a revision of Berlin’s definition of the concept of freedom, which is intended to show that the democratic principle of self-government can be reconciled with the liberal principle of limited interference, because the idea of freedom as self-determination can be limited by the logic of its own exercise.

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For the time being, however, all that I mean to establish through the reference to Berlin is that freedom does not need to be made compatible with all other human values according to its own internal logic. Thus it can afford to be defined purely formally in terms of the idea of choosing for oneself one’s own conduct, without any concrete content being specified a priori. This is the deepest point of contention between the specific conception of freedom advanced by the Catholic Church and the one I will attempt to defend in the last chapter of this book.

THE NOTION OF TOTALITARIANISM The Moralization of Politics

The last aspect of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism I will focus upon and examine critically concerns its use of the notion of totalitarianism. As I already pointed out in the previous chapter of this book, this notion has been employed by the Catholic Church in the context of the formulation of its critique of relativism essentially as a figure of absolute political evil, whose function has been to wrap up the reductio ad absurdum of the political consequences assumed to follow from the acceptance of relativism as a philosophical starting point. To be sure, in the first part of the history of the discourse of antirelativism, the term that was still primarily used to refer to the ultimate and most threatening political consequence of relativism was not exactly “totalitarianism” but rather “communism” or “socialism.” As I have also already pointed out in the previous chapter, however, the function exercised by these terms was essentially analogous to that exercised by the notion of totalitarianism afterward: taking for granted that they represented political abominations, the Church used them to reduce to absurdity any political doctrine that could be, even remotely, connected to them. There are a number of related reasons why this mode of argumentation may appear problematic. First, it effectively spares the Church the burden of demonstrating the negative valence of the political consequences of the view it intends to criticize. For example, when it is claimed that relativism is dangerous because it leads to totalitarianism it is not necessary to engage in a detailed analysis of what the actual political consequences of adopting relativism as a philosophical standpoint are likely to be, because the negative valence attached to the notion of totalitarianism is already taken for

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granted, and therefore relativism can be immediately rejected out of hand on the basis of this association. Moreover, the grounds for the conceptual link that is established between the view that is being criticized and totalitarianism are often very tenuous and vague, as in the idea that relativism is connected to totalitarianism because it implies that it is impossible to specify any a priori limits to the exercise of political power. The relationship that is thereby established does not involve any sort of conceptual necessity: at most, it shows that a totalitarian regime could in principle emerge out of a situation in which relativism was taken as the foundation for politics. However, this abstract possibility is immediately treated as a necessity, and relativism is rejected on those grounds. What makes this possible is that totalitarianism is inflated into such a threatening menace that anything which could even remotely be found to possibly lead to it must immediately be treated as if it necessarily implied it. Moreover, since human affairs are always much more complicated than abstract logic, anything could in principle be shown to lead to totalitarianism. Thus the procedure proves to be generalizable: any political position can be criticized by pointing out that it could lead to totalitarianism. The reason, as we have seen, is that the negative valence of the notion is taken for granted and inflated to such an extent that establishing any conceptual link between X and totalitarianism already counts as a refutation. In fact, if we step back to examine the arguments employed by the Catholic Church in the past few decades to deal with a variety of other intellectual opponents, it emerges that relativism is not the only notion that has been criticized in this way: secularism, the idea that political legitimacy should not be founded on a transcendent source, and even a restrictive interpretation of the principle of freedom of conscience according to which religious views should not be allowed to be expressed in public have all been accused of potentially leading to totalitarianism. Precisely this generalizability of the objection should make us skeptical of it, because it implies that the specificity of the position that is being criticized need not be taken into account. At a deeper level, a further reason why the use of the notion of totalitarianism appears problematic is that it implies a moralization of the domain of the political, that is, a reduction of the complex range of problems and issues that emerge in connection with the question of organizing the coexistence among human beings to the simplistic binary opposition between the categories of good and evil: totalitarianism is assumed to be a figure of

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absolute political evil and therefore whatever can be associated with it is also assumed to be evil, while the Catholic Church, simply in virtue of the fact that it claims to be striving against totalitarianism, is assumed to be good. In the political theory of the twentieth century, this tendency toward the application of moral categories to the political domain has preoccupied many authors: on both sides of the political spectrum, from Carl Schmitt to Hannah Arendt, it has been felt to represent a problem because it runs the risk of effacing the specificity of the domain of the political itself. This is not, however, the line of thought I intend to pursue in order to criticize the Church’s use of the concept of totalitarianism. The reason is that I find the normative emphasis on the specificity of the domain of the political too abstract and also based on dubious intellectual incentives: especially in the works of authors such as Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt, it seems to function essentially as a substitute for the perceived loss of the religious sanction for political action, which ultimately ends up sacralizing (and indeed an aestheticizing) the domain of the political itself. The conception of the political I have been employing throughout this analysis hopes to be less sanctimonious: it refers to the whole set of actions and interactions that have to do with the organization of coexistence among human beings. Correspondingly, the reason why I find the application of moral categories to the domain of the political problematic is more simple: the binary opposition between good and evil is too coarse a framework to adequately understand the complexity of the problems that emerge in the political domain. The consequence is that those who approach politics from the point of view of morality tend to do a terrible job, even at fulfilling their own specific goals. A pertinent example may serve to illustrate this point. In the first chapter of this book, we saw that during the period between the two world wars the Catholic Church pursued the strategy of seeking alliances and signing concordats with many of the regimes it would later accuse of totalitarianism, in particular, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The rationale for this policy was that the most dangerous threat confronting all contemporary societies was represented by “atheistic communism,” explicitly identified as an embodiment of “the organized forces of evil” by Pope Pius XI in the encyclical Divini Redemptoris. Today, of course, the fact that the Vatican initially sided with the forces of fascism and Nazism against liberal democracy and socialism is a source of great embarrassment for the Catholic Church. My contention, however,

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is that this strategic mistake was made possible by the fact that the Church reasoned in terms of the simplistic categories of good and evil and was therefore led to suppose that no intermediate position between atheistic communism and authoritarian fascism was possible. Liberal democracy was lumped in on the side of communism because the latter was treated as a figure of absolute evil, and therefore anything that could be even remotely associated with it had to be rejected out of hand. What remained, however, was evidently not considered carefully enough, because the Church automatically assumed that whatever was against evil must necessarily be good. But the fact is that politics is far more complex than this simple binary can account for, which is the fundamental reason why I think that the framework of morality is inappropriate for approaching political questions and often ends up leading to very poor decisions. A More Convincing Theory of Totalitarianism

The embarrassing fact that the Church initially supported some of the political regimes it was later to condemn as totalitarian (the break with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany only came comparatively late, in 1931 and 1937, respectively) can also be used to illustrate another problematic aspect of the way in which the Church has attempted to establish a connection between the notions of relativism and totalitarianism: any serious attempt to examine the actual historical processes that led to the emergence of totalitarian regimes in these countries immediately reveals a more complex picture. While most of the authors who have examined the history of so-called totalitarian regimes in any degree of detail agree that the progressive undermining of the old certainties on which social integration had traditionally relied was an important enabling factor, nobody has ever even suggested that the transition from this background condition to totalitarianism was either necessary or automatic. Other important mediating factors also played a crucial role. In particular, the fact that tends to be systematically obscured by the Church’s advocates was that totalitarian movements mostly stemmed out of an attempt to reintroduce absolute certainties in a situation in which they had been undermined. This is confirmed empirically by the fact that none of the movements that would later be identified as totalitarian took relativism as their philosophical standpoint. On the contrary, they all had pretty solidly anchored conceptions of what truth amounted to: for the Soviets, it was the scientific

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laws of historical development predicting that class struggle would necessarily be radicalized to the point where the capitalist system would ultimately be replaced by a dictatorship of the proletariat; for the Nazis, it was the idea of the superiority of the Aryan race, which was supposed to have to assert itself historically by progressively subduing and eliminating all the inferior peoples. The reason why this fact tends to be systematically obscured by the advocates of the Catholic Church is that it calls into question the idea that a reference to some notion of absolute truth is what is needed in order to avoid totalitarianism. The Nazis and the Soviets had their own notions of what truth amounted to, but this did not prevent them from developing into totalitarian movements. On the contrary, it was precisely the attempt to impose this conception of truth upon others that ultimately made these movements totalitarian, in the sense in which the Catholic Church has been employing this term. This appears to shed an eerie light on the Church’s own claim that what is needed today is to reintroduce the reference to an idea of absolute truth as an antidote to relativism. The last point I made in the previous section can perhaps be clarified with reference to the work of an author who has devoted a large part of his intellectual effort to studying the historical conditions that led to the emergence of totalitarianism from a philosophical point of view: the French philosopher and political theorist Claude Lefort. As we will also see more fully in the last chapter of this book, the starting point of his discussion is the assumption that modernity is characterized by a “dissolution of the markers of certainty.” On the basis of this assumption, Lefort claims that there are two possible political outcomes from this background philosophical condition. The first is what he refers to as “democracy,” defining it as a form of society that embraces the indeterminacy of modernity, institutionalizing it and thereby opening itself up to a constant process of redefinition of its own organizational form. This is what Lefort means to suggest through the idea that democracies leave the place of power “empty”: the structuring reference to the figure of a King is not replaced with any substantive representation of what society should look like, and therefore all social relations are left open to being constantly redefined by social actors themselves. Totalitarianism, on the other hand, is understood as a negative reaction against the dissolution of the markers of certainty characteristic of modernity. Perceived as a loss and experienced as a cause of anxiety, the

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“emptiness” of the place of power is made into something that needs to be overcome. Thus totalitarian movements attempt to “refill” the place of power with substantive representations of social unity, which provide artificial substitutes for lost certainties. This is what lends them their distinctive violence and capillarity, the idea that all aspects of the social order must be subordinated to a single overarching ideology: If in effect .  .  . the reference to an empty place gives way to the unbearable image of a real vacuum . . . representations which can supply an index of social unity and identity can become invested with a fantastic power. This is a process which appears to have underscored the emergence of both historically known forms of “totalitarianism.” . . . We cannot of course ignore that in one case the image of the people was actualized through a sanctification of the proletariat and in the other through a sanctification of the nation; but, in terms of the question we are posing, the similarity between the two is striking. Both attempted in one way or another, to give power a substantial reality, to bring the principles of Law and Knowledge within its orbit, to deny social division in all its forms and to give society a body once more.

The reason why this theory of totalitarianism appears pertinent in the present context is that it can be read as a way of reiterating the point that, historically, totalitarianism has not emerged out of relativism, but rather out of the attempt to react against a situation in which “the fundamental markers of certainty had been destroyed.” From the point of view of the Church’s anti-relativist discourse, this is somewhat disquieting because it suggests that there is a structural analogy between the Church’s own political project and the one that underscored the totalitarian adventure during the interwar years: both, in fact, prove to be guided by the attempt to reintroduce a reference to some idea of absolute truth in a situation where it has been undermined. Perhaps it is possible to invert the objection that the Catholic Church makes against relativism, suggesting that, if the terms of the debate are to be accepted, it is actually anti-relativism more than relativism that has historically proved more likely to lead to totalitarianism. This is not, however, a point I want to insist upon very much, precisely because, as I have sought to suggest through the analysis, the mode of argumentation centered on the question of establishing what leads to totalitarianism is neither very useful nor very fair to the positions that are thereby

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being criticized. The last point I made can perhaps be taken as a way of further illustrating the slipperiness of this mode of argumentation: once one enters into the logic of establishing what leads to totalitarianism, it may be difficult to avoid being accused of the same thing oneself. Perhaps it would be better to avoid entering into this logic in the first place.

3 RATIONALISM Between Relativism and Religion

In this chapter I examine what I think is likely to be the dominant response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism within the field of contemporary political theory. This response agrees with the critics of relativism that a conception of democracy founded on such philosophical premises would be problematic or even self-defeating. However, it challenges the idea that democratic regimes must necessarily draw their substantive moral commitments from religion. Instead it claims that such regimes can succeed in grounding their moral values autonomously, through the aid of the faculty of reason. Reason is therefore here posited as the basis for a sort of middle course between the two alternative poles of the binary opposition set up by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism: relativism and religion. While, on the one hand, relativism is still perceived as a problem for politics, the appeal to religion as a foundation for normativity is judged unnecessary, because reason itself is supposed to provide an adequate substitute for it in the task of supplying a set of substantive moral values, capable of preventing democratic regimes from overthrowing themselves by democratic means. The dominant strand of such rationalism within the field of contemporary political theory identifies itself more specifically as a form of

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neo-Kantian constructivism. This is meant to imply that the religious or metaphysical conception of the grounds for moral values is replaced by a metaphysically less onerous procedure for the construction of presumptively rational outcomes. Moral values therefore cease to be perceived as reified essences, assumed to exist in a transcendent domain, and begin to appear as the contingent and revisable outcomes of a specific procedure, whose validity should in principle be recognized by all rational individuals. In this sense, the notion of moral values is de-transcendentalized. However, the implicit assumption remains that the outcomes that emerge from the stipulated procedures display the key features of the values that were previously assumed to stem from religious or metaphysical sources: they are supposed to be morally binding for all individuals, simply in virtue of the fact that they have been defined in the appropriate way, and therefore independently of any other relativizing conditions. In order to discuss this form of neo-Kantian constructivism, in what follows I will be focusing in particular on the thought of two of its most illustrious exponents within the field of contemporary political theory: Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. Both these authors claim a direct lineage from Kant’s moral and political philosophy. On the one hand, Habermas attempted to reconceptualize the Kantian idea of a procedure for moral deliberation in terms of a criterion of rationality that posits as presumptively rational the outcome of a communicative process that approximates the conditions of an “ideal speech situation.” On the other hand, Rawls used the artifice of an “original position” to model the conditions under which a set of presumptively rational agents could reach an agreement over a set of determinate principles of justice applicable to democratic societies. In this way, both Habermas and Rawls attempted to provide rational justifications for substantive conceptions of democracy, which can be read as containing responses to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, inasmuch as they posit a set of moral guidelines for democratic deliberation that can serve as limits to the democratic exercise of political power, without necessarily relying on any external or transcendent (that is, ultimately religious) sources of legitimacy. My contention, however, will be that both Habermas and Rawls ultimately fail to provide sufficient grounds for developing a fully convincing response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. The basic reason is a version of the objection made by Hegel against Kant’s attempt to found a substantive morality exclusively on the necessary presuppositions of reason: namely, that reason is incapable of establishing

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the validity of its own presuppositions rationally, and is accordingly forced to import its substantive content from an outside that escapes it, or at least precedes it. My contention is that, depending on how this outside is understood, neo-Kantian rationalism falls back either on a disavowed form of dogmatism, which puts it on the same plane as the religious absolutism it is meant to replace, or on a form of philosophical relativism, which reproduces all the problems rationalism was supposed to avoid in the first place. Thus, in the final analysis the claim is that reason alone is incapable of providing an adequate foundation for a sustainable middle course between the two poles of the binary posited by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism and remains trapped within the terms of this basic polarity. To substantiate this thesis, in this chapter I provide a critical analysis of Habermas’s and Rawls’s respective attempts to justify a substantive set of moral values on the basis of a neo-Kantian conception of reason. The former is used to illustrate how such an attempt can fall back on a disavowed form of dogmatism, while the latter is taken to illustrate how a neo-Kantian conception of reason can fall back on a form of philosophical relativism. Together these two analyses are meant to give an illustration of the overall meta-ethical horizon within which neo-Kantian rationalism remains inscribed. Of course, I am aware that such a procedure of refutation cannot be considered exhaustive of all the possible attempts to found a morality exclusively on the basis of the category of reason. However, the reason I have chosen to focus on the writings of Habermas and Rawls in particular is that I think their theories can be considered exemplary of much broader strands of thought within the field of contemporary political theory. If it is still felt that there remain significant options I have not considered, then the burden of proof lies on the objector to show how it is possible to do better than the authors I do consider. JÜRGEN HABERMAS: BEYOND METAPHYSICS BUT THIS SIDE OF RELATIVISM

A useful starting point to begin a critical examination of Habermas’s attempt to found a substantive morality on the basis of a specific conception of reason is his own characterization of his overarching philosophical project. Although the formulations have varied over the course of his vast scientific production, a formula that recurs in several of his most important

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writings is that the overall goal of his political philosophy is to provide a “non-religious and post-metaphysical justification of the normative bases of the democratic constitutional state.” A number of aspects of this formula are worth pointing out because they serve to delineate the basic coordinates within which Habermas situates his philosophical project. The first thing we can note is that the notions of religion and metaphysics are lumped together as one of the poles of what Habermas wants to steer clear from. The reason is that Habermas considers both religion and metaphysics as traditional (that is, essentially premodern) grounds of philosophical justification, inasmuch as they are both taken to rely on an objectivistic conception of truth, which the Kantian critique of metaphysics is supposed to have rendered obsolete. The second aspect that is also worth highlighting from the above characterization of Habermas’s overall intellectual project is that Habermas also insists that he wants to provide a normative justification for the intellectual bases of the democratic constitutional state. This can be interpreted as a way of marking a distance from the strands of contemporary political theory that refuse to adopt an explicitly normative perspective. In particular, the relativistic attitude of positivist social science and much of the so-called post-modern philosophy. The reason for this is spelled out most clearly in Habermas’s book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, where Habermas portrays the kind of relativism that for him underscores much of contemporary social science and post-modern philosophy as a “deviated” outcome of the modern critique of metaphysics itself. Freed from the anchoring of an external reality, Habermas contends, a number of both modern and post-modern thinkers have been led to call into question the idea that there could ever exist a rationally justifiable set of moral values. Such a position is, however, said to be ultimately “untenable” because, as Habermas puts it, “the totalization of the critique of reason is ultimately self-referential,” in the sense that it undercuts its own grounds of validity by negating the very standpoint from which it can be asserted that a rational foundation for morality is unavailable. Habermas’s specific name for this kind of fallacy is “performative contradiction,” and much of his critical effort in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity consists in showing how various prominent advocates of the post-modern form of relativism—from Nietzsche to Foucault—fall into it. Various examples of Habermas’s specific use of the concept of relativism could be extrapolated from his analysis of these authors. For the purposes

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of illustration, I prefer to single out a more abstract passage, which is worth quoting at length because it also provides an indication of the broader intellectual coordinates within which Habermas situates his philosophical project: The question of how objective knowledge is possible has been answered by some theorists in an objectivistic and by others in a relativistic sense. Members of the first group reckon on an independent reality, towards which our interpretations finally converge, in the sense intended by a correspondence theory of truth. . . . On the other hand, the relativists hold a socialization theory of truth. They are of the opinion that every possible description only mirrors a particular construction of reality that inheres grammatically in one of various linguistic world-views. . . . Both these positions are however confronted with insurmountable difficulties. The objectivists are faced with the problem of having to take up a standpoint between language and reality in order to defend their thesis; but they can only argue for such a null-context from within the context of the language they themselves use. On the other hand, the relativistic thesis, which concedes a perspectival right to every linguistically constituted view of the world also cannot be put forth without performative contradiction, because the totalization of the critique of universalist reason is ultimately self-referential. . . . So, whoever absolutizes one of the two aspects of the linguistic medium of reason, be it its universality or its particularity, gets caught in aporias.

One thing that emerges from this passage is that Habermas employs the notion of relativism essentially in the same way as the advocates of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism that were considered in the previous chapters of this book, treating it as an inherently self-defeating position that no actual thinker could ever coherently adopt. Indeed, in this respect, it is interesting to point out that, like many of the documents already considered, Habermas paradoxically employs the concept of “absolutization” in his definition of relativism. This could offer grounds for applying to Habermas the same critique I made in chapter 2 concerning the way in which the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism employs this term. However, that is not the line of critique I am interested in pursuing (again) in this chapter. Rather, what I am more interested in extrapolating from this discussion is an overall vision of the way in which Habermas situates his own

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philosophical project. For, the broader point that emerges from the passage is that Habermas posits, on the one hand, a kind of objectivism that, as we have seen, is supposed to underscore both the traditional forms of metaphysics and religion and, on the other hand, a kind of relativism that is taken to underscore much of contemporary social science and postmodern philosophy. Thus, in the final analysis Habermas’s philosophical project proves to be defined in terms of a conceptual opposition that overlaps in many significant ways with the one that is also at the heart of this book; that is, the opposition between religion (understood as a form of objectivist metaphysics) on the one hand and relativism on the other. By rejecting both, Habermas suggests that what he wants to provide is a sort of middle course, or at least third way, between them. What remains to be established, however, is whether the category of communicative rationality he appeals to for this purpose is capable of providing an adequate foundation for such a project, and more specifically whether in so doing Habermas is able to lay the grounds for a convincing response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. It is therefore to a discussion of these questions that I shall now turn. Grounds for a Habermasian Response to the Catholic Discourse of Anti-Relativism

As is well known, the core of Habermas’s theory of rationality is the idea that the outcome of a deliberative procedure conducted under the conditions of an “ideal speech situation” can be considered normatively rational. From this, Habermas deduces that a set of substantive values capable of both limiting and directing the democratic exercise of political power can be inferred from the conditions required for approximating such a conception of rationality. For he maintains that the notion of an ideal speech situation contains an implicit reference to a set of substantive moral values whose violation can be considered irrational, and therefore illegitimate, from the perspective of his conception of rationality. Specifically, Habermas maintains that since the notion of an ideal speech situation involves a recognition of the equality and autonomy of all participating subjects, any proposal that violates these principles can be considered irrational from the perspective of communicative rationality. This can be thought of as offering the basis for a response to the key objection contained in the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism because it im-

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plies that democratic theory does not necessarily need to appeal to religion in order to ground the validity of a set of substantive moral values capable of preventing it from overthrowing itself by democratic means: the Habermasian conception of communicative rationality can also be appealed to as a substitute for it. For, by the logic of the argument outlined, as long as the notion of communicative rationality is assumed to constitute a valid criterion of political legitimacy, any practical proposal seeking to undermine the core democratic values of freedom and equality can be considered irrational and therefore politically illegitimate. Moreover, what appears particularly attractive in this argument is that it need not be construed as a way of imposing a set of external or transcendent limits on the democratic exercise of political power. Habermas suggests that, in light of the overlap that exists between the substantive values implicitly referred to by the notion of communicative rationality and the constitutive values of democracy itself, the latter can be understood as a way of instantiating the conditions required for approximating the ideal of communicative rationality in concrete political practice. Indeed, Habermas assumes that the legitimacy of democracy as a political form derives precisely from the fact that it can be understood as a way of discovering—or at least approximating—what would be agreed to under the conditions of an ideal speech situation. From this perspective, any practical proposal violating the core democratic principles of freedom and equality can be considered democratically, as well as rationally, illegitimate because it violates the conditions upon which the legitimacy of democracy depends in the first place. Concrete limits on what a democratically constituted people can legitimately do to itself are therefore assumed to be inscribed within the very logic of democracy itself, because the notion of communicative rationality is assumed to encapsulate a set of substantive moral values that cannot be legitimately violated by a conception of democracy drawing its legitimacy from such a conception of rationality. In practice, for Habermas, this means that a conception of democracy founded on his theory of communicative rationality must necessarily take the form of a constitutional order defining a set of substantive principles that are meant to institute the procedures of the democratic process of deliberation. Such a process is then assumed to consist in a reflexive endeavor to determine the specific requirements of such principles in relation to given concrete situations. Thus the principles of constitutionalism and

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democracy are assumed to be reciprocally dependent upon each other. This, however, implies that democratically legitimate norms can never violate the constitutional principles that serve to institute the democratic process in the first place, because that would undermine the grounds on which these can be considered democratically legitimate at all. In this sense, the Habermasian theory of constitutional democracy can be said to be “kept on the rails” by its orientation to communicative rationality. To be sure, the cogency of this response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism depends on the prior assumption of the validity of Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. For it is ultimately on this basis that Habermas establishes the legitimacy of his theory of constitutional democracy and therefore the illegitimacy of any political proposal intended to undermine its core values. In order to evaluate the cogency of this response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, it is therefore necessary to examine in more detail the justification that Habermas provides for his theory of communicative rationality. THE ARGUMENT FROM THE UNIVERSAL PRAGMATICS OF LANGUAGE

The basic ground on which Habermas seeks to establish the validity of his theory of communicative rationality is what he refers to as a “universal pragmatics” of language. This consists in an analysis of the necessary presuppositions of the competent use of language, among which, Habermas wants to show, there must also be the presupposition of the rational validity of a consensus reached under the conditions of an ideal speech situation. The reason why this is supposed to offer a justification for Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality is that, if it can be shown that all competent uses of language implicitly presuppose the rational validity of a consensus reached under the conditions of an ideal speech situation, it follows that such a conception of rationality is practically irrefutable, because any attempt to contest it would have to implicitly presuppose the validity of what it intended to refute, thereby entering into contradiction with itself. As Habermas himself points out, such an argumentative strategy has a Kantian structure, since it is based on an analysis of necessary presuppositions; however, it is not transcendental in a strict sense, because it does not provide an analysis of the necessary presuppositions of all possible experience, but rather only of a particular kind of empirically observed behavior, that is, the competent use of language. Its argumentative power

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is nonetheless very strong because, by the logic of the argument outlined, whatever can be shown to be implicitly presupposed by all competent uses of language is also practically irrefutable, inasmuch as its refutation would presumably have to happen through language, and this would involve it in the performative contradiction of presupposing what it intended to contest. Of course, this cannot yet be considered a sufficient justification of Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. For that requires showing that the rational validity of a consensus reached under the conditions of an ideal speech situation is indeed a necessary presupposition of all competent uses of language. Habermas’s argument for maintaining this is accordingly what needs to be examined in most detail. The starting point of this argument is the claim that all meaningful linguistic utterances—or “speech acts”—can be interpreted as criticizable “validity claims”: that is, as claims to a specific kind of validity that can in principle be accepted or rejected by the interlocutors. To raise—or criticize—such validity claims, for Habermas, necessarily involves assuming that one could, if necessary, provide reasons for doing so. Now, in most cases, Habermas points out that such a justification relies on a set of implicit presuppositions that are shared between the interlocutors. This is what he refers to as the pre-reflective or background “life-world” of language. However, in this respect Habermas also points out that in some cases such shared presuppositions can break down or be explicitly called into question. When this happens, for him, the speaker can only make good (or “redeem”) his or her validity claims by providing further reasons for what he or she has stated. Such reasons also inevitably depend on further validity claims. Thus the logic of redeeming validity claims, for Habermas, initiates a logical regression that ultimately points in the direction of an ideal whereby the interlocutors reach a consensus through a completely unrestricted exchange of validity claims. It is in this sense that for him the idea of the validity of a consensus reached under the conditions of an ideal speech situation can be considered implicit in all competent uses of language. Since all linguistic utterances are assumed to rely on the presupposition that the validity claims they raise are capable of being redeemed, and since the only way of doing this when the life-world assumptions on which this validity is normally predicated break down is assumed to be with reference to the ideal of a consensus reached under the conditions of a completely unrestricted exchange of validity claims, it follows that all competent uses of language must necessarily presuppose

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the rational validity of a consensus reached under the conditions of an ideal speech situation, according to Habermas’s definition of this concept. When this point is connected with what has already been established, it follows that the hypothetical outcome of a deliberative procedure conducted under the conditions of an ideal speech situation can be considered communicatively rational, because the fact that all competent uses of language must necessarily presuppose this implies that it is not something that can be coherently called into question, because that would presumably involve using language and therefore presuppose the validity of what was meant to be contested in the first place. Thus on the basis of his analysis of the necessary presuppositions of the competent use of language, Habermas pretends to establish the rational irrefutability of his conception of communicative rationality. The Relation Between Communicative Action and Other Competent Uses of Language

The most obvious objection that can be raised against this attempted justification of Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality—which was in fact raised by numerous early commentators of his Theory of Communicative Action—is that the assumption that all meaningful linguistic utterances can be interpreted as “validity claims” is unfounded. More specifically, it may be true of some kinds of linguistic utterances—most notably, those that take place in the context of a cooperative inquiry oriented toward reaching an understanding, such as the activity of exchanging arguments in a seminar—but it is not necessarily true of all competent uses of language. For instance, many of the early criticisms of Habermas’s theory of communicative action focused on the relation between “communicative” and “strategic” uses of language, with the former understood as speech acts aiming toward the achievement of a rational understanding, and the latter as speech acts aiming toward the achievement of other kinds of purposive ends, such as persuading or influencing the interlocutor. The key claim in this respect is that the latter kind of utterance does not necessarily need to take the form of (or even be interpretable as) raising a set of criticizable validity claims. In the article “Habermas’ Defense of Rationalism,” for instance, Allen Wood mentions what he calls “true imperatives”—such as “open that door!” uttered among equals (that is, not based on any appeal to an implicit entitlement)—as an example of a kind of statement that does not seem to

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either implicitly or explicitly raise any validity claims, but that rather seems merely to express a command or an invitation. Similarly, Jonathan Culler has brought attention to what he calls “declamatory” uses of language (such as the statement “hello”) and to “literary productions” (mentioning as an illustrative example Apollinaire’s famous one-line poem “Bard”: “And the singing of the marine trumpets”), suggesting that even though both can be said in a broad sense to aim at the goal of being understood, neither seems to take the form of, or even be adequately interpretable as, raising a set of criticizable validity claims. This is a serious objection to Habermas’s justification of his theory of communicative rationality because, if it is indeed the case that not all competent uses of language can be adequately interpreted as raising a set of criticizable validity claims, then it follows that the necessary presuppositions Habermas takes to be implicit in this specific kind of language use cannot be considered rationally binding in the way he supposes. For, their refutation need not take place through the specific kind of language use that presupposes them. To illustrate this point, in his discussion of Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality, Wood mentions the example of prayer. This specific kind of language use could arguably be shown to presuppose some kind of divine or supernatural entity capable of responding to the prayer. Such a point could not however be considered sufficient to establish that the existence of such an entity is rationally irrefutable, because its refutation doesn’t necessarily have to take place through prayer itself. To establish the validity of his theory of communicative rationality, Habermas is therefore required to demonstrate that the exchange of criticizable validity claims oriented toward reaching a rational understanding is not merely one possible use of language among others, but rather implicitly presupposed by all competent uses of language. To be sure, Habermas himself does provide an argument to this effect in the context of his Theory of Communicative Action. However, it is not clear whether this argument is indeed persuasive. It is therefore to a consideration of this aspect of his thought that I shall now turn. The Priority of the Use of Language Oriented Toward Reaching an Understanding

The core idea on which Habermas relies to show that all competent uses of language must ultimately be interpretable as a set of criticizable validity claims is that the use of language oriented toward reaching a rational

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understanding can be considered the “most fundamental,” in the sense that it is implicitly presupposed by all other competent uses. To show this, Habermas relies on a conceptual distinction between “illocutionary” and “perlocutionary” speech acts, which is ostensibly drawn from Austin’s philosophy of language, but which Habermas reinterprets in an original way: for him, illocutionary speech acts are those whose principal aim is to communicate a certain content and therefore ultimately to be understood, while perlocutionary speech acts are those whose principal goal goes beyond that of merely communicating a certain content, in the sense that they also seek to achieve other purposive goals, such as influencing or persuading the interlocutor. On this basis, Habermas contends that the latter can be shown to be “parasitic” on the former since achieving a speech act’s perlocutionary goals depends on the interlocutor understanding its illocutionary content. For instance, even in the case of a “pure imperative” such as the one mentioned by Wood (“open that door!” uttered among equals), the speaker can only hope to achieve the perlocutionary goal of having the interlocutor open the door if the latter understands the illocutionary content of the utterance (that the speaker wants him or her to open the door). Thus Habermas contends that all meaningful speech acts must ultimately be implicitly oriented toward reaching an understanding. As has been pointed out by several commentators, however, this argument doesn’t bring Habermas very far, because the fact that all meaningful speech acts must aim at being understood in this sense doesn’t necessarily imply that they must take the form of (or even be interpretable as) raising a set of criticizable validity claims. For instance, in the example from Wood, the statement “open that door!” can be said to aim at being understood without thereby implying that it must raise a set of criticizable validity claims. Similarly, the examples mentioned by Culler of declamatory and literary uses of language all clearly aim at being understood, but this doesn’t imply that they must be implicitly raising a set of criticizable validity claims. Habermas’s argument from the relation between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts therefore seems to be beside the point. Or, more precisely, it seems to rely on a confusion between two different senses of the expression “being oriented toward reaching an understanding.” Initially he assumes that a statement being oriented toward reaching an understanding implies that it is formulated, or at least interpretable, as a set of criticizable

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validity claims, which are themselves capable of being redeemed by rational argumentation (call this the strong sense of “being oriented toward reaching an understanding”). However, this is not the sense of being oriented toward reaching an understanding that is supported by his argument from the relation between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. For the latter only implies that a statement must be formulated in such a way that the interlocutor is capable of understanding its meaning (call this the weak sense of “being oriented toward reaching an understanding”). These two senses of the expression in question do not amount to the same thing because to understand the meaning of a speech act doesn’t imply that one must also think it could be formulated, or at least interpreted, as raising a set of criticizable validity claims. Indeed, as Wood has noted, to assume that these two senses of the expression amount to the same thing comes close to assuming what Habermas’s argument was meant to prove in the first place: namely, that all meaningful linguistic utterances must necessarily take the form, or at least be interpretable as, raising a set of criticizable validity claims. Thus, in the final analysis Habermas’s argument proves to be either circular or invalid: it is circular if it assumes that to understand the meaning of a statement implies assuming that it could be formulated or interpreted in terms of a set of criticizable validity claims, and it is invalid if it pretends that the relation between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts shows that is the case. In either case, Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality ultimately seems to be left without a rational foundation and therefore to be posited as a dogmatic assumption, which must accordingly be situated on the same conceptual plane as the theological and metaphysical conceptions of normativity it was originally meant to replace. The Argument from Philosophy of History

A possible reply that could be advanced on Habermas’s behalf in response to the objection outlined is that in his Theory of Communicative Action Habermas also provides another argument for demonstrating that the exchange of criticizable validity claims oriented toward reaching an understanding (in the strong sense) can be considered the “most fundamental” use of language. Instead of aiming to show that such a use of language is implicitly presupposed by all other competent uses, this argument suggests that it constitutes the immanent telos of all other competent uses of language.

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In this respect, for instance, Habermas writes: “Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech. . . . Naturally, this doesn’t mean that speech and understanding are related to one another as means to ends. But we can explain the concept of reaching understanding only if we specify what it means to use sentences with a communicative intent. The concepts of speech and understanding reciprocally interpret one another. Thus, we can analyze the formal-pragmatic features of the attitude oriented to reaching understanding in connection with the model of the attitude of participants in communication, even though many utterances in ordinary communicative practice do not have this linguistic form.” As has been pointed out by numerous commentators, this line of argument gives The Theory of Communicative Action a distinctively Hegelian twist. For in order to explain in what sense the goal of reaching an understanding can be considered the immanent telos of all competent uses of language, without relying on a confusion between the two different senses of “being oriented toward reaching an understanding,” Habermas is ultimately led to inscribe his theory within the framework of an overarching philosophy of history, which posits the ideal of a communicative rationalization of all the integrating structures of society as its ultimate goal or end. This is made clear, for example, in the sections of the text that propose a rational reconstruction of the Marxist doctrine of historical materialism in terms of a progressive evolution of the forms of communicative integration of society. The specific philosophy of history that results from this decomposes the history of human evolution into three idealized stages or epochs: a primitive or archaic stage in which nature and culture, and therefore language and world, are assumed to be “still insufficiently differentiated from one another” and in which society is accordingly assumed to be integrated through the “spellbinding authority of myth”; a theological or metaphysical stage in which the ultimate locus of authority is assumed to be projected on a transcendent domain, and in which therefore society is assumed to be integrated through a “hermeneutic process” of commandments imposed upon it from above; and finally a modern or post-metaphysical stage in which the existence of a transcendent domain is reflexively called into question, implying that the burden of social stabilization has to be increasingly taken over by the structures of “communicative rationality.” The underlying logic that is assumed to drive the transition between these different stages or epochs of human evolution is a process Habermas refers to alternately as a “rationalization of the life-world” or as a “linguistification of the sacred,” that is, a process whereby assumptions and beliefs

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that were previously taken for granted and therefore not thematized explicitly are progressively called into question and therefore submitted to rational scrutiny. For Habermas, such a reflexive rationalization of previously under-thematized assumptions can only take the form of an exchange of criticizable validity claims oriented toward reaching a rational understanding. Thus, he deduces that the implicit goal—or telos—of human history can be understood as a progressive rationalization of all structures of social integration, through the exchange of criticizable validity claims oriented toward reaching a rational understanding. Of course, Habermas is fully aware that such a goal is not fully achievable in practice, because the use of language to give reasons in support of specific validity claims always supposes the reference to a prior “life-world,” whose validity cannot be established through the same linguistic process, but rather needs to be presupposed. However, he contends that the “rationalization of the life-world” is something that can be achieved by degrees and therefore to a greater or lesser extent. In this sense, what he takes to be the ultimate telos of human history is construed as a sort of regulative ideal that guides the evolution of human society, without ever being fully attainable in practice. On this basis, Habermas establishes that even though it is not necessarily presupposed by all competent uses of language, the exchange of criticizable validity claims oriented toward reaching a rational understanding can nonetheless be considered their immanent telos. Coupled with the assumption that such a use of language necessarily presupposes a recognition of the rational validity of a consensus reached under the conditions of an ideal speech situation, this can be interpreted as a way of providing an alternative justification for his theory of communicative rationality. For if the implicit goal of all competent uses of language is to contribute to an overarching process of rationalization of the life-world, and if this process is assumed to presuppose the rational validity of a consensus reached under the conditions of an ideal speech situation, it follows that the latter cannot be coherently denied without entering into the “performative contradiction” of frustrating the immanent purpose of what one is doing in the first place. The Lack of a Rational Foundation for Habermas’s Philosophy of History

The central problem with the argument outlined in the previous section is that Habermas fails to provide a rational justification for his philosophy of

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history. Indeed, the only kind of intellectual support he seems to provide for it at all, apart from several attempts to read what he takes to be the crucial stages of human history through the lens of its interpretive categories (which, from the point of view of rational argumentation, amount more to expositions than to justifications of his theory), is a series of “structural homologies” between his conception of the successive stages of human evolution and Jean Piaget’s and Lawrence Kohlberg’s respective models of individual cognitive development. In this respect, Habermas writes: “As is well known, Piaget distinguishes among stages of cognitive development that are characterized not in terms of new contents but in terms of structurally described levels of learning ability. It might be a matter of something similar in the case of the emergence of new structures of worldviews. The caesurae between the mythical, religious-metaphysical, and modern modes of thought are characterized by changes in the system of basic concepts. With the transition to a new stage the interpretations of the superseded stage are, no matter what their content, categorially devalued. It is not this or that reason, but the kind of reason, which is no longer convincing.” This insight cannot provide any rational support for Habermas’s philosophy of history. For to make the analogies that exist between Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s respective theories of individual cognitive development and Habermas’s philosophy of history into an argument for the latter clearly begs the question of the validity of the former and—perhaps even more importantly—of the legitimacy of transposing insights drawn from the domain of individual human psychology to that of universal history. What appears even more troubling in Habermas’s Hegelian twist, however, is not just the absence of any rational foundation for his philosophy of history, but rather the fact that its key interpretive categories are clearly constructed in a retroactive manner, that is, from the point of view of the specific theory of rationality that they are supposed to provide support for in the first place. For instance, when Habermas writes that primitive or mythical worldviews “do not permit a clear conceptual differentiation between things and persons, i.e. between objects that can be manipulated and subjects capable of speaking and acting,” and that this is the reason why they “do not recognize the distinction between teleological and communicative action,” he is clearly describing such worldviews from the point of view of a theory of rationality that does make these distinctions: his own.

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The reason this constitutes a problem for the attempt to use Habermas’s philosophy of history as the grounds for a justification for his theory of communicative rationality is that it renders the whole enterprise circular, since the philosophy of history that is intended to provide support for his conception of rationality ultimately proves to presuppose it to begin with. What emerges from this analysis is therefore that both the neo-Kantian and the Hegelian strands of Habermas’s justification for his theory of communicative rationality appear to be stuck in a dilemma: they either have to presuppose what they intend to justify, and therefore ultimately provide no rational grounds for it at all, or simply posit it dogmatically as a starting point, on the basis of which all the rest of Habermas’s theories are subsequently deduced. In either case, Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality does not appear capable of providing a self-sufficient substitute for the religious and metaphysical conceptions of morality it originally intended to replace; rather, it appears to situate itself conceptually on the same plane as them. From the point of view of the broader line of reasoning pursued in this chapter, this implies that Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality fails to offer an adequate basis for a convincing response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. For in the final analysis, it proves incapable of sustaining a middle course between the two conceptual poles of the binary opposition on which this discourse is predicated—that is, philosophical relativism on the one hand and religious absolutism on the other—and falls back on something that from the point of view of the present discussion isn’t so far removed from the latter. The Question of Operationalization

Before moving on to show that John Rawls’s political philosophy illustrates the opposite theoretical possibility—namely, a fall back of neo-Kantian rationalism on to a disavowed form of philosophical relativism—it is worth considering another objection to Habermas’s attempt to ground a substantive conception of constitutional democracy on his theory of communicative rationality, because this will help to shed further light on some of the problems raised by the attempt to ground political legitimacy on a contexttranscending conception of truth or rationality. The objection concerns the issue of the “operationalization” of Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. Even assuming that Habermas

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succeeds in showing that the outcome of a deliberative procedure conducted under the conditions of an ideal speech situation can be considered presumptively rational (which, as I hope to have shown, is not the case), there would still remain the problem of explaining how such a conception of rationality can be made into the ground for a self-limiting conception of constitutional democracy. This is the key question that Habermas addresses in his treatise Between Facts and Norms. As I already mentioned, the core of the argument that Habermas advances in this text is that the operationalization of his theory of communicative rationality can proceed through the medium of law. On the basis of his analysis of the necessary presuppositions of the competent use of language, Habermas contends that a deliberative process approximating the conditions of an ideal speech situation can be instituted politically through a constitutional order that guarantees certain basic political, civil, and social rights to all members of a given polity (such as the right to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and a right to education and health care). The deliberative process itself is then assumed to consist in a collective process of interpretation of the specific requirements imposed by such constitutional principles in the given particular circumstances, which is itself to be conducted in accordance with the principles that are being interpreted. Thus, in the final analysis, Habermas’s theory of constitutional democracy takes the form of a communicative self-interpretation of the principle of communicative rationality, instantiated through the medium of law. A point that Habermas insists on again and again in Between Facts and Norms, however, is that such a concrete instantiation of his ideal of communicative rationality can never succeed in fully realizing the conditions of an ideal speech situation. For Habermas recognizes that all concrete linguistic exchanges involve both practical constraints and implicit power relations that distort the extent to which such an ideal can be realized. Just as in the context of the formulation of his philosophy of history, this ultimately leads Habermas to posit the notion of a society integrated entirely through the means of communicative rationality as a sort of telos that is intended to provide a standard for critique of concrete political practice. In this sense, Habermas’s political philosophy can be understood as predicated on a form of philosophical fallibilism which implies that the notion of communicative rationality is posited as a sort of normative horizon whose purpose is to orient concrete political practice without assuming

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that it can ever be fully achieved. From this perspective, really existing societies can be critically evaluated on the basis of the extent to which they approximate the abstract ideal of a purely communicative—and therefore rational—integration of society. The reason I consider this account problematic is that it seems to ignore, or at least pass over, the gap that may exist between the approximation of a given set of procedures and their hypothetical outcomes. Indeed, Habermas seems to take for granted that a constitutional order approximating the procedures of an ideal speech situation would also succeed in approximating its hypothetical outcomes to the same degree. However, that seems an unwarranted assumption. Consider, for instance, the following situation: If you and I have to make a decision that is binding for both, but our deliberative process is distorted by the fact that you are pointing a gun at me, it is not clear that an outcome most closely approximating what we would have decided if that distorting condition didn’t exist would be achieved by doing our best to approximate the procedures of an ideal speech situation despite that distortion (for example, by my trying to reason with you while you are holding the gun). Indeed, a result that more closely approximates what would have been decided under the hypothetical conditions of an ideal speech situation might perhaps be obtained by my doing precisely the opposite (such as taking another gun and pointing it back at you). The objection can be formulated more generally in terms of the notion of the “second-best.” Habermas’s operationalization of his theory of communicative rationality seems to rely on the assumption that, short of the possibility of fully realizing his ideal of communicative rationality, any concrete approximation of the procedural conditions of the ideal speech situation must succeed in approximating his substantive ideal to the same degree. However, that is far from being necessarily the case. On the contrary, what the above example is meant to illustrate is that, in situations in which the substantive ideal cannot be realized, it may be the case that the second-best option from the point of view of the ideal itself is not a closer approximation of its procedural conditions. As far as I am aware, this objection has not yet been raised explicitly against Habermas’s attempted justification of his theory of constitutional democracy on the basis of his notion of an ideal speech situation. However, the reason I consider it particularly relevant in the present context is that it can be interpreted as offering further confirmation of a point I

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already raised in the previous chapter of this book, concerning attempts to ground political legitimacy in a context-transcending conception of truth or rationality in general: namely, that assuming such a standard exists in principle is not yet sufficient to resolve the concrete political problem of how to legitimate the exercise of power, because it still leaves open the question of establishing the content of that truth in the first place. My contention there was that taking seriously the problems raised by this question—which is ultimately the question of the interpretation of truth—reveals that an orientation toward a context-transcending conception of truth or rationality does not resolve the problems supposedly posed by the assumption of a form of philosophical relativism, but may in fact end up exacerbating them, because conflicts between different interpretations of truth are ultimately more intractable than ones that occur within the framework of an overarching indeterminacy concerning ultimate ends. This appears to be confirmed by the analysis of Habermas’s thought, inasmuch as it suggests that his theory of communicative rationality may ultimately run the risk of confusing concrete political actors even more, rather than providing them with specific guidance. For while on the one hand his theory offers an abstract standard of political legitimacy which seems to imply that concrete political actors should not orient themselves toward the achievement of their own selfish interests or goals, on the other hand it provides no clear indication of what they should do instead in order to fulfill the standard of legitimacy. Thus, in the end, it seems to run the risk of reproducing the well-known disputes between different interpretations of absolute truth at the level of the different interpretations of the best way to instantiate the ideal of communicative rationality. JOHN RAWLS: FROM KANTIAN RATIONALISM TO CULTURAL RELATIVISM

John Rawls’s political philosophy illustrates the opposite theoretical possibility of the one brought out through the discussion of Habermas: that is, the fall back of a neo-Kantian conception of reason on a disavowed form of philosophical relativism. To show this, a useful starting point is a discussion of Rawls’s own characterization of his philosophical project and of the reasons why—if successful—it could be thought of as providing the grounds for a response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism.

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In A Theory of Justice, Rawls begins by stating that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought,” and immediately after adds that “a theory, however elegant and economical, must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions, no matter how efficient and well-arranged, must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.” This suggests that what he wants to develop in the rest of the book is a criterion of political legitimacy that can enjoy the same conceptual status—and therefore perform the same conceptual functions—as the notion of truth does in the domains of religion, science, and philosophy. Indeed, later in the same text, Rawls even states that “we should strive for a kind of moral geometry with all the rigor which this term connotes.” Although he doesn’t state it in precisely these terms, the overall goal of Rawls’s political philosophy is therefore essentially analogous to Habermas’s: to provide a rational substitute for religious and metaphysical conceptions of normativity, which nonetheless escapes from what he describes as the “pitfall” of philosophical relativism. The reason why—if successful—such a project could be thought of as providing the grounds for a response to the Catholic discourse of antirelativism is that a conception of justice that fulfilled these requirements could be employed by democratic theory to envisage the imposition of a set of substantive limits on what a sovereign people could legitimately do to itself, which would presumably prevent it from overthrowing itself by democratic means, without necessarily relying on a transcendent or religious source of legitimacy to justify them, but rather appealing directly to their inherent truth or justice. In fact, in his later writings, Rawls himself increasingly emphasized that he understood his theory of justice as a way of providing a set of political guidelines intended to orient and limit the democratic exercise of political power. In the preface to his treatise Political Liberalism, for instance, Rawls states that the purpose of the book is to develop a “political conception of justice appropriate for democratic societies,” later adding: The course of democratic thought over the past two centuries or so makes plain that there is at present no agreement on the way the basic institutions of a constitutional democracy should be arranged if they are to satisfy fair terms of social cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal. . . . Justice as fairness [that is, the specific conception

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of justice that Rawls sought to elaborate throughout his intellectual career] tries to adjudicate between these contending traditions by proposing two principles of justice to serve as guidelines for how basic institutions are to realize the values of liberty and equality.

Presumably, if coherently applied, such guidelines for the democratic exercise of political power should also prevent a democratic regime from overthrowing itself by democratic means. And indeed, if we consider the specific content of the two principles of justice that constitute the core of Rawls’s theory, it emerges that they could be construed as fulfilling this function. In particular, the first of Rawls’s two principles of justice states that “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme for others.” It seems difficult to imagine that an anti-democratic project aiming to subvert the democratic order from within could ever be pursued consistently with this substantive principle. Thus—if successful—Rawls’s theory of justice would provide sufficient grounds for a compelling response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. What remains to be established, however, is whether Rawls succeeds in providing a rational justification for his theory of justice that avoids on the one hand the kind of dogmatism that characterizes both Catholic moral theology and Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality, and on the other hand the kind of moral relativism all three declaredly aim to steer clear away from. It is accordingly to an examination of this issue that the remaining part of this chapter is dedicated. The Argument from the Original Position

As is well known, the core argument advanced by Rawls in support for his theory of justice consists in the claim that its two main principles are those that would be agreed to by a set of rational individuals under the hypothetical conditions of an “original position,” defined roughly as a deliberative setting in which participants enjoy perfect information concerning the general facts and features of human society, but are kept under a “veil of ignorance” concerning their specific place and role within it. The reason this is assumed to offer rational support for Rawls’s principles of justice is that the informational constraints hypothetically imposed on the parties in the original position are assumed to screen out all morally

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irrelevant and potentially distortionary determinants, thereby producing results that are morally justified from a rational point of view. The original position is therefore assumed to function as a sort of epistemic tool for discovering what the faculty of reason, oriented exclusively by moral concerns, would posit as the constitutive elements of a theory of justice. In most of his writings, Rawls presents this mode of argumentation as a way of “generalizing and carrying to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract as represented by Rousseau, Locke and Kant.” This suggests that he understands it as a way of justifying his theory of justice “constructivistically,” that is, in a purely rational manner, starting form first principles, if not entirely a priori. Such an interpretation places, however, a heavy burden on the way in which Rawls defines the notion of an original position. For on the one hand it has to be defined in such a way that the parties within it are capable of reaching an agreement on some substantive principles of justice. This implies that the informational constraints imposed upon them cannot prevent them from knowing anything about what the good or the right amount to. But on the other hand it has to avoid presupposing what it wants to prove. This implies that the parties in the original position cannot be assumed to already hold the specific conception of justice that the procedure is meant to justify in the first place. The way in which Rawls attempts to strike a balance between these two conflicting demands is in fact a point on which a lot of the criticism of his argument from the original position has focused. It accordingly deserves to be considered in some detail. The Question of Metaphysical Presuppositions and the Specter of Circularity

One criticism that has been raised by several commentators against the argument from the original position is that the specific conception of the “self ” that Rawls implicitly appeals to in constructing the notion of an original position is metaphysically too thin. For the notion of the “self ” is arguably constituted by the consciousness of the place one occupies within a broader social whole. If this is the case, it seems difficult, if not incoherent, to try to imagine what a set of rational individuals would agree to after having been deprived of the consciousness of their particular role and place within society. For that seems to rely on an abstract conception of

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the individual, which ignores the fact that such a construction is itself the product of a given social and therefore historical configuration. My impression, however, is that this critique of Rawls’s argument from the original position actually misses its mark. The reason is that Rawls is not committed to assuming that the kind of subjectivity on which the original position is predicated is in fact an accurate description of how people really are, or even could be. On the contrary, Rawls is very clear in specifying that it is a hypothetical construct, whose purpose is to imagine what would be agreed to by a set of imaginary individuals conforming to its requirements. In this sense, it is not committed to any metaphysical doctrine concerning the real nature of the self. Indeed, Rawls himself makes this explicit in a passage of Political Liberalism: The veil of ignorance, to take one prominent feature of that position, has no specific metaphysical implications concerning the nature of the self; it does not imply that the self is ontologically prior to the facts about persons that the parties are excluded from knowing. We can, as it were, enter the original position at any time, simply by reasoning from principles of justice in accordance with the enumerated restrictions of information. When, in this way, we simulate being in the original position, our reasoning no more commits us to a particular metaphysical doctrine about the nature of the self than our acting a part in a play, say Macbeth of Lady Macbeth, commits us to thinking that we are really a king or queen engaged in a desperate struggle for political power.

Despite the cogency of this reply to the “communitarian” objection to Rawls’s argument from the original position, my contention is that this argument remains nonetheless vulnerable to the opposite charge: namely, that the conception of the self on which it is predicated is too thick (rather than too thin) from the point of view of the logic of the argument it is supposed to serve. The basic reason is that, in order to ensure that the parties in the original position can reach an agreement over a set of substantive principles of justice, Rawls is forced to suppose that they already entertain a specific conception of the good. However, from the point of view of rational argumentation, this raises the specter of circularity, because it suggests that Rawls is ultimately presupposing, rather than justifying, the principles of justice that his argument from the original position is supposed to provide support for.

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This can be illustrated by considering a little more closely the way in which Rawls defines the notion of the original position and the specific principles of justice that are supposed to be deduced from it. Rawls assumes that the parties in the original position are all “rationally self-interested”— which for him means that they all seek to maximize their interests in terms of their specific conception of the good—and “mutually distinterested,” which is assumed to mean that they do not care about the extent to which others realize their own interests or conceptions of the good. In addition, Rawls also assumes that the parties in the original position have a conception of “primary goods,” defined as goods that any self-interested person would find valuable, whatever his or her particular conception of what their self-interest amounts to. On this basis, Rawls contends that the parties in the original position would come to an agreement over the following principles of justice: first, that “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others”; and second, that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and attached to positions and offices open to all.” To be sure, some commentators have quibbled over whether these are actually the principles that would be chosen by rational individuals under the conditions of the original position. However, the more serious problem with this deduction seems to be that it doesn’t amount to anything much more than a restatement of the specific conception of the good that was written into the hypothetical construction of the original position from the start. For if we assume that “basic liberties” and “social and economic goods” are desired by all self-interested individuals, whatever their particular conception of the good, it doesn’t seem very surprising that a set of selfinterested individuals, ignorant of their particular conception of the good, would agree to a set of principles of justice that amounts essentially to the idea that everybody is guaranteed to have the maximum amount of such goods, compatibly with the amount obtained by the others. In other words, the problem seems to be that the notions of “basic liberties” and of “social and economic goods” are trivially congruent with the concept of “primary goods” that Rawls introduces in the hypothetical construct of an original position. Thus, instead of justifying his principles of justice through a rational procedure, Rawls seems to be merely presupposing such principles, through the way in which he defines the notion of an original position.

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The same also applies to the dimension of (relative) maximization that is implicit in Rawls’s second principle of justice. For as I pointed out above, Rawls assumes that the parties in the original position are rationally selfinterested. Together with the assumption that they have to come to an agreement with others over a specific set of substantive principles of justice, this makes it rather unsurprising that the outcome ends up being a decision in which they all agree to maximize the conditions for achieving their own interests, compatibly with everybody else having at least the same. But once again, the moral substance of what Rawls wants to show is presupposed rather than demonstrated. The Issue of Neutrality

One way for Rawls to get around this problem would be to argue that the substantive moral presuppositions that are introduced in the hypothetical construct of the original position are in themselves sufficiently weak and general to avoid prejudicing his argument from the start. For instance, if it could be shown that the substantive moral values they refer to are implicitly presupposed by all possible conceptions of the good, or perhaps even by the idea of rationality itself, Rawls’s argument for his principles of justice would still stand, because it could then be understood as a sort of transcendental deduction of the necessary presuppositions of all moral thought. And indeed, there are some passages, in particular from A Theory of Justice, that seem to make some suggestions to this effect. Although Rawls never claims a fully transcendental status for his conception of the original position, he does advance the claim that the substantive presuppositions it appeals to are “neutral” between a variety of different substantive conceptions of the good and therefore can be employed to adjudicate rationally between them without circularity. In this respect, for instance, Rawls writes that his argument from the original position aims to proceed “from widely accepted but weak premises to more specific conclusions. Each of the presumptions should therefore by itself be natural and plausible; some of them may seem innocuous or even trivial. For the aim of the contract approach is to establish that taken together they impose significant bounds on acceptable principles of justice.” The problem with this response, however, is that Rawls doesn’t provide any independent ground for demonstrating that the normative presuppositions that go into the definition of the original position are indeed as “weak”

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and “natural” as he supposes. On the contrary, some of them at least appear somewhat controversial, inasmuch as they are predicated on an individualistic (and moreover acquisitive) conception of self-interest that is a distinctive feature of the “liberal” conception of justice that Rawls wants to justify in the first place. Although it may be true that a variety of substantive conceptions of the good are compatible with those premises, it is certainly not the case that all are. Indeed, this appears to be implicitly recognized by Rawls himself in a passage from A Theory of Justice that discusses the specific conception of rationality on which his argument from the original position is predicated: I have assumed throughout that the persons in the original position are rational. But I have also assumed that they do not know their conception of the good. This means that while they know that they have some rational plan of life, they do not know the details of this plan or the particular ends and interests which it is calculated to promote. How, then, can they decide which conceptions of justice are most to their advantage? . . . To meet this difficulty, I postulate that they accept the account of the good touched upon in the preceding chapter: they assume that they normally prefer more primary social goods rather than less. Of course, it may turn out, once the veil of ignorance is removed, that some of them for religious or other reasons may not, in fact, want more of these goods. But from the standpoint of the original position, it is rational for the parties to suppose that they do want a larger share, since in any case they are not compelled to accept more if they do not wish to. Thus even though the parties are deprived of information about their particular ends, they have enough knowledge to rank the alternatives. They know that in general they must try to protect their liberties, widen their opportunities, and enlarge their means for promoting their aims whatever these are.

In this passage, Rawls explicitly concedes that some substantive conceptions of the good may not be consistent with the assumption that having more of the specific kinds of “primary goods” that Rawls identifies as instrumental for the fulfillment of any particular conception of self-interest (that is, essentially “basic liberties” and social and economic “means” for pursuing one’s aims) is always better than having “less.” This implies recognizing that his conception of the original position is not neutral between

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all possible—or even plausible—conceptions of the good. As I have pointed out, this compromises the grounds for the validity of his argument from the original position. The way in which Rawls tries to get around this problem is by supposing that “from the perspective of the original position” it is rational for individuals to assume that they will always want more “primary goods,” because even if that turns out not to be the case once the veil of ignorance is removed, “they are not compelled to accept more if they do not wish to.” This argument cannot, however, offer any independent support for the way in which Rawls constructs the argument from the original position because, as he points out himself, it is only valid “from the perspective” of such a position in the first place. Thus the specter of circularity reemerges at this juncture, because Rawls’s conception of the original position only proves to be neutral among the restricted set of conceptions of the good that already agree with its basic normative premises. This does not establish that the construction is either weak or natural because, by Rawls’s own concession, it remains incompatible with a number of other substantive conceptions of the good, which are accordingly excluded arbitrarily from the domain of his justification. The Argument from Reflective Equilibrium

In order to address the set of objections raised in the sections above, in his later writings Rawls was led to lay more emphasis on an idea that was in fact already present in the first formulations of his theory of justice, but which had originally received less attention and had only gradually taken priority over the original position as the principal conceptual ground for the justification of his principles of justice. This is the idea of “reflective equilibrium,” which Rawls defines in terms of the relation between a theory of justice and our “considered moral intuitions”: for him, a theory of justice can be considered in “reflective equilibrium” with our considered moral intuitions when it offers a means of “systematizing” them and “making them coherent with one another,” in such a way that in some cases this may even require revising some specific moral judgments that do not appear to be consistent with the “underlying logic” of the rest. The increasingly preponderant role that this notion assumes in Rawls’s later thought is clearly manifested by the fact that in Political Liberalism

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Rawls ceases to present the argument from the original position as a way of providing an independent justification for his principles of justice, and presents it instead as a means for clarifying and systematizing moral intuitions assumed to be implicit in a specific “political culture.” In this respect, for instance, Rawls writes: As a device of representation, the idea of the original position serves as a means of public reflection and self-clarification. It helps us work out what we now think, once we are able to take a clear and uncluttered view of what justice requires when society is conceived as a scheme of cooperation between free and equal citizens. . . . This enables us to establish greater coherence among all our judgments; and with this deeper self-understanding we can attain a wider agreement among one another.

Correspondingly, Rawls also abandons the idea that the argument from the original position can provide a completely “constructivist” justification for his principles of justice, that is, a justification that proceeds entirely a priori, or at least deductively from a set of universally shared first principles. In his discussion of this question in a later chapter of Political Liberalism, for instance, he writes: “Not everything can be constructed. We must have some material, as it were, from which to begin. . . . Since justification is addressed to others, it proceeds from what is, or can be, held in common; and so we begin from shared fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture, in the hope of developing from them a political conception that can gain free and reasoned agreement in judgment, this agreement being stable in virtue of its gaining the support of an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. These conditions suffice for a reasonable political conception of justice.” From the point of view of the analysis conducted in the previous sections of this chapter, this can be read as amounting to a concession of the fact that the argument from the original position depends on a set of substantive normative assumptions that it cannot itself account for, but that are assumed to belong to a specific “political culture” whose distinctive feature is that it understands society as a “scheme of cooperation between free and equal citizens.” This implies a recognition of the fact that the ultimate ground for Rawls’s justification of his principles of justice is not the argument from the

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original position, but rather the specific kind of “political culture” that the parties in the original position are assumed to share, and with which his principles of justice are said to be in reflective equilibrium. While this certainly makes Rawls’s presentation of his theory of justice more compelling, it also undermines the possibility of hanging on to the idea that what he succeeds in providing is a rational justification for a substantive conception of justice, capable of exercising the same conceptual function in the domain of politics that the notion of truth exercises in the domains of religion, science, and philosophy. For in the final analysis, what the argument from reflective equilibrium boils down to is the claim that the two principles of justice that constitute the core of Rawls’s theory are rationally compelling for those who already agree or subscribe to the specific kind of “political culture” that the parties in the original position are assumed to share. This carries no rationally compelling power for those who do not already belong to or for some reason agree to the key tenets of that “political culture.” The Specter of Relativism

The reason why the point made in the previous section is particularly relevant from the point of view of the overall argument I am trying to advance in this chapter is that it suggests that Rawls’s attempted justification of his principles of justice can avoid the specter of circularity only by falling back on a disavowed form of cultural relativism. For if it is true that the ultimate ground of Rawls’s justification of his theory of justice is not the argument from the original position itself but rather a specific conception of “political culture” that the parties within it are assumed to share, it follows that the scope of validity of his theory must remain limited—and therefore relative—to it. In the absence of any independent justification for this specific political culture, this implies that Rawls’s theory of justice cannot avoid recognizing its own cultural relativity. This is confirmed by the fact that in the passages quoted above from Political Liberalism, Rawls seems to treat the specific conception of “political culture” on which his theory of justice is predicated as a description of the sort of values he thinks are broadly shared by most citizens of our—liberaldemocratic—societies. In light of the objection developed here, this effectively amounts to a concession that the scope of validity of his theory must

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remain limited—and therefore relative—to a specific historical and political context. This is just another way of saying that Rawls’s attempted justification for his principles of justice doesn’t ultimately move beyond a form of culturally determined relativism. In fact, this is a point that has already been brought out by numerous commentators of Rawls’s later writings, both to criticize him or to praise him for it. For the purposes of the analysis being carried out in this chapter, it is not immediately necessary to establish whether this is to be considered as the ground for a potential objection to his thought or as a reason for praising it. All that I have been attempting to demonstrate is that Rawls’s political philosophy does not succeed in providing a purely rational justification for his theory of justice; rather, it illustrates the way in which the attempt to do so can fall back on a disavowed form of culturally determined relativism. This confirms the general thesis I have sought to substantiate over the course of this chapter: namely, that the notion of reason alone is incapable of providing the grounds for a sustainable middle course between the two conceptual poles posited by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, that is, philosophical relativism on the one hand and dogmatic absolutism on the other hand. For just as the analysis of Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality illustrates how such an attempt can fall back on a disavowed form of dogmatism, this discussion of Rawls’s theory of justice illustrates the way in which it can fall back on a form of relativism. In both cases, what proves to be untenable is precisely the kind of middle course between relativism and dogmatism that was sought at the start. The Limits of Cultural Relativism

On the basis of the conclusion reached in the previous section, in the next chapter of this book I will seek to put forward an alternative response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, which I think is more persuasive than the one considered in this chapter, because it challenges the key assumption that this kind of rationalism still has in common with the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism: that the reliance of a form of philosophical relativism must necessarily constitute a problem for democratic theory. Before moving on to articulate that response, however, it might be worthwhile to devote some space to an explanation of the reasons why, in order to do so,

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I have chosen not to rely on a further elaboration of Rawls’s thought, but rather on a different set of arguments drawn primarily from the work of the great Austrian jurist and political theorist Hans Kelsen. For after all, if the interpretation I have provided is correct, Rawls’s theory of justice can be considered both relativistically grounded and the basis for a potential response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. Why then not rely on a further interpretation of what their thought seems to have in common to advance my own response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism? The principal reason I consider Rawls’s conception of relativism, as well as the theory of justice he constructs on this basis, inadequate for developing a fully convincing response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism is that, on close consideration, this theory doesn’t posit relativism itself as the philosophical foundation for justice or democracy. Rather, it ultimately relies on a restriction of the domain of extension of relativism as a foundation for their respective theories of democracy. This emerges if we consider the fact that Rawls proposes to ground democratic institutions on what the members of a given “political culture” are assumed to share. This implies that his theory of justice is predicated on the assumption of a certain degree of normative homogeneity within cultural groups. For it is ultimately this homogeneity that functions as the ground for the legitimacy of the political institutions that are taken to be appropriate for it (even though a certain measure of pluralism within the cultural group can also be accepted according to the logic of this argument, as long as it does not extend to the fundamental principles that are assumed to define the group’s identity and therefore provide the basis for the legitimacy of its political institutions). From this, it follows that while Rawls’s theory of justice is compatible with the recognition of the possibility of irreducible moral disagreements between cultural groups, it must discount such a possibility within them. The specific conception of relativism I intend to rely on in order to advance a more compelling response to the Catholic discourse of antirelativism, on the other hand, is predicated on the assumption that there can also exist irreducible moral disagreements within a cultural group. This implies that the argument I will provide for the connection between relativism and democracy cannot rely on a restriction of the domain of application of relativism as its philosophical foundation, but must rather make relativism itself—that is, the recognition of the potential unavailability of a

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shared criterion for solving all moral conflicts—into the basis for the legitimacy of democratic institutions. Another way of putting this is to say that Rawls’s theory of justice is predicated on a merely cultural form of relativism. This remains compatible— and indeed presupposes—that some kind of moral truth is available within cultural groups. What I want to explore, on the other hand, is whether a theory of democracy can do away with the orientation to an idea of moral truth altogether. This requires a more radical conception of relativism than the one either implicitly or explicitly endorsed by Rawls, which gets rid of the assumption of cultural homogeneity and can therefore be considered a properly philosophical form of relativism.

4 DEFENSE OF A RELATIVIST CONCEPTION OF DEMOCRACY

In this chapter, I put forward an alternative response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, which I find more compelling than the rationalist one considered in the previous chapter. Instead of attempting to substitute the religious conception of absolute truth with a different set of values supposedly derived from reason itself, this response challenges the assumption that a conception of democracy predicated on a form of philosophical relativism must necessarily be self-defeating. On the contrary, I show that it is possible to construct a theory of democracy based on a form of philosophical relativism that is not vulnerable to the objections made by the Catholic Church, because it is politically sustainable on its own, without needing to rely on any external or transcendent (that is, ultimately religious) sources of legitimacy. The exposition is structured in three parts. In the first, I clarify the specific definition of relativism on which my argument relies. This is necessary both to overcome the problems I pointed out in chapter 2 concerning the way in which the notion of relativism is usually defined by its critics and to distinguish my philosophical starting point from that of the alternative theories of democracy discussed in chapter 3.

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In the second part, I show that the specific conception of relativism I propose to endorse offers the philosophical grounds for a principled defense of the core democratic values of freedom, equality, and the legitimacy of conflict, and therefore of the political form of democracy itself. The argument developed in this section is based on a reconstruction and extrapolation of the thought of the great Austrian jurist and political theorist Hans Kelsen. Finally, in the last part of this chapter I show that the specific conception of democracy I extrapolate from Kelsen’s writings offers the basis for a compelling response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. This response consists in showing that such a conception of democracy is not more vulnerable than one deriving its legitimacy from a set of absolute moral or political values to the threat of being overthrown by democratic means, because it contains within itself sufficient conceptual resources for justifying a set of constitutional limitations on the democratic exercise of political power. It follows that the antidote that the Catholic Church recommends to prevent democratic regimes from potentially overthrowing themselves— that is, the imposition of a set of constitutionally enshrined limitations on the democratic exercise of political power—need not rely on a set of absolute moral or political values. To be sure, as I will also point out in the context of this analysis, neither a positivist conception of constitutionalism nor a religiously inspired one can ever offer an absolute guarantee that democracy will not overthrow itself by democratic means. However, this will lead me to question the desirability— and indeed the coherence—of such a demand in the first place, inasmuch as the idea of an absolutely secure or risk-free democracy seems to imply the paradox that a democratic regime ought to be imposed even on people who do not want to govern themselves democratically. The conclusion reached is therefore that complementing democracy with reference to a set of absolute moral or political values may end up generating more problems than it actually solves.

THE DEFINITION OF RELATIVISM Between Nihilism and Absolutism

In the discussion of the way in which the Catholic Church has historically employed the concept of relativism provided in chapter 2, I pointed out

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several recurrent problems and inconsistencies. Before moving on to show how this notion can provide the philosophical foundation for a coherent and sustainable conception of democracy, it is therefore necessary to clarify how I propose to define it in a way that overcomes these problems. This clarification will also serve the additional purpose of distinguishing the way in which I propose to understand the concept of relativism from the philosophical premises that underscore the alternative justifications of democracy considered in chapter 3. In particular, I will seek to distinguish the concept of relativism from the kind of epistemological fallibilism that is implicit in Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality, the form of pluralism on which Rawls explicitly predicates his theory of justice and in particular his political liberalism, and finally the form of cultural or ethnocentric relativism that ultimately underscores Rawls’s theory of justice. For the purposes of this discussion, I propose to define relativism as a second-order (that is, meta-ethical) standpoint consisting in the consciousness that all first-order moral judgments depend on a set of prior categories and assumptions, which cannot themselves be justified absolutely. From this it follows that first-order moral judgments are necessarily relative to the set of premises and categories on which they depend, and therefore that moral judgments can be true (or valid) for some, without necessarily being so for everybody else. Given a different set of premises, it is usually possible to reach equally valid but different moral conclusions; and when this happens there is no absolute or context-transcending criterion on the basis of which to resolve such disagreements, because all higher-order criteria depend on prior categories and premises too, without the possibility of this regression ever being definitively ended. Of course, there may and often do exist significant degrees of overlap between different people’s and even different social groups’ inherited moral categories. This implies that there may and often do exist ways of solving moral conflict by appeal to such shared categories. However, the point is that this overlap is philosophically contingent, because there is no criterion on the basis of which the validity of any set of premises or categories can be established in a way that does not itself depend on prior premises or categories. Thus the validity of all moral judgments is necessarily limited—or relative—to the set of premises on which they rely. This is precisely the conclusion reached by Hans Kelsen at the end of his discussion of the concept of relativism in What Is Justice?:

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The answer to the question about the ranking of values is bound to turn out differently according to whether the question is addressed to a believing Christian, who considers his spiritual welfare, i.e., his fate after death, to be more important than earthly goods, or to a materialist who has no belief in the immortality of the soul; and the answer cannot be the same if it is given on the assumption that freedom is the supreme value, i.e., from the standpoint of liberalism, as it is on the supposition that economic security is the ultimate goal of a social order, i.e., from the standpoint of socialism. . . . The answer to such questions will always have the character of a subjective, and therefore purely relative, judgment of value.

Several features of this passage are worth underlining in light of the discussion carried out in chapter 2. First, it should be made clear that Kelsen’s conception of relativism does not imply a negation of the existence of moral values or of the validity of moral judgments. On the contrary, it supposes both, because that is what is meant to be relativized in the first place. If moral values didn’t exist and moral judgments were consequently impossible, there would be nothing left for moral relativism to relativize. This is what I sought to emphasize by suggesting that relativism ought to be understood as a second-order standpoint consisting in the consciousness of the relativity of all first-order moral judgments. For this definition clearly supposes the existence, and therefore the possibility, of first-order moral judgments. In this sense, the definition of relativism I propose to work with ought to be distinguished from a form of philosophical nihilism on the grounds that relativization is different from negation: while the nihilist denies the existence of moral values as such, and therefore forbids him- or herself from formulating any moral judgments at all, the relativist is conscious of the relative validity of his or her moral values and is therefore entitled to make moral judgments for him- or herself, as long as he or she does not illegitimately attempt to extend the domain of their validity to those who do not share the premises on which they depend. At the same time, the specific definition of relativism I have proposed also ought to be distinguished from a form of moral absolutism, because it is not predicated on the statement of some absolute moral truth. On the contrary, the essential claim is precisely that the standpoint from which such a truth would be enunciated is unavailable. Thus, while the moral ab-

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solutist is confident that his or her moral values can be justified universally and definitively, the relativist calls that confidence into question. It follows that the specific definition of relativism I am proposing escapes the standard objection according to which any affirmation of relativism must necessarily involve a “performative contradiction.” For the claim that moral judgments are relative to the particular moral categories employed to formulate them is not situated on the same conceptual plane as the first-order moral judgments it seeks to relativize. As I have already emphasized, it is posited as a second-order standpoint. This implies that it is not a first-order moral judgment, and therefore that it doesn’t contradict itself. The confusion here only stems from the assumption that the relativist claim is itself posited as an absolute moral truth. However, that is an illegitimate assumption, arbitrarily introduced by those who continue to try to understand relativism from an absolutist perspective, while the point of relativism is precisely to deny the availability of such a perspective in the first place. Indeed, a logical implication of this conception of relativism is that it is not only possible but also necessary to be relativist about one’s own relativism. For this refers to the possibility of adopting a third-order standpoint, from which the affirmation of relativism itself must also appear relative to a prior set of categories and assumptions. Far from being a problem for the specific definition of relativism I have proposed, the logical regression this initiates is precisely the reason why I affirm that an absolute ground for moral (and philosophical) judgments is unavailable: ultimately, all such judgments are made from the perspective of a given set of premises and categories and must therefore remain relative to them. Beyond Indifferentism and the Fact/Value Distinction

A further important feature of the specific definition of relativism I am proposing is that there is no reason for supposing that it should be tied to a form of moral indifferentism, consisting in a passive withdrawal from the willingness to exercise the faculty of moral judgment. The reason is that the consciousness that one’s moral judgments are relative to the particular set of categories employed to formulate them does not imply that moral judgments are useless or impossible, but rather that the subject making the judgment must assume responsibility for the specific set of moral categories

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employed to make it. In this sense, the overall effect of adopting such a standpoint is to situate the exercise of the faculty of moral judgment within the framework of the nexus between freedom and responsibility, rather than within the framework of obedience to a higher authority. This is a point that was recognized explicitly by Hans Kelsen in the context of his discussion of the concept of relativism, where, after proposing the definition quoted, he asks: What then is the moral of this relativistic philosophy of justice? Has it any moral at all? Is relativism not amoral, or even immoral, as it is sometimes maintained? On the contrary! The view that moral principles constitute only relative values does not mean that they constitute no values at all; it means that there is not one moral system, but that there are several different ones and that consequently a choice must be made amongst them. Thus, relativism imposes upon the individual the difficult task of deciding for himself what is right and wrong. This, of course, implies a very serious responsibility, the most serious responsibility a man can assume. If men are too weak to bear this responsibility, they shift it to an authority above them, to the government and in the last instance to God. Then they have no choice. . . . The fear of personal responsibility is therefore one of the strongest motives of the passionate resistance against relativism. However, relativism is here rejected and—what is worse—misinterpreted, not because it morally requires too little, but because it requires too much.

To assume that taking responsibility for one’s own moral standpoint must necessarily sap the motivation for exercising the faculty of moral judgment would seem to rely on a dubious psychological generalization, according to which individuals would be more willing to take a moral stand if in so doing they thought of themselves as obeying a higher authority rather than deciding freely. However, even everyday experience shows that this is not necessarily the case, since we often observe people that seem more willing to defend their moral and political judgments precisely because they have chosen them and therefore perceive them as theirs, rather than because they take them to correspond to some absolute truth. Such an insight is, for example, contained in one of the chapters from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, where he notes that citizens of democratic societies are often more stubborn than aristocratic subjects

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in defending their opinions, precisely because the notion of freedom of conscience is so deeply engrained in such countries’ political culture: “When an idea, whether sound or unreasonable, takes hold of the mind of the American people nothing is more difficult than to eradicate it. . . . I attribute this effect to the very same cause that, at first sight, should seemingly prevent it; freedom of the press. Peoples amongst which this freedom exists are attached to their opinions by pride as much as by conviction. They love them because they seem sound to them, but also because they have chosen them. And they hold them not only as something true, but also as something of their own.” The specific aspect of this passage that appears pertinent to the present discussion is the insight that it is not necessary to believe that one’s moral judgments correspond to an absolute truth in order to take an active stand for them: the willingness to do so can also stem from the fact itself of having made those judgments freely and therefore coherently with the assumption of a form of moral relativism. This is also the point that is meant to be conveyed by the statement quoted at the start of this book, according to which there is nothing that prevents one from realizing “the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly.” On the contrary, for Schumpeter this is the distinctive feature of a specific kind of civic ethos that democratic societies necessarily presuppose. Finally, the last important clarification with respect to the specific definition of relativism I am proposing here concerns its scope. This may serve to preempt another potential objection that has been raised against some versions of this concept. In her essay “Truth in Politics,” for instance, Hannah Arendt famously begins by stating that the notion of normative truth is incompatible with political freedom. For as she puts it: “Truth carries within itself a certain element of coercion. Once a statement is recognized as true and pronounced to be so, it is beyond argument, dispute, opinion and consent.  .  .  . That is why what Mercier de la Rivière once remarked about mathematical truth applies to all kinds of truth: ‘Euclide est un véritable despote, et les vérités géométriques qu’il nous a transmises sont des lois véritablement despotiques.’ ” Later in the same essay, however, Arendt adds that factual truths are different from moral ones because “facts have no conclusive reason for being what they are; they could always have been different, and this annoying contingency is literally unlimited.” This particular contingency of factual truth is for her tied to its being constitutive of the shared “worldliness” that

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makes politics possible. For as she puts it, “in absence of a shared ‘world’ of contingent and therefore alterable facts, politics itself would lose its ground.” From this, Arendt deduces that a “radical skepticism” applying to the domain of facts as well as values would undermine the conditions for politics (and therefore freedom) just as much as a form of “moral dogmatism.” Indeed, toward the end of her essay, Arendt even goes as far as to suggest that when the possibility of relying on unquestionable factual truths is called into question—opening even history itself to the possibility of retrospective manipulation—a society may be already on its way toward a form of “totalitarianism.” From the perspective of the set of issues under consideration here, this can be interpreted as another way of establishing a connection between relativism and totalitarianism—which as we have seen is a distinctive feature of much of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism—on the basis of the claim that factual relativism undermines the very “worldliness” that provides the shared ground for politics in the first place. The easiest way to forestall this objection is to hold on to the distinction between facts and values and thereby to restrict the domain of application of relativism to the latter sphere. In this way it is possible to steer clear both of the “despotism” that for Arendt characterizes all assertions of (moral) truth and of the “totalitarian” tendencies implicit in the denial of factual truths. And indeed, such a restriction can be said to be implied by the specific way in which I have formulated the definition of relativism. For, as it will be recalled, this has been defined as a second-order (that is, metaethical) standpoint concerning the domain of validity of first-order moral judgments. This says nothing at all about whether factual judgments are also to be considered relative in the same sense. A possible ground for sustaining this distinction between facts and values is to point out that facts are amenable to scientific evaluation, by either forensic or experimental means, while the same is not the case for value judgments. For instance, in his discussion of the concept of relativism, Kelsen clearly relies on such a distinction when he suggests that the answer to the question of whether a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, with no possibility of escape, would be justified in committing suicide cannot be “valid for everybody, as for instance the statement that heat expands metallic bodies.” As Kelsen himself later makes clear, “the latter is a judgment about reality, verifiable by experiment, not a judgment of value, which defies such

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verification.” Thus the basic idea on which he seems to be relying in order to make this distinction is that, for what concerns factual judgments, there is an ultimate reality out there, with which we can interact, and which can therefore be explored by means of experiments, while the same is not the case for moral judgments, because these depend entirely on the categories we presuppose to formulate them. At the same time, however, there are a host of rather well-known objections that can be raised against the possibility of sustaining such a clear-cut distinction between the domain of facts and values, stemming, for instance, from the recognition that even our empirical perceptions—and therefore the experiments that rely upon them—may be tainted by moral presuppositions to the extent that they depend on categories that are themselves morally laden. For this reason, I prefer to remain agnostic over the question of the applicability of the specific conception of relativism I am endorsing to the domain of facts. This is not a problem for the purposes of my argument because the only strong presupposition on which it relies is that relativism applies to the domain of moral values. Thus whether the same is also true of factual statements is a question I propose to leave open in the context of the present discussion. All it is important to establish here is that if relativism were true of facts as well as values, the consequence wouldn’t necessarily be the complete loss of “worldliness” that Arendt seems to worry about. All that would follow is that the way in which the world is perceived is itself an open—and therefore political—question. Thus, presumably it would have to be submitted to the same normative considerations that follow from the assumption of a form of value relativism. This is precisely the subject of the discussion to be carried out in the second part of this chapter. The Distinction Between Relativism, Fallibilism, Pluralism, and Ethnocentrism

Before moving on to illustrate the way in which the conception of relativism articulated can function as the ground for a principled defense of democracy, it is worth devoting a little more attention to this definition in order to distinguish it from the philosophical premises that underscore the theories of democracy discussed in chapter 3. In particular, I will here seek to distinguish the concept of relativism from the form of epistemological fallibilism that is implicit in Habermas’s theory of communicative

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rationality, the kind of pluralism on which Rawls predicates his political liberalism, and the form of cultural or ethnocentric relativism that ultimately underscores Rawls’s theory of justice. In each case, I will seek to point out that while there are some affinities between the concept in question and the specific conception of relativism I am proposing, there are also some important differences, which appear relevant in this context because they translate into a different set of political implications with respect to the most appropriate way of dealing with political disagreement and therefore conflict. Let me begin by clarifying what I take to be the difference between moral relativism and the kind of epistemological fallibilism that underscores Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. The latter can be defined as the idea that absolute moral truths can never be achieved in practice because the ideal of “complete communicative rationality” is always hampered by the existence of ineliminable limiting conditions in the way in which concrete attempts to obtain it are carried out. The organizing assumption nonetheless remains that such a form of rationality admits of the possibility of being approximated to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the way in which it is sought. This provides the basis for the toleration of moral disagreement as a provisional feature of the specific state of moral understanding in which a community currently exists, and potentially also as a driving force for the furtherance of such understanding. However, the ultimate goal—or “regulative ideal”—remains some kind of truth or rationality that cannot be challenged. This idea has in common with the conception of relativism I have proposed a recognition of the unavailability of a notion of absolute moral truth. However, what distinguishes them is that fallibilism remains oriented toward such a regulative ideal and therefore still assumes that it can be approximated to a greater or lesser degree. This implies the possibility of establishing a hierarchy between different substantive conceptions of what is good or right, depending on the degree to which they approximate the ideal. The specific conception of relativism I have proposed to endorse, on the other hand, challenges the very possibility of drawing such hierarchical distinctions between moral judgments and doctrines, because it undercuts the criteria for doing so in the first place. The consequence is a substantive difference in the way of relating to the dimension of moral and political disagreement. For while the specific conception of relativism I have proposed treats the existence of moral and po-

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litical disagreement as both legitimate and ineliminable, from the perspective of the kind of epistemological fallibilism that underscores Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality political disagreement must necessarily be seen as the sign that complete rationality has not yet been achieved and therefore as the marker of a problem, that is, something that needs to be overcome. Even though this form of fallibilism is predicated on the assumption that such a goal can never be fully achieved in practice, that remains its normative orientation, and in this sense it can be said to be normatively averse to disagreement in a way that the specific conception of relativism I have proposed isn’t. What distinguishes the conception of relativism I have proposed from the kind of moral pluralism that underscores Rawls’s theory of justice, and in particular the reformulation he offers in his book Political Liberalism, ultimately amounts to something similar. At its core, moral pluralism can be defined as the idea that there exist multiple, ultimately irreconcilable moral doctrines that are equally valid. Crucially, however, pluralism does not assume that this plurality restricts the scope of validity of such doctrines. Rather, it maintains that multiple irreconcilable moral doctrines can be equally valid over the same domain (that is, within the range of the same set of philosophical premises). This has in common with the specific conception of relativism I have proposed the assumption that irresolvable moral conflicts may exist. However, what distinguishes them is the assumption that such disagreements may exist within the same philosophical domain. For, this has the effect of introducing a hierarchy between different orders of moral and political disagreement, and therefore between different kinds of moral standpoints. In his treatise Political Liberalism, for instance, Rawls recognizes that there may exist a plurality of reasonable comprehensive doctrines (that is, of moral doctrines ultimately based on the assumption of the freedom and equality of all human beings). This is what prompts him to make room for a recognition of the legitimacy of disagreement between them, within the framework of his original theory of justice. However, comprehensive doctrines that are not considered reasonable in this sense are not treated in the same way, because they are not assumed to belong to the domain within which pluralism is considered legitimate. What is important to point out here is that this is not merely a contingent feature of Rawls’s specific version of pluralism, but rather a general implication of moral pluralism as such, which follows from the assumption

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that legitimate disagreement can exist within the same philosophical domain, since this implies that disagreements between different philosophical domains cannot be considered equally legitimate. The apparently more radical version of moral pluralism endorsed by Isaiah Berlin, for instance, carries the same implication. For Berlin assumes that there exist multiple, irreconcilable moral values that are objectively valid. This implies that moral judgments based on views that do not belong to the set of objectively valid moral values cannot enjoy the same degree of legitimacy as the ones that are. What my analysis accordingly reveals is that moral pluralism is by definition limited to a given philosophical domain (since this is the domain within which multiple irreconcilable moral views can be held to be equally valid), whereas the specific definition of relativism I have proposed concerns the kinds of disagreements that can exist between moral views belonging to different philosophical domains (that is, based on different sets of moral premises). To be sure, from this it follows that it is possible to be a relativist and a pluralist at the same time—as I in fact argue that Rawls is, in the interpretation I provided in the previous chapter of this book. However, it is important to keep the two concepts apart, because it is also possible to be a pluralist and a moral objectivist at the same time, as the example of Isaiah Berlin would seem to suggest. This brings me to discuss what I take to be the difference between the specific conception of relativism I have attributed to both Rawls and Rorty in the previous chapter of this book, and the one I propose to endorse as the basis for my own argument. Its core lies in the fact that both Rawls’s and Rorty’s respective versions of relativism are predicated on a substantive conception of political culture or ethos, which is implicitly made to function as the ultimate bedrock of political justification. Both Rawls and Rorty accordingly assume that it is possible to deduce substantive moral commitments from one’s cultural background or belonging. The specific conception of relativism I have proposed shares with this form of cultural relativism the assumption that absolute moral and political truths are ultimately unavailable, but it forbids itself from treating culture or ethnicity as functional substitutes for them. The reason is that it does not derive the unavailability of absolute moral or political truths from the irreducibility of possible disagreements between different cultural groups, but rather from the more general philosophical insight that all moral and philosophical judgments depend on prior categories and assumptions that

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cannot themselves be justified absolutely. This implies that it is compatible with the absence of any morally substantive common ground within cultural groups, as well as between them. To be sure, the specific conception of relativism I am proposing is also compatible with the assumption that individuals stemming from similar cultural or historical backgrounds may share a similar set of moral and philosophical premises and therefore reach similar substantive moral conclusions when confronted with similar problems. In this sense, there can exist local or culturally specific truths. However, the key point is that there cannot be any guarantee of this, because common histories and cultural backgrounds always need to be appropriated by individuals, that is, on the basis of prior categories for which the ultimate responsibility lies with the individual. Thus the conception of relativism I am proposing implies that culture and ethnicity cannot function as the basis for any stable justification of a substantive set of moral values, as they do in Rawls’s works. Beyond the three specific philosophical standpoints from which I have sought to distinguish my definition of relativism here, there are of course a number of other contiguous concepts that could perhaps also be opposed to the kind of moral absolutism defended by the Catholic Church. A few terms that come to mind are, for instance, “pragmatism,” “skepticism,” “perspectivism,” and “subjectivism.” My contention, however, is that such terms do not really introduce any substantive alternatives to the concepts that have already been discussed, but on reflection boil down to some variant or combination of them. The concept of “pragmatism,” for instance, appears to be employed sometimes in a sense that makes it essentially congruent with Habermas’s conception of fallibilism, and other times in ways that make it congruous with Rawls’s versions of cultural relativism. Perhaps the most consistent use of this term is the one proposed by John Dewey, according to which pragmatism is the view that truth is the way of perceiving the world that appears most conducive to the successful fulfillment of one’s practical goals. Upon reflection, however, this conception of pragmatism proves to be merely a specification of the conception of relativism I have proposed, inasmuch as it implies that truth is always relative to the subject making the judgment. Similarly, the notion of skepticism can be defined as the idea that all claims to moral truth are subject to being legitimately called into doubt. This can stem either from a conception of fallibilism as I have defined it

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or from a form of philosophical relativism as I have defined it. However, it does not appear to introduce any substantively different philosophical standpoint, as is also the case for the notions of perspectivism and subjectivism, which I understand as essentially congruent with the way in which I have defined the concept of relativism. The implication that follows from this is that the argument I will develop in the next section could perhaps also be formulated in terms of the notions of pragmatism, skepticism, perspectivism, or subjectivism, as long as the appropriate definitions of such terms were adopted throughout. However, that would merely amount to a semantic difference, which would not alter the substance of what I have to say. The reason I have ultimately chosen to stick with the term “relativism” is that this is the term that is also employed by my principal interlocutors: the Catholic Church on the one hand and Hans Kelsen on the other, whose discussion of the relation between relativism and democracy constitutes the principal source of inspiration for the argument I will seek to develop in the next section of this chapter.

RELATIVISM AS THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF DEMOCRACY The Core of the Argument

On the basis of the clarifications concerning the definition of relativism, it is now possible to move on to an account of the way in which such a conception of relativism can function as the philosophical foundation for the justification of a form of democracy that will then be shown to be able to withstand the objections raised by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. As I already mentioned, this argument will be spelled out largely through a reconstruction and extrapolation of the thought of Hans Kelsen on the matter. Before delving into the details of this exegetical project, however, it may be worthwhile to abstract some of the key intuitions on which the argument is based. This will serve to highlight the conceptual independence of the ideas being developed from an exegesis of Kelsen’s thought, while also providing a guiding thread for the analysis to follow. The core of the argument depends on three basic intuitions, which respectively connect the concept of relativism to (1) a notion of freedom understood as a right not to be subjected to coercive exercises of power one

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has not consented to, (2) an idea of equality understood as the denial of the intrinsic superiority of any substantive conception of the good or the right over any other, and (3) a form of tolerance understood as the recognition of the legitimacy of disagreement and therefore conflict between such rival conceptions. On the basis of the assumption that democracy can be understood as the political institutionalization of these three basic values— freedom, equality, and the intrinsic legitimacy of political conflict—it follows that relativism constitutes an adequate philosophical foundation for a normative commitment to democracy. Let me therefore proceed to substantiate each of these three basic intuitions. First, I will consider the connection that can be established between relativism and freedom as defined above. The starting point is the assumption that the legitimate exercise of coercive power over others requires a justification that is at least in principle recognizable as valid by those on whom the power is meant to be exercised. Since relativism, as it has been defined, implies that what is true for those seeking to exercise coercive power need not also be true for those on whom it is meant to be exercised, such a justification—and therefore the exercise of power it is meant to justify—can only be legitimate if it is consented to by the latter party. Thus the moral relativist is logically committed to recognizing the normative value of a form of freedom understood as a right not to be subjected to forms of coercive power one has not consented to. The second key intuition on which the argument for the connection between relativism and democracy is based is that relativism provides the philosophical foundation for a form of equality understood as the denial of the intrinsic superiority of any substantive conception of the good or the right over any other. This can be justified on the basis of the assumption that discrimination between different substantive conceptions of the good or the right supposes a criterion, which must be recognized as valid from the point of view from which the discrimination is meant to be enforced. However, relativism as it has been defined implies that, from the point of view from which relativism is being enunciated, no substantive conception of what is good or right can be considered absolutely valid. Thus, from this perspective, no substantive conception of the good or right can be considered intrinsically superior to any other. Finally, the last basic intuition on which the argument for the connection between relativism and democracy relies is that relativism provides the philosophical foundation for a recognition of the legitimacy of

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disagreement—and therefore conflict—between different substantive conceptions of the good or the right. This follows logically from what has already been stated. For if relativism implies that there is no absolute criterion for discriminating between substantive conceptions of the good or the right, it must also imply that any persistent disagreement or conflict between them cannot be perceived as a sign that at least one of them must be wrong. Thus disagreement and conflict must appear as part of the essential texture of morality, and therefore as something to be valued in themselves. If these three lines of reasoning are coupled with the assumption that democracy can be understood as the political institutionalization of the values of freedom, equality, and the legitimacy of conflict, it follows that relativism can be considered an adequate philosophical foundation for a normative commitment to democracy. Of course, I am aware that as it has been stated thus far the argument is still situated at a very high level of abstraction, from which many of the most important details—and difficulties—are not visible. However, it is precisely in order to spell out some of these details and address some of these difficulties that I will now turn to Hans Kelsen’s various formulations of this basic argument in his writings on this topic. Hans Kelsen on the Connection Between Relativism and Democracy

The issue of the connection between relativism and democracy occupied a central place in Hans Kelsen’s thought throughout his intellectual career. In his numerous—albeit still relatively understudied—writings on this topic, it is therefore possible to find several parallel formulations of the basic intuitions I outlined. These are worth examining in some detail, since they shed light on different aspects of the same overall argument and may therefore help to enhance its plausibility. In his first major text on democracy—the treatise titled The Essence and Value of Democracy—Kelsen starts by articulating the assumption that all coercive exercises of political power require a justification. For as he puts it, “Nature itself demands freedom. . . . The more one man’s primary feeling of self-worth depends on the rejection of any other man’s higher worth, the more he perceives the foreign will, which the social order imposes upon him, as a burden.” Although the appeal to the concept of nature in this passage might appear to be in tension with the anti-naturalism that must arguably be im-

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plicit in the conception of relativism I endorse, this can be interpreted as a restatement of the fundamental assumption that underscores most modern political theory, at least since Hobbes: namely, that political power is an essentially artificial reality, and for this reason it requires a justification. On this basis, Kelsen points out that the most common strategy for the justification of political power has historically consisted in obscuring its artificiality by purporting that its social organization corresponds to an objective reality. This strategy depends on the assumption that such a reality can be perceived and understood correctly by human beings. Thus Kelsen maintains that the traditional justification for the legitimacy of political power has depended on the assumption of the availability of some kind of normative truth. The paragon of this strategy of justification, for him, is Plato, who notoriously offered a justification for a system of rule by philosophers on the basis of the assumption that there exists an absolute idea of the Good, accessible only to a select class of individuals, who have received the appropriate training and are therefore entitled to rule over others. From this, Kelsen deduces that there is an intellectual and political “affinity” between what he calls “philosophical absolutism” and “political authoritarianism.” For, as he puts it, “the latter has the unmistakable tendency to use the former as an ideological instrument. To justify his unlimited power and the unconditional submission of all others, the ruler must present himself, directly or indirectly, as authorized by the only true absolute, the supreme superhuman being, or as inspired by him in a mystical way.” A logical corollary of this thesis is that, if relativism is recognized as true—that is, if absolute moral and political truths are assumed not to be accessible to human beings—the coercive exercise of political power loses the principal ground for its philosophical justification. This already provides a prima facie justification for a negative conception of freedom as a right to non-interference. For if the coercive exercise of political power requires a justification, and the grounds for such a justification turn out to be unavailable, it follows that no coercive exercise of political power is justified. To this Kelsen adds that the only kind of justification for the coercive exercise of political power that is consistent with the assumption of a form of philosophical relativism is that based on the consent of those on whom the power is supposed to be exercised. For, as I have pointed out at several junctures, although relativism implies that what is true for me need not

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necessarily also be true for you, it is consistent with (and indeed presupposes) that you or I may hold something to be normatively true for ourselves. This implies that, if you or I consent to a binding decision or norm, the element of coercion that may be required to enforce it must also be considered legitimate from a relativist’s perspective. This is what Kelsen seems to be getting at when he writes: “If it is recognized that only relative values are accessible to human knowledge and human will, then it is justifiable to enforce a social order against reluctant individuals only if this order is in harmony with the greatest possible number of equal individuals, that is to say, with the will of the majority.” Or as he puts it even more concisely in The Essence and Value of Democracy: “He who only relies on earthly truth and only allows human knowledge to direct social policy can justify the coercion, which the realization of that policy inevitably requires, in no other way than with the assent of at least the majority of those who are supposed to benefit from the coercive order.” From the perspective of the argument being reconstructed here, these passages can be interpreted as a way of spelling out the reasoning that underscores the first substantive intuition outlined above: namely, that there exists a logical connection between the assumption of a form of philosophical relativism and a conception of freedom understood as a right not to be subjected to any exercise of coercive power one has not consented to. The justification of the second substantive intuition outlined above— which can also be gleaned from several aspects and passages of Kelsen’s discussion of the connection between relativism and democracy—stems from a further analysis of the logical implications of the existence of an absolute moral or political truth. At one point in The Essence and Value of Democracy, for instance, Kelsen asks: What else could there be in the face of the towering authority of the absolute Good, but the obedience of those, for whom it is their salvation? There could only be unconditional and grateful obedience to the one who possesses—i.e. knows and wills—this absolute Good. This obedience, of course, can only rest on the belief that the authoritative figure of the lawmaker possesses the absolute Good insofar as the great multitude of subjects is denied that same knowledge.

On the face of it, this passage may appear merely as a restatement of a thesis concerning the connection between relativism and freedom, if only from a

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slightly different perspective. For to assume that there exist absolute moral or political truths implies the assumption that people ought to live and be governed by them. But strictly speaking, this implies that people cannot— or in any case ought not—govern themselves, since absolute truth is by definition independent of the contingent desires and wishes of individual human beings. Thus to submit to the authority of truth means to relinquish the idea of self-government. On closer inspection, however, the passage also proves to contain a further insight that is worth developing further: namely, that if there exist absolute moral or political truths, then the idea of an equal intrinsic worth of all substantive conceptions of the good or the right is also absurd. For the notion of such a truth is posited precisely as a criterion of discrimination between different conceptions of what is taken to be good or right. Thus it provides the grounds for establishing hierarchies between different opinions on the basis of the extent to which they correspond to (or at least approximate) such a criterion. This is what Kelsen can be read as implying when he points out that the assumption of the existence of an “absolute Good” provides the grounds for drawing a distinction between the “authoritative figure of the lawmaker” that “possesses the absolute good” and “the great multitude of subjects” that is “denied the same knowledge.” From this it follows that the idea that all individual opinions concerning what is right or good are of equal intrinsic worth depends upon the assumption that there are no absolute moral or political truths providing a criterion to establish a hierarchy between them, which is another way of saying that relativism provides the philosophical foundation for a justification of the principle of equality between individual conceptions of the good and the right, inasmuch as it undercuts the grounds for discriminating between them. To be sure, in The Essence and Value of Democracy Kelsen also recognizes that some authors in the history of Western political thought have attempted to justify some elements of the democratic procedure of majority rule on the basis of the claim that they are in fact the best available means for discovering and implementing some conception of political truth. For instance, Kelsen mentions that in The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau justifies the legitimacy of majority rule as the best available means for establishing what the general will amounts to. Similarly, a whole strand of contemporary democratic theory has developed precisely around the attempt to justify majority rule on the basis of its supposed epistemic qualities.

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However, Kelsen sternly dismisses such a supposition, stating that “everyone suspects that the defenders of democracy are here making use of an argument which is foreign to the very nature of democracy. That which was able to demand popular acceptance due to a single leader’s charisma cannot be transferred to the many of the anonymous mass, to the average citizen. . . . Any serious attempt on the part of democracy to justify itself in this way would make it the donkey in lion’s skin.” Although Kelsen does not elaborate further on the reasons for this dismissal, these can be inferred from the reasoning already outlined: namely, that for Kelsen democracy is a regime founded on the principles of freedom and equality, and from the perspective of a philosophical standpoint that assumes the existence of absolute moral or political truths, such principles must appear either absurd or meaningless. For if the goal of a political system is to discover and implement an objective political truth, then there is no meaningful sense in which the members of the system can be said to even seek to govern themselves. Similarly, if the assumption is that there exists a set of absolute moral and political truths, then there is no meaningful sense in which all individual views and opinions can be said to be of equal intrinsic worth, since some will necessarily be closer to the truth. Finally, the last basic insight sustaining the connection between relativism and democracy is justified in Kelsen’s writings by paying attention to the consequences of the different possible assumptions concerning the existence of absolute moral or political truths on the mode of apprehension of political disagreement and therefore conflict. Kelsen begins by pointing out that the assumption that there exist absolute moral or political truths must necessarily lead to the conclusion that disagreement and conflict in these domains are illegitimate, or in any case the markers of a problem. For, as Kelsen puts it, “the absolute is by definition one.” Thus, from its perspective the existence of disagreement or conflict must necessarily appear as a sign that at least one of the parties involved is wrong. Accordingly, Kelsen writes: “Tolerance, minority rights, freedom of speech and freedom of thought, so characteristic of democracy, have no place within a political system based on the belief in absolute values. This belief irresistibly leads—and has always led—to a situation in which the one who assumes to possess the secret of the absolute good claims to have the right to impose his opinion as well as his will upon the others, who, if they do not agree, are in error. And to be in error is, according to this view, to be wrong, and hence punishable.”

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To be sure, Kelsen could not have failed to be aware of the fact that, over the history of Western political thought, a number of attempts have been made to reconcile the commitment to an idea of absolute moral or political truth with the acceptance of some form of tolerance of diverging opinions. In the previous section of this chapter, for instance, I pointed out that a form of philosophical fallibilism is compatible with the toleration of moral and political disagreement, even if it remains oriented toward an idea of absolute moral or political truth, inasmuch as it posits such disagreement as a necessary feature of the conditions under which the truth is sought and perhaps even as a driving force for this search in the first place. Similarly, an argument could perhaps be made to suggest that the Catholic Church has over the course of its history also been able to endorse a form of tolerance for religious disagreement on the basis of an analogous set of premises. For instance, the document Dignitatis Humanae promulgated by the Second Vatican Council in 1965 explicitly makes the point that absolute (that is, divine) truth is “inaccessible to human cognition.” From this, it deduces that different religious creeds and representations ought to be seen as marking different “stages” in humanity’s overall march toward final redemption and therefore as worthy of “respect” in themselves, even though the Catholic Church is still assumed to be the “depositary” and therefore the “guardian” of its most complete formulations. From this perspective, Kelsen’s statement concerning the incompatibility between a belief in the existence of absolute moral and political truths and the tolerance of disagreements in these domains should perhaps be interpreted as a way of pointing out that the attempts that have historically been made to reconcile them have remained inadequate, or at least truncated, inasmuch as they are only capable of providing a provisional justification for the toleration of disagreement. Both the fallibilist and the Catholic Church’s arguments I mentioned, for instance, imply a commitment to toleration only as a means—and therefore for the time that it takes—to reach consensus on the presupposed notion of absolute truth. Thus disagreement continues to be perceived as a problem, in the sense of something that needs to be overcome. From this, Kelsen deduces that the only valid philosophical ground for a principled acceptance of the legitimacy of moral and political disagreement as such (that is, as something worth defending for its own sake rather than as a means to a further end) must be a form of philosophical relativism that denies the existence of absolute moral and political truths. For as Kelsen

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himself puts it: “That values have only relative validity implies that opposite values are neither logically nor morally excluded.” Thus “he who views absolute truth and values as inaccessible to the human understanding must deem not only his own, but also the opinions of others at least as feasible.” This specific kind of attitude with respect to other people’s opinions is for Kelsen an essential presupposition of a normative commitment to democracy, since democracy is founded on the free exchange of values and opinions and therefore presupposes the legitimacy of conflict between them: “Democracy values everyone’s political will equally, just as it gives equal regard to each political belief and opinion, for which the political will, after all, is merely the expression. Hence, democracy offers every political conviction the opportunity to express itself and to compete openly for the affections of the populace. . . . [Moreover] the rule of the majority, which is so characteristic of democracy, distinguishes itself from all other forms of rule in that it not only by its very nature presupposes, but actually recognizes and protects—by way of basic rights and freedoms and the principle of proportionality—an opposition, i.e., the minority.” From this, Kelsen deduces that the assumption of a form of philosophical relativism is an essential precondition for the normative commitment to democracy, in that it furnishes the philosophical foundation for the specific kind of tolerance of moral and political conflict on which this political form depends. To sum up, Kelsen provides three parallel arguments to substantiate the thesis that there exists a logical connection between relativism and democracy: one based on the idea that relativism undercuts the grounds for the legitimate exercise of coercive political power and therefore compels a recognition of the normative value of freedom as a right not to be subjected to forms of coercive power one has not consented to; another based on the idea that relativism abolishes the criterion for drawing hierarchical distinctions between different substantive conceptions of what is good or right and therefore compels a recognition of the equal intrinsic worth of everyone’s opinion on such matters; and finally one saying that relativism provides the grounds for a recognition of the inherent legitimacy of moral confl ict as an unavoidable feature of moral life. Each of these three parallel lines of argument is condensed and illustrated in an example Kelsen often refers to in his writings, which relies on an interpretation of a passage from the New Testament, in which the circumstances of Jesus’s trial before Pontius Pilate are recounted. It is worth

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examining Kelsen’s reading of this passage in some detail, because, as well as serving to further underscore most of the basic intuitions on which the argument I have been attempting to reconstruct relies, it was also to become one of the most notorious aspects of Kelsen’s theory as a whole, attracting the attention of the most disparate commentators—sometimes, as we will see, to the detriment of his other more explicit statements on this topic. The passage in question is from John 18, and its content can be broadly summarized as follows: Jesus is said to have been brought before Pontius Pilate, the Roman consul in Jerusalem, with the accusation of claiming to be the king of the Jews. Upon interrogation, Jesus asserts that he has come onto this earth “to bear witness to the Truth.” In response, Pilate asks rhetorically, “What is Truth?”; he then proceeds to allow the crowd that has gathered around the scene to make the final judgment over Jesus’s case. Notoriously, this crowd chooses to have Jesus crucified instead of Barabbas, who, as John puts it at the end of the chapter, “was a known criminal.” The commentary Kelsen appends to this short parable, after describing it as “one of the most sublime pieces of world literature . . . which has grown, without intending it, into a tragic symbol of the antagonism between absolutism and relativism,” is the following: “For those who believe in the Son of God and king of the Jews as witness to the absolute truth, this plebiscite is certainly a strong argument against democracy. And this argument, political scientists must accept. But only under one condition: that these believers are as certain about their political truth, which they will enforce with violence if necessary, as the Son of God was about his.” What Kelsen seems to be suggesting here is the same point we already encountered above: that an allegiance to the democratic principle of majority rule is the logical consequence of finding oneself in the philosophical quandary implied by Pilate’s question. Not knowing what truth amounts to, Pilate is assumed to have behaved like a true democrat, because he refused to impose his will upon others and preferred to defer to the will of the majority. If he had been as certain as the Son of God about being in possession of the absolute truth, Kelsen concedes, it would have made no sense for Pilate to behave as he did. However, as soon as that certainty is called into question, his behavior begins to appear more reasonable. Indeed, the famous gesture that Pilate made after emitting this judgment—to wash his hands—is said to symbolically illustrate that he did not necessarily agree with the decision of the majority. He simply didn’t know whether Jesus was the Son of God or not, and that is why he was willing

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to abide by the decision of the majority instead of imposing his own will upon them. In this sense, the “tragic symbol of the antagonism between absolutism and relativism” in this interpretation is not Jesus but Pilate. For he is the figure Kelsen is asking us to identify with in order to understand what makes majority rule reasonable: Pilate rather than Jesus himself, who is absolutely convinced of possessing the truth, and for whom the whole procedure must accordingly appear absurd (“Forgive them, they known not what they do,” he famously exclaims once on the cross). Three Possible Objections

Before moving on to demonstrate that the arguments outlined above provide the philosophical foundation for a conception of democracy that is not vulnerable to the charges raised by the Catholic discourse of antirelativism, it is worth considering a number of prior objections that could potentially be made against what has been stated. This will help to further underscore the validity of the insights I have sought to extrapolate from Kelsen’s thought, while also laying some more of the conceptual grounds for the discussion to be carried out in the following section of this chapter. In particular, I will focus here on three possible objections to the arguments I have sought to outline. The first challenges the coherence of deducing any positive normative standpoint from the assumption of a form of philosophical relativism. For if relativism amounts to the claim that the validity of all moral judgments is relative to a prior set of categories and assumptions, the validity of which cannot be established absolutely, it seems to imply that no positive normative standpoint can be definitively justified. But isn’t that precisely the opposite of what I have been attempting to do? Specifically, doesn’t a justification of the values of freedom, equality, and the legitimacy of conflict suppose that one cannot be a relativist about such values? And if that is the case, isn’t the whole project of justifying such values on the basis of a form of philosophical relativism incoherent? My contention is that the appearance of contradiction that is conjured by these questions depends on a confusion over what is meant either by relativism or by the concept of a justification in the context of the arguments I have provided. The first issue has already been dealt with in the context of the discussion of the definition of relativism. There I emphasized that for the purposes of the present discussion relativism ought to be understood as a second-order philosophical standpoint, that is, not as a judgment about

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what is right or wrong in itself, but rather as a judgment on the conditions of validity of such judgments. It follows that there is no contradiction involved in holding both that freedom, equality, and the legitimacy of conflict are values and that the validity of all moral values is relative to the premises and categories from which they are derived. For the first claim is posited as a first-order moral judgment about what is good or right, whereas the second is a claim about the conditions of validity of this kind of judgment. Since these two claims are not situated on the same conceptual plane, they cannot contradict each other. Thus one can indeed be a relativist about freedom, equality, and the legitimacy of conflict while adopting them as a positive normative standpoint at the same time. All that being a relativist about such a standpoint implies is a consciousness that its validity depends on a prior set of assumptions and categories, which cannot be justified absolutely. From this perspective, the point of the arguments I have provided in the previous section is to show that relativism provides a sufficient set of categories and assumptions from which the values of freedom, equality, and the legitimacy of conflict can appear valid. This does not involve denying the unavailability of absolute foundations because, as I also pointed out in the context of the discussion of the definition of relativism, the specific definition I have adopted is not only compatible but actually requires one to be a relativist about one’s own relativism. Thus the kind of philosophical justification that is here being offered for these values is itself relative, that is, contingent on a prior set of assumptions and categories, the validity of which is not assumed to be absolutely justifiable. The only remaining way that this may appear incoherent is if one starts from the assumption that all justifications are necessarily absolute. This would imply that to justify means to show that something is absolutely true. But that clearly begs the central question. For the way in which I have employed the concept of justification implies that a set of values can be considered justified if they can be shown to follow logically from certain plausible premises. This does not establish their absolute truth, but rather only their validity within a certain context, the context defined by the premises on the basis of which their validity is established. Thus the implication is that the range of validity of the justification provided for the values of freedom, equality, and the legitimacy of conflict must remain restricted to the range of those who subscribe to the kind of relativism that provides its

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philosophical foundation. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t a justification at all, only that it is a relative rather than an absolute justification. The second objection to the argument for the connection between relativism and democracy I will consider here challenges the deduction of the specific values of freedom, equality, and the legitimacy of conflict from the assumption of a form of philosophical relativism. Differently from the objection considered above, this does not challenge the coherence of deducing any positive normative standpoint from such premises. However, it contends that the specific inferences I have sought to draw from them are unwarranted, because it is also possible to justify a set of very different— and indeed opposite—moral and political principles starting from the same premises. The most prominent example that comes to mind in this respect is the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which notoriously begins from the denial of the existence of absolute moral values (“the words Good and Evil are ever used with relation to the person that useth them, there being nothing simply and absolutely so”), but nonetheless culminates in a defense of a form of absolute monarchy, in which the multitude is deprived of any possibility of even questioning the authority of the absolute sovereign. The same point has however also been made with reference to a wider set of authors. This can be interpreted as a direct challenge to the argument I have sought to develop in the previous section of this chapter and is therefore worth considering in some detail here. In response, however, I contend that, although it is undeniable that several authors in the history of Western political theory have attempted to employ relativist (or skeptical) premises to justify anti-democratic positions, such arguments invariably rely on a suppression or denial of the relativist premises from which they begin. Thus the thought of such authors ultimately confirms, instead of contradicting, the upshot of the arguments I have sought to advance. In what follows, I will seek to illustrate this with reference to in particular the thought of Thomas Hobbes. The first thing that is worth pointing out in this respect is that the very same passage from the Leviathan that I quoted above to underscore Hobbes’s endorsement of a relativistic philosophy also clearly establishes a link between such premises and the idea that moral and political values can only be established by “consent.” Here is the full text of the passage in question:

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These words of Good and Evill are ever used with relation to the person that useth them, there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of Good and Evill to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves, but from the nature of man (where there is no commonwealth) or (in a commonwealth) from the Person that representeth it, or from that arbitrator or Judge whom men disagreeing shall by consent set up and make his sentence the rule thereof.

This passage sheds an interesting light on the reasons for Hobbes’s appeal to the artifice of a social contract as the foundation of his theory of sovereignty. For what it seems to imply is that once it is recognized that moral values “are ever used in relation to the person that useth them, there being nothing simply and absolutely so,” collectively binding rules can only be established among “men disagreeing” on the basis of the category of “consent.” Moreover, as Norberto Bobbio has pointed out in one of his insightful studies of Hobbes, there is something “inherently democratic” in such a strategy for the legitimation of political power, since even though Hobbes’s social contract is meant to remain “purely hypothetical,” it still sets up a criterion of legitimacy based on what “all human beings can at least in principle accept.” Thus the idea of self-government is implicitly set up as a standard of legitimacy. Indeed, as Bobbio also points out, this is explicitly recognized by Hobbes himself in a passage from his book on The Citizen, in which he concedes that his theory of the social contract implies that the act of constituting a sovereign is in itself inherently democratic, even if the kind of polity that is thereby set up isn’t. Once again, it is worth quoting this passage in full, since in light of what has been said it provides further confirmation for the key thesis I have been seeking to establish: namely, that once the existence of absolute moral and political truths is called into question, the only legitimate basis on which political authority can be established is a democratic notion of consent: Those who met together with intention to erect a City were almost in the very act of meeting a Democraty; for in that they willingly met, they are suppos’d oblig’d to the observation of what shall be determin’d by the major part: which, while that convent lasts, or is adjourn’d to some certain dayes, and places, is a clear Democraty; for that convent, whose will is the will of all the Citizens, hath the Supreme Authority;

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and because in this Convent every man is suppos’d to have a Right to give his voice, it followes, that it is a Democraty by the definition given in the first Article of this Chapter.

To avoid any possibility of misunderstanding on this point, Hobbes also later adds that “an Aristocraty, or Councell of Nobles endued with supreme authoritie, receives its originall from a Democraty, which gives up its Right unto it,” and then again that “as an Aristocratie, so also a monarchy is derived from the Power of the People, transferring its Right, (that is) its Authoritie on one man.” These passages seem to suggest that in Hobbes’s The Citizen it is possible to find the elements for a dual theory of the constituent power, akin to the one that was developed more explicitly by John Locke and later also Jean-Jacques Rousseau—that is, the idea that the political entity is created in two stages: a first stage in which the social body is created by essentially democratic means (pactum unionis), and a second stage in which the form of government of this social body is then decided, either by a transfer of power to a monarchy or an aristocracy or by the people retaining it for themselves (pactum subiectionis). Of course, by pointing this out I do not mean to make a case for suggesting that Hobbes was ultimately a democrat. On the contrary, in both The Citizen and Leviathan he provides several arguments for suggesting that monarchy is ultimately a superior form of commonwealth to democracy. Thus, as has been pointed out by several commentators, both of these texts were ultimately intended to function as defenses of absolute monarchy, whose strength lay precisely in the fact that they employed the basic arguments of its opponents at the time, turning them to opposite political purposes. In this respect, however, it is worth pointing out that all the arguments Hobbes provides for the superiority of monarchy to democracy implicitly rely on the assumption that it is possible to establish the soundness of public policy in an objective (that is, ultimately non-relativistic) way. The first and most important of these arguments, which is in fact contained in both The Citizen and the Leviathan, is, for instance, based on the insight that “whosoever beareth the Person of the People, whether it is one or an assembly that bears it, beareth also his own natural Person.” From this, Hobbes deduces that “where the publique and private interest are most closely united, there is the publique most advanced. Now in Monarchy the private interest is the same with the publique. The riches, power, and honour of a Monarch

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arise onely from the riches, strength, and reputation of his Subjects. For no King can be rich, nor glorious, nor secure, whose Subjects are either poore, or contemptible, or too weak through want, or dissension, to maintain a war against their enemies; whereas in a democracy, or aristocracy, the public prosperity confers not so much to the private fortune of one that is corrupt, or ambitious, as doth many times a perfidious advice, a treacherous action, or a civil warre.” The problem with this argument, from a Hobbesian perspective, is that it supposes that the “publique interest,” as a criterion for evaluating political outcomes, can be established objectively, that is, independently of the procedure through which the commonwealth is taken to express itself. But, as we have seen, Hobbes supposes that prior to and independently from the constitution of the commonwealth there is no “publique interest,” or conception of “Good and Evill,” separate from the one entertained by every individual human being. Thus to sustain this argument for monarchy Hobbes is forced to relinquish, or at least contradict, the moral relativism on which his original conception of the social contract has been shown to be based. The same also applies to the other principal argument Hobbes provides for the superiority of monarchy over democracy, which is that “a monarch receiveth counsel of whom, when, and where he pleaseth; and consequently may hear the opinion of men versed in the matter about which he deliberates, of what rank or quality soever, and as long before the time of action and with as much secrecy as he will. But when a sovereign assembly has need of counsel, none are admitted but such as have a right thereto from the beginning; which for the most part are of those who have been versed more in the acquisition of wealth than of knowledge.” Rather like the previous one, this argument supposes that it is possible to establish who are the “men versed in the matter” about which it is being deliberated independently of the political procedure through which the commonwealth is instituted and expresses itself. But this contradicts the premises on which Hobbes’s argument for the social contract is predicated in the first place. For, if that were possible, why not nominate these people as sovereigns in the first place? What emerges from this analysis is therefore that, far from providing a challenge for the arguments I have sought to advance in the previous section of this chapter, a close reading of Hobbes’s writings ultimately confirms my basic insight, both directly and a contrario—because Hobbes himself recognizes the existence of a logical link between the assumption that there

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are no absolute moral and political truths and the idea that political legitimacy ought to be founded on the inherently democratic notion of consent, and because the passages in which he seeks to justify the superiority of monarchy to democracy depend on a relinquishing of his original relativistic premises. My contention is that something similar could also be shown with respect to the other authors evoked to challenge the idea that there is a logical connection between relativism and democracy. However, such an analysis would be beyond the scope of the present discussion. I can therefore only rely on what has been stated about Hobbes as an illustrative example. Finally, the last potential objection to the arguments I have extrapolated from Kelsen that will be considered here concerns the specific conception of democracy that can be justified on the basis of a form of philosophical relativism. For even assuming that everything that has been stated thus far holds—that is, that relativism provides a sufficient philosophical foundation for the values of freedom, equality, and the legitimacy of conflict—such values may still be held to be compatible with a variety of different conceptions of democracy, some of which may be problematic for normative reasons analogous to those raised by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. Such an objection has in fact been raised explicitly by the Italian legal and political theorist Gustavo Zagrebelsky, on the basis of a criticism of Kelsen’s reading of the parable from Jesus’s trial. In this respect, Zagrebelsky accepts that Pilates’s question indicates his adoption of an essentially relativist standpoint; however, he claims that the way in which Pilate ends up dealing with Jesus’s trial as a result of this isn’t really democratic in any recognizable sense of the term. Rather, for Zagrebelsky, Pilates’s behavior is “cynical and opportunistic,” since his main concern is not to give Jesus a fair trial, but rather to court the favor of the Synedrium of high priests who had accused Jesus in the first place and keep the people happy by giving them an opportunity to vent their aggressive impulses. Thus Zagrebelsky contends that the means through which Jesus was ultimately condemned are more akin to an authoritarian kind of mob rule than to liberal democracy. From the perspective of the set of issues being considered here, this claim can be seen as analogous to the key contention that is also at the heart of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism: namely, that a conception of democracy founded on a form of philosophical relativism is always at risk of converting itself into its political opposite. However, there is also an additional reason why it is worth addressing here: that this will offer

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the opportunity of further clarifying some of the distinctive features of the specific conception of democracy that can be inferred from the arguments outlined. This will contribute to laying the grounds for the discussion to be carried out in the next section of this chapter. To do so in fact requires moving beyond a mere exegesis of the parable from John. For what is at stake here is clearly not the real or even intended meaning of that text, but rather the inherent validity of the ideas Kelsen thought he could express through it. Thus even if it were to turn out that Kelsen’s reading of the biblical passage is indefensible, as Zagrebelsky suggests, that could only at most lead to the conclusion that the parable is badly suited to express the point he wants to make. But the logic of the ideas could still stand. Thus, in what follows I will begin by outlining some of the distinctive features of the specific conception of democracy that Kelsen seeks to justify on the basis of the arguments outlined, and only toward the end will I return to Zagrebelsky’s objection to show why it doesn’t hit the mark. Kelsen’s Theory of Democracy

Most of the distinctive features of Kelsen’s theory of democracy are presented—and justified—as derivations from the conditions required to institute a political regime based on the three principal normative values inferred from his conception of philosophical relativism: freedom, equality, and the legitimacy of conflict. These three values are not, however, all given the same importance. Rather, the guiding thread of the exposition is provided by the conceptual evolution that for him must be undergone by the principle of freedom in order to become actualized in a concrete political order, with the principles of equality and the legitimacy of conflict only serving ancillary conceptual functions at key moments during the argumentation. In this sense, the principal mediating category between relativism and democracy, for Kelsen, is that of freedom—although the argument wouldn’t work if equality and the legitimacy of conflict weren’t presupposed too. The starting point is that in the most abstract and general sense (that is, the sense that follows directly from the assumption of a form of moral relativism, according to the argument provided), the concept of freedom has a purely negative meaning, which signifies the rejection, or illegitimacy, of all forms of coercive power exercised by human beings over one another. Since, however, for Kelsen a social order can only exist on the basis of a set

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of collectively binding norms, he suggests that this original idea of freedom must undergo a series of “metamorphoses” in its meaning in order to become the foundation for a meaningful conception of democracy. The first such “metamorphosis” is a transformation from the purely negative idea of the rejection of heteronomy into the positive idea of collective self-government. For Kelsen, this is the step that was taken by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract, through the claim that if individuals cannot continue to live in the pure independence of the hypothetical state of nature, then they can only be free in the sense that they are the authors of the laws to which they have to submit. While Kelsen recognizes that this is an essential step in the development of the idea of democracy, he claims that it is not sufficient to arrive at its full determination. The reason he adduces is that, in Rousseau, the notion of autonomy remains tied to the principle of unanimity as a criterion for making legitimate laws. Against this, Kelsen objects that if the legitimacy of the juridical order is subordinated to a requirement of consistency with the will of all the subjects to whom it is supposed to apply, it is effectively emptied of all significance, because there is no point in coercing anybody to do something they already want to do in the first place. On this basis, Kelsen argues that the concept of freedom must undergo a further “metamorphosis” if it is to function as the basis for the social order in a meaningful sense: from the idea of autonomy as unanimity, it must be converted into the majority principle as a procedure for collective decisionmaking that maximizes the number of individuals who can be considered free in a given social order. This is therefore the first distinctive feature of Kelsen’s theory of democracy, which was in fact already alluded to in the reconstruction of Kelsen’s arguments for the connection between relativism and democracy. Two things are particularly worth highlighting here with respect to this point. First, the majority principle is not being justified as a compromise or second-best solution with respect to the kind of unanimity implicit in Rousseau’s conception of the social contract. Rather, Kelsen claims that “the principle of absolute majority represents an upper limit. Anything less would mean that the will of the state could from its very inception conflict with more wills than it agrees with. Anything more would make it possible for a minority, rather than a majority, to determine the will of the state, by preventing an alteration of that will.”

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Second, it is worth highlighting that this specific derivation of the principle of majority rule implicitly presupposes a recognition of the normative value of equality, as it has been defined. For it is only if the individual conceptions of what is good or right are assumed to be of equal intrinsic worth that the logic of maximization between individual wills that Kelsen appeals to can lead to this result. Thus this is one of the instances in which the principle of equality proves to be essential for Kelsen’s deduction of the specific features of his theory of democracy, alongside that of freedom. Nor is it the last. For Kelsen’s justification of the principle of majority rule becomes the basis for a deduction of other essential features of a democratic order, which ultimately prove to be even more relevant from the point of view of the set of issues under consideration here. The stepping-stone is the claim that the fulfillment of the majority principle supposes the existence of a minority, since it is meaningless to speak of a majority if this is not opposed by a minority. For this reason, Kelsen suggests that the democratic principle of majority rule cannot be fully realized without the recognition of certain “fundamental rights” that guarantee the persistence of a minority as a counterpart to the power of the majority. This point is formulated by Kelsen as follows: “The very concept of a majority already presupposes the existence of a minority and, thus, the right of the minority to exist. . . . The protection of the minority is the essential function of so-called freedoms and fundamental rights or human and civil rights, which are guaranteed by all modern parliamentary-democratic constitutions. . . . Such a rational form of self-restraint can only be constitutionally instituted through the means of a variation in the degree of rigidity of legal norms. . . . Measures, which infringe upon certain national, religious, economic or broadly intellectual spheres of interest, are possible only with the assent, and not against the will, of a qualified minority; that is, they require agreement between the majority and the minority.” What the passage also illustrates is that, for Kelsen, the kinds of rights that are required to institute and protect the principle of rule itself can only be effectively guaranteed if they are inscribed within the framework of a “constitutional order” based on the principle of the “hierarchy of norms”— that is, certain norms must require more taxing conditions than a simple majority to be modified or abrogated. Thus, paradoxically, for Kelsen the institution of super-majoritarian constraints on the exercise of political power by the majority proves to be a logical requirement of the concrete

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institutionalization of the democratic principle of majority rule itself. This is extremely important from the point of view of the set of issues being considered here because it shows that, in addition to being predicated on the principle of majority rule, Kelsen’s conception of democracy is also inseparable from a form of liberal constitutionalism, understood in terms of the legal limitation of the exercise of political power. From this reasoning, Kelsen deduces the last distinctive feature of his specific conception of democracy, which is its inherently parliamentary character. For, as Kelsen points out, the existence of super-majoritarian constraints on the democratic exercise of political power implies that when the most important political decisions are at stake the majority cannot decide on its own and needs to find a “compromise” with the minority. For Kelsen, this is the essence of the parliamentary procedure, since, as he puts it, “the entire parliamentary process, whose dialectical procedures are based on speech and counter-speech, argument and counterargument, aims for the achievement of compromise.  .  .  . Herein lies the actual significance of the majority principle within a real democracy: by dividing the entire body of subjects into essentially two large groups, this principle has already furnished the possibility for compromise in government, since the final integration into a majority, as well as a minority, itself necessitates compromise.” From the perspective of the language employed in contemporary democratic theory, this might perhaps be interpreted as a way of pointing out that a majoritarian democracy is also inherently deliberative. However, the key difference between the specific conception of democracy that is being articulated here and most of the mainstream versions of the contemporary theory of deliberative democracy (such as Habermas’s) is that in Kelsen’s theory there is no expectation that the outcome of the deliberative process should correspond to, or even approximate, a criterion of rationality. For this reason, it remains consistent with the persistence of substantive disagreement even after the decision has been made. For the notion of compromise does not imply that the decision made can be regarded as correct or rational by all the individuals taking part in the process of approving it; it merely implies that it represents a “resultant” of all the interests and opinions represented within it. This justification of parliamentarism based on the notion of compromise is accordingly the point at which Kelsen’s deduction of the value of the legitimacy of conflict from the premises of a form of philosophical relativism

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becomes relevant. For Kelsen’s conception of parliamentarism is inextricably tied to the idea that the will of the collectivity can only be defined and expressed through a conflictual—that is, dialectical—process whereby different views and opinions are brought to bear on one another. To sum up, we can see that, starting from the premise of a form of philosophical relativism, Kelsen is ultimately able to establish the legitimacy of a specific conception of democracy that can be described as majoritarian, constitutional, and parliamentary (or deliberative) at the same time. Such a description is clearly at odds with the image of an authoritarian kind of “mob rule” evoked by Zagrebelsky in his criticism of Kelsen’s reading of the parable from Jesus’s trial. Thus even assuming that Zagrebelsky’s reading of this parable is more convincing, all it can at most show is that the parable in question is inadequate to capture all the subtlety and complexity of Kelsen’s theory of democracy. Most importantly, however, the purpose of this exposition has been to begin laying the grounds for the direct response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism that I will seek to provide in the next section of this chapter. It is accordingly to that task that I shall now turn.

RESPONSE TO THE CATHOLIC DISCOURSE OF ANTI-RELATIVISM Kelsen’s Discussion of the Religious Discourse of Anti-Relativism

On the basis of the conclusions established in the previous section, we can now move on to articulate a direct response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, which I take to be more compelling than the rationalist one discussed in the previous chapter. As a starting point, it is worth noting that in his article “Foundations of Democracy,” published on the American journal Ethics in 1955, Kelsen himself already took notice of the existence of a religious discourse challenging the adequacy of relativism as a philosophical foundation of democracy and sought to provide a response to it. In particular, in a section of that text titled “Democracy and Religion,” Kelsen sought to address the arguments raised by two contemporary theologians—Emil Brunner and Reinhold Niebuhr—who had already focused their attention on moral relativism as a potential threat for the stability of democratic regimes. Indeed, Kelsen states that their arguments “play a very

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important part in the anti-relativistic movement, since they are used not only by theologians in favor of religion, but also by thinkers not connected with a particular historic religion in favor of philosophical absolutism in general.” In response, Kelsen raises a number of points I have also touched upon in the discussion of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism in chapter 2. However, he does not really address what I take to be the core of the objection contained in this discourse against a conception of democracy founded on a form of philosophical relativism: namely, that such a conception runs the risk of being self-defeating, because there is nothing within it that can prevent it from overthrowing itself by democratic means, if the people as a whole (or a sufficiently large part of it) were to turn against the democratic principle itself. It is therefore worth briefly recalling what Kelsen did say about the religious discourse of anti-relativism, before developing a more pointed response addressing this issue in particular. Kelsen begins by stating that “Brunner as well as Niebuhr start their crusade against relativistic positivism (or skeptical secularism, as Niebuhr puts it), with the accusation that this intellectual attitude is responsible for totalitarianism.” Specifically, Brunner is reported as stating that “the relativism of the nineteenth century, with its denial of the metaphysical and superhuman, dissolved the idea of justice by proclaiming the relativity of all views of justice. . . . It was only to be expected that one day a political power devoid of all religious scruples should discard the last vestiges of the traditional idea of justice and proclaim the will of the ruling power as the sole canon of appeal in matters of law.” Similarly, Niebuhr is reported as stating that “the form of skepticism which asserts the relativity of all human perspectives . . . stands on the abyss of moral nihilism and threatens the whole of life with a sense of meaninglessness. Thus it creates a spiritual vacuum into which demonic religions easily rush.” Against such arguments, Kelsen raises two main objections, one of a historical and one of a logical nature. The first is that Brunner’s and Niebuhr’s arguments obscure the fact that the actual historical bearers of totalitarian projects were never themselves relativists, but rather staunch supporters of some conception of absolute truth. Targeting Brunner in particular, for instance, Kelsen writes: “Brunner’s assertion that relativism is responsible for the totalitarian state is in open contradiction with the undeniable fact that the classical justification of the totalitarian states is furnished just by that philosophy which more than any other has rejected relativism

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and emphatically asserted the transcendental existence of absolute values— i.e., Plato’s.” From the perspective of the discussion carried out in chapter 2, this can be interpreted as another way of pointing out that the claim according to which relativism leads to totalitarianism is in reality a reversed charge for consequences of which philosophical absolutism itself ought to be in fact treated as the main culprit. Indeed, Kelsen points out that Brunner himself implicitly recognizes this when he writes: “The Church, which today protests against the oppression it suffers at the hands of the totalitarian State, would do well to remember who first set the State the bad example of religious intolerance by using the secular arm to safeguard by force what can only spring from a free act of the will. The Church should always bethink itself with shame that it was the first teacher of the totalitarian State at nearly every point.” For Kelsen, this is clearly true, although he adds that “the Church could be ‘the teacher of the totalitarian state in nearly every point,’ not because she represented ‘a positivism void of faith and inimical to metaphysics and religion,’ but because she taught just the contrary: the belief in absolute justice.” The second key objection that Kelsen raises against the formulations of the religious discourse of anti-relativism that he considers is that—even if it could be shown that a form of philosophical relativism laid the conditions for the subsequent emergence of totalitarianism, as Brunner and Niebuhr seem to suggest—this could in no way demonstrate the falsity of relativism as a philosophical standpoint, let alone the truth of philosophical absolutism. For as Kelsen puts it: “The argument set forth against relativistic positivism, that this philosophy makes the totalitarian state possible is a political argument, and as such, even if it were true, could prove nothing against relativism as an epistemological principle. . . . A statement may be true even if the belief in its truth may have effects which from some point of view or other may be considered as evil.” Again, from the perspective of the discussion carried out in chapter 2, this can be interpreted as another way of making the point that there appears to be something strange, if not inherently contradictory, in the attempt to justify the appeal to a set of absolute moral and political truths with reference to the presumed political consequences of adopting relativism as a philosophical standpoint. For the absolute is by definition independent from all empirical consequences. Thus the most that can be established by this argument is that it would be preferable if a set of absolute

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moral and political truths were to exist. But that is insufficient to establish that such truths actually do—let alone that they can be accessed by human beings and therefore serve to guide concrete political practice. Although both of these arguments appear cogent, neither gets to the real core of the most challenging objection raised by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism against conceptions of democracy founded on philosophical relativism. For as I sought to make clear in the analysis carried out in chapter 1, this discourse can be interpreted as an objection raised from within the framework of democratic theory itself, inasmuch as it posits that a conception of democracy founded on a form of philosophical relativism runs the risk of being self-defeating, because it doesn’t appear to contain anything to prevent it from overthrowing itself if the people as a whole, or a sufficiently large part of it, were to turn against the democratic principle itself. This claim doesn’t depend either on the historical case that this is actually how totalitarian regimes came to power where they did or on the truth or falsity of the philosophical relativism it seeks to criticize and the absolutism it seeks to replace it with. Rather, as Kelsen himself recognizes, it is posited as a political point, challenging the viability of a conception of democracy that is not complemented with the reference to a set of absolute moral or political values. In order to address this objection, it is therefore necessary to develop a further argument, which Kelsen himself did not formulate explicitly in his discussion of the religious discourse of anti-relativism, but which I believe can nonetheless be reconstructed on the basis of the premises introduced so far. That is accordingly what I propose to do in the remaining sections of this chapter. The Connection Between Democracy and Constitutionalism

The core of the response I intend to advance against the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism consists in showing that the specific conception of democracy that I have sought to justify on the basis of a form of philosophical relativism is not more vulnerable to the threat of being overthrown by democratic means than one complemented with a reference to a set of absolute moral or political values. It can therefore be considered politically sustainable on its own without needing to rely on any external or transcendent (that is, ultimately religious) sources.

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A useful starting point for such a demonstration is to point out that it is not true that the specific conception of democracy that I have sought to outline and justify doesn’t contain any principle capable of preventing it from overthrowing itself by democratic means. On the contrary, as I have sought to make clear through the exposition of the distinctive features of Kelsen’s theory of democracy, such a conception of democracy is inextricably tied to a form of constitutionalism, which imposes a set of concrete limits on the democratic exercise of political power. This constitutive link between democracy and constitutionalism has a direct bearing on the objection raised by the Catholic discourse of antirelativism because it implies that democracy can only be realized through a set of legal norms that cannot be changed by the will of a simple majority. For instance, a democratic constitution can specify that a proposal to abrogate the majority principle itself requires a qualified majority of twothirds to be approved. At the limit, some principles taken to be especially important for the stability and viability of the democratic order can even be entrenched in the constitutional framework by specifying that they cannot be abrogated by any legal means. This clearly imposes concrete limits on the possibility that the democratic regime may overthrow itself by democratic means because it implies that whoever sought to achieve that would have to either muster enough political support to change the constitution itself or conduct a revolution and establish a different one, which involves confronting the whole repressive apparatus of the state. To be sure, on behalf of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, it might be retorted that this is precisely what this discourse has been arguing for all along. For presumably, the point of insisting on the importance of a reference to absolute moral and political values is to imply that such values ought to be inscribed within a legally enforced constitutional framework in order to function as effective limits on the democratic exercise of political power. From this perspective, the appeal to the principle of constitutionalism cannot constitute a valid response to the main objection contained in the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, because that begs the question as to the foundation for the legitimacy of such a notion of constitutionalism in the first place. This contention, however, misses the key point of the argument I am seeking to develop here: namely, that a conception of democracy founded on a form of philosophical relativism does not need to refer to a set of

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absolute moral or political truths in order to assume a constitutional form. For the legitimacy of constitutional limitations on the democratic exercise of political power can also be established internally; that is, with reference to the same principles and values on which democracy is founded in the first place. This can be demonstrated on the basis of at least two separate arguments, drawing from the premises established in the previous section of this chapter. First, Kelsen himself provides an explicit argument to show that the conception of democracy he justifies on the basis of a form of philosophical relativism must be inscribed within the framework of a constitutional order imposing a set of concrete limits on the democratic exercise of political power. This argument is based on the insight that a concrete application of the majority principle requires the existence of a minority, because a majority without a minority would by definition cease to be a majority. From this, Kelsen deduces that, in order to be coherent with itself, a system based on the principle of majority rule must necessarily take active measures to preserve the existence, and therefore the rights, of the minority. In practice, he notes that this requires imposing a set of limits on the power of the majority itself, which cannot but take the form of constitutional norms that cannot themselves be altered or abrogated by a simple majority. For Kelsen, this is the core of the notion of constitutionalism— that is, the idea of a “hierarchy” of different orders of legislation defined by a variation in the conditions required for changing or abrogating them. Thus by the logic of this argument, Kelsen reaches the conclusion that constitutionalism is an inherent presupposition of the concrete instantiation of the democratic principle of majority rule itself. A more general argument for the same conclusion can however also be advanced on the basis of the premise that the conception of democracy that has been justified with reference to a form of philosophical relativism is inherently procedural—in the sense that it does not predetermine the specific content of the legal and political orders that can be considered legitimate from its point of view, but merely defines the way in which such orders are to be created. From this it follows that the specific conception of democracy I have sought to justify must necessarily take the form of a system of rules defining the specific procedures through which collectively binding norms are to be made in conformity with the values of freedom, equality, and the legitimacy of conflict.

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This too is merely another way of understanding the notion of constitutionalism, that is, as a system of rules defining the conditions under which legally valid norms can be produced. Thus, to the extent that it is inherently procedural, the specific conception of democracy I have sought to justify can be said to also be inherently constitutional. But this implies that it must also be inherently self-limiting, because the constitutional norms that serve to institute such a conception of democracy also by necessity impose a set of limits on what can be legitimately established by it. Thus the specific conception of democracy I have sought to justify on the basis of a form of philosophical relativism can be said to be constitutionally limited by the inherent logic of its own exercise. Finally, a second argument that can be provided to establish the legitimacy of constitutional limitations on the democratic exercise of political power coherently with the principles and values I have inferred from the assumption of a form of philosophical relativism is based on the insight that a democratic order based on these values can also impose constitutional limitations upon itself by democratic means. For instance, as I already pointed out above, a democratic majority could decide to impose a two-thirds super-majority requirement for proposals seeking to abrogate the majority principle itself. If that were to happen, the norm in question could be considered democratically legitimate, as long as it had been approved through the established procedure. However, it could also succeed in binding the power of the majority itself from then onward, as long as there is a coercive state apparatus committed to enforcing the rules established by the majority. As has been pointed out by numerous contemporary theorists of constitutionalism, there is thus a sort of path-dependency of established legislation that can be used to overcome the apparent paradox of self-limitation. This implies that a democratic order can succeed in imposing a set of constitutional limitations upon itself without needing to rely on any external or transcendent (that is, ultimately religious) sources of legitimacy, and therefore coherently with the assumption of a form of philosophical relativism. What the above analysis reveals is that the key objection contained in the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism is predicated on a rather simplistic conception of democracy as the unmediated expression of a substantive sovereign or at least a majority will. From such a perspective, the imposition of constitutional limitations on the democratic exercise of political

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power must indeed appear as something that is imposed on the democratic order from outside, which in turn implies that they must necessarily draw their legitimacy from a set of absolute or transcendent (that is, ultimately religious) moral values. However, from the perspective of the specific conception of democracy I have sought to justify, the constitutional order is not something that confronts the democratic system from outside; rather, it is a necessary presupposition of that system itself, which at the same time draws its legitimacy from that system’s own functioning through the mechanism of self-binding. The principles of constitutionalism and democracy thereby enter into a relationship of reciprocal implication that allows them to both justify and sustain each other. Comparison Between Relativism and Absolutism as Grounds for the Defense of Democracy

To be sure, on the basis of the argument developed in the previous section, an advocate of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism could perhaps still retort that the attempted internal justification of the legitimacy of constitutional limitations on the democratic exercise of political power that I have proposed deprives the value of constitutionalism of at least part of its cogency. For if the basis for the legitimacy of the constitutional norms that are supposed to prevent the democratic order from overthrowing itself is assumed to be located in the democratic process itself, then it follows that such a process could at least in principle abrogate or amend such norms, in a way that would still make it possible for it to overthrow itself by legal means. This can be interpreted as a way of restating the same basic objection I have found to be at the core of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism at a higher level of abstraction, that is, under the conditions in which even the constitutionally enshrined limits on the democratic exercise of political power could be democratically overcome. Indeed, this is arguably what the advocates of this discourse mean to point out through their frequent references to the way in which Hitler came to power in Germany, since this is arguably a case in which a democratic constitutional order was overthrown by strictly legal means. Moreover, even if the legal-historical interpretation of this specific case can be called into question, the fact remains that the point that is meant to be illustrated through this example is at least theoretically possible. For

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even in the limit case in which a democratically established constitution attempted to legally entrench certain specific principles by proscribing all legal means for amending them, that could still in principle happen by means of a prior amendment of the amendment rule itself. My contention, however, is that such a restatement of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism is in reality somewhat disingenuous. For in order to retain its critical edge, it must rely on the assumption that a constitutional order founded on a set of absolute moral and political values would do better in facing the same problem. But that is far from clearly being the case. Certainly, if we were to assume a situation in which all the members of a given polity were committed to democracy as an absolute value the problem wouldn’t even emerge. But that cannot be the relevant term of comparison. For the same would also be true of a hypothetical society in which all members were committed democrats on the grounds of their endorsement of a form of philosophical relativism. The question that needs to be answered is therefore whether a constitutional order founded on a set of absolute moral and political values would be any more effective than one justified on the basis of a form of philosophical relativism in confronting the challenge posed by the potential existence of a set of principled enemies of democracy within it (which, by the logic of the arguments I developed, must be assumed to be philosophical absolutists, since relativism has been shown to imply a normative commitment to democracy). And it is here that the anti-relativist case under consideration appears weakest. For, at the minimum, it seems plausible to suggest that the fact that the defenders of a democratic constitutional order perceive it as justified by a set of absolute moral values would make no difference whatsoever with respect to the chances of keeping the enemies of democracy at bay, compared to a situation in which its defenders perceived their commitment as based on a form of philosophical relativism. After all, what difference can it possibly make to a set of absolutist enemies of democracy whether its defenders perceive their commitment as justified by a set of absolute moral or political values or by a form of philosophical relativism? In the end, which of the two would have more chances of succeeding is a question that depends on the actual distribution of forces and has nothing to do with the reasons for which they hold the beliefs they do. However, upon closer reflection, it is even possible to suggest that a defense of democracy based on a form of philosophical relativism would in

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fact be more effective than one based on the appeal to a set of absolute moral or political values in confronting the potential challenge posed by a set of absolutist enemies of democracy within it. The reason for this is implicit in something that has already been pointed out: namely, that between two rival conceptions of truth there is little possibility for negotiation or compromise. Each party must necessarily perceive the other as either wrong or deluded, and must accordingly seek to impose their conception of the good or the right upon them. This already constitutes an abandonment of the democratic method. The relativist, on the other hand, confronts the absolutist on a different plane, by challenging the grounds for his or her certainty in the first place. The relativist’s goal is therefore not to impose his or her conception of the good over the others, but rather to moderate the other party’s views in order to lay the foundations for the possibility of a compromise. The chances of this being successful may be as slim as those of imposing one’s conception of the good on the other, but at least the method itself is coherent with the basic values of democracy. Both of these points can be illustrated with reference to the specific case that is most often used to raise this objection in the first place: Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933. As I noted, this is arguably a case in which an enemy of democracy succeeded in coming to power by legal means, despite the existence of a constitutional regime, and then proceeded to dismantle the existing democratic order from within. The question, however, is what additional security could have been provided for the democratic order if its defenders had been committed to it as an absolute moral value, as opposed to a set of values grounded in a form of philosophical relativism. As a matter of fact, both absolutists and relativists did take a stand in the situation at hand: the conservative Catholic thinker Carl Schmitt recommended that the president of the Republic assume emergency powers and use “all available means” to reassert civil peace and save the constitutional order. Hans Kelsen, on the other hand, remained committed to the principles of the democratic process, suggesting that even supposed enemies of the democratic order ought to be allowed to participate within it, in the hope that this could strengthen their commitment to it. What needs to be emphasized in this respect (against a common misconception) is that in the end it was a version of Schmitt’s strategy—not Kelsen’s—that prevailed. For what actually happened is that President Hindenburg assumed emergency powers and proceeded to nominate Hitler to the position of chancellor before his party obtained a majority in the

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1933 elections. The reasons for this are still a matter of intense speculation among historians. However, few seem to doubt that Hindenburg was in fact worried much more about the prospect of a socialist revolution than about the prospect of Hitler coming to power. Thus it is probably the weakness of his commitment to democracy as such (not its philosophical basis) that ultimately mattered most. But in any case, the fact remains that it is as yet doubtful whether Hitler would have succeeded in coming to power through democratic elections, had he not already been nominated chancellor through extraordinary means by President Hindenburg. In terms of the question under consideration here, this suggests that it is at least possible that Kelsen’s strategy could have worked, while what we know for a fact is that the solution recommended by an absolutist defender of the constitutional order was actually complicit in supplying the means through which it was ultimately overthrown. To be sure, by this I do not mean to suggest that if Kelsen had had his way Hitler would not have come to power. Rather, the point I mean to advance is that the specific conception of constitutionalism that Kelsen was able to justify on the basis of his philosophical relativism provided at least as many grounds to mount a defense against Hitler’s rise to power, compared to a conception of constitutionalism based on the appeal to a set of absolute moral or political values. Moreover, the means through which Hitler actually did come to power amounted to a departure from Kelsen’s proposed method of dealing with him. Thus it cannot be excluded that his strategy could have been more effective than the one that was actually adopted. The only certain conclusion that follows from what has been stated is accordingly that neither a conception of constitutional democracy founded on a form of philosophical relativism nor one founded on the reference to a set of absolute moral and political values can ever provide an absolute guarantee that such an order will not be overthrown by its own means. For that is a question that depends on the concrete distribution of forces on the ground rather than on the reasons political actors hold the commitments they do. The Paradox of Riskless Democracy

The conclusion reached at the end of the previous section raises the question of whether developing a theory of democracy that is absolutely secure from the risk of being overthrown by its own means is ultimately possible—or

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even desirable. For even though it seems sensible that a committed democrat should be appalled at the possibility that a democratic order might overthrow itself by its own means, it is possible that the converse image of an absolutely secure or risk-free democracy—on which the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism implicitly relies—might turn out to be even more troubling. It is accordingly with a discussion of this paradox that I shall end the present discussion. The idea that the commitment to democracy ought to be based on a set of absolute moral or political values seems to imply that in a hypothetical situation in which a majority—or perhaps the totality—of a given polity’s members were not interested in governing themselves democratically, such a form of government should nonetheless be imposed upon them, as the morally right thing to do. But that is somewhat absurd. For if democracy is supposed to be a regime founded on collective self-government, how can it be coherently imposed on anyone who doesn’t want it? On the other hand, the idea that the commitment to democracy is necessarily founded on a form of philosophical relativism commits the democrat to being a democrat about his commitment to democracy as well. Thus in the hypothetical situation in which an overwhelming majority of the members of a given polity turned out to be resolutely opposed to the democratic principle itself, such a democrat would have to bite the bullet and recognize that trying to impose a democratic order under such circumstances would make no sense, which, however, does not imply agreeing with the opinion of the majority or even renouncing the hope of some day succeed in changing it. The reason is that the only alternative to biting the bullet in this way must involve violating those values or procedures and therefore effectively doing the work of the enemies of democracy for them. This emerges if we consider a little more closely what would be required concretely to prevent a democratic regime from overthrowing itself by democratic means in a situation in which the overwhelming majority was opposed to the democratic principle itself. Presumably, this would require either preventing those people from voting or from being represented in the key democratic institutions or, at a minimum, imposing a set of constitutionally enshrined limitations on the democratic exercise of political power, while renouncing all pretense of justifying them democratically and appealing instead to a higher (and indeed ultimately necessarily absolute) authority. In either case, this makes it difficult to see in what sense the kind of regime that would result could still be considered democratic in any mean-

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ingful sense. For at a minimum, democracy means that political power has to be exercised by those on whom it is applied (which implies a notion of collective self-government somehow giving effect to the values of freedom, equality, and the legitimacy of conflict). If the overwhelming majority is prevented from the possibility of participating in the political process, or if a set of absolute limitations is imposed upon it by appeal to a higher authority, what seems to go missing is precisely the essence of democracy itself. Thus the attempt to provide absolute guarantees that democracy will not overthrow itself by democratic means may end up compromising the very regime it is supposed to protect in the first place. This is ultimately what was affirmed by Kelsen himself in the last lines of a text devoted specifically to the question of the defense of democracy, which are all the more poignant for having been written in 1932: “Those who are for democracy cannot allow themselves to be caught in the dangerous contradiction of using the means of dictatorship to defend democracy. One must remain faithful to one’s flag even when the ship is sinking; and in the abyss one can only carry the hope that the ideal of freedom is indestructible, and the more deeply it sinks the more it will one day return to life with greater passion.”

CONCLUSION

The conclusion reached at the end of the previous chapter is that a conception of democracy founded on a form of philosophical relativism can contain sufficient theoretical resources within itself to avoid overthrowing itself by democratic means, without needing to rely on any external or transcendent (that is, ultimately religious) sources of legitimacy. On this basis, I contend that the key claim underlying the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism—that democratic regimes need to make reference to a set of absolute moral values in order to avoid the risk of degenerating into a form of tyranny or totalitarianism—is unfounded. Instead of summarizing the arguments made to substantiate this thesis, in conclusion I propose to explore the bearing of what has been stated so far on the three theoretical issues mentioned in the introduction, in order to bring out some of the broader intellectual stakes of the present discussion. This will allow me to further underscore the significance of the results obtained by my analysis, while at the same time indicating some potential avenues for further research. The first theoretical issue mentioned in the introduction concerns the conceptual necessity of the appeal to a figure of the absolute as the ultimate foundation for the justification of political institutions. As I pointed out

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through the discussion of Arendt in the introduction, the categories that were initially assumed to be able to perform this function at the beginning of modernity were primarily those of God or the “people,” viewed essentially as functional substitutes for each other (vox populi, vox dei). Both of these figures of the absolute, however, soon proved problematic, because the same critical process that had posed the problem of the foundation for political legitimacy in the first place could also call their capacity to function as viable substitutes for it in question. This has led some recent thinkers to suggest that perhaps the problem itself is badly framed. To search for a viable substitute for God in a situation in which all traditional grounds for political legitimacy are called into question may turn out to be a futile undertaking. “Post-foundationalism” therefore understands itself as the intellectual project of providing a viable justification for political institutions without relying on any presupposed notion of the absolute. In practice, this has often taken the form of an attempt to ground normativity in the process itself of searching for such an elusive ground. The consequence is a reinterpretation of normativity as a performative category that stems from the very attempt of trying to establish it in specific ways. The conception of democracy I have put forward in the previous chapter of this book has in common with this form of post-foundationalism the attempt to do without the reference to a presupposed figure of the absolute. The intellectual strategy it pursues is however slightly different, because the performative dimension implicit in the attempt to ground the legitimacy of political institutions on the process of looking for such a ground in the first place runs the risk of falling back on a certain aesthetization of the political, which ultimately undermines the normative dimension itself. What I attempt to do, on the other hand, is to hang on to both horns of this apparent dilemma at the same time, that is, to provide a resolutely normative justification for the legitimacy of democratic institutions, without relying conceptually on some presupposed figure of the absolute. The way in which I have proposed to do this is by suggesting that the absence of any absolute ground for political justification can itself function as the ground for the justification of a specific conception of democracy. The reason, as I have sought to demonstrate, is that this absence implies that all exercises of coercive power and attempts at discrimination between different substantive conceptions of the good or the right must be considered illegitimate, unless they are consented to by the individuals to whom

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they apply. Since democracy can be understood as a political regime based on the principle of consent among equals, it follows that a form of philosophical relativism implying the unavailability of any absolute grounds for political justification constitutes a sufficient philosophical ground for justifying such a form of democracy. The obvious objection that can be raised against this argument is that it doesn’t succeed in overcoming foundationalism because it implicitly posits relativism (that is, the presupposed absence of any absolute grounds for philosophical justification) as an absolute. My contention, however, is that the way in which I defined the notion of relativism provides a means for avoiding, or at least deflecting, this objection. For, as I have insisted at several junctures, relativism should not be understood as positing an absolute truth, but rather as challenging the availability of such a notion in the first place, on the basis of the recognition that all claims to normative truth depend on a set of prior categories and assumptions, which cannot themselves be justified absolutely. Such a definition can—and indeed must—be coherently applied to itself. This implies that the specific definition of relativism I am proposing does not claim to stand outside the endless chain of justification and presupposition in which all philosophical views are necessarily inscribed. Rather, it is true and comprehensible only within a certain context: the context defined by the standard rules of inference and intelligibility which readers of this book must necessarily share if they are to understand its content. In this sense, I claim that it is not only possible but necessary to be a relativist about one’s own relativism—which implies that positing such a form of relativism as the philosophical foundation for the legitimacy of democratic institutions amounts to a way of grounding their legitimacy not in a figure of the absolute, but in something that is inherently relative; that is, relativism itself. The key difference between this way of justifying democratic institutions and one based on a figure of the absolute is that this mode of justification can coherently recognize its own relativity, while justifications based on a figure of the absolute cannot by definition. For instance, for a conception of legitimacy founded on the assumption that what God says, or what the people want, is infallible, it must necessarily count as an objection that the specific conception of God or the people on which it relies depends on a set of prior categories and assumptions that are not capable of being justified absolutely. However, for a conception of political legitimacy founded on the assumption that relativism implies the illegitimacy of all forms of

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coercive power and political discrimination that are not consented to by those on whom they are supposed to apply, it cannot count as an objection that the conception of relativism being appealed to is itself relative to a set of prior categories and assumptions that cannot be justified absolutely, because that is precisely what that conception of relativism affirms in the first place. There is therefore a sort of short circuit in the logic of endless regression that underscores my conception of relativism, which implies that this notion can be posited as the ground for the normative justification of democracy without thereby assuming any notion of the absolute. For the absolute is by definition that which cannot be relativized, but the logic of endless regression that underscores my conception of relativism can be relativized without contradiction, because all that achieves is a confirmation of the very same logic in the first place. In this sense, the specific justification of democracy I have proposed can be understood as another—more convincing—way of establishing the result sought by “post-foundationalist” theories of democracy: to establish the normative legitimacy of democratic institutions without relying on a presupposed notion of the absolute, that also escapes the difficulties raised by the attempt to do so performatively, with reference to the features of the process of searching for such an absolute in the first place. What I have provided is a resolutely normative justification of democracy, which nonetheless doesn’t rely on any presupposed notion of the absolute. The second theoretical issue mentioned in the introduction concerns the apparent paradox whereby a conception of democracy founded on a form of philosophical relativism could potentially overthrow itself by democratic means because there is nothing within it to prevent that if the people as a whole—or a sufficiently large part of it—were to turn against the democratic principle itself. A large part of the analysis conducted in the previous chapter has been devoted to showing that this is not the case—or at least not more the case for a conception of democracy founded on a form of philosophical relativism than for one based on the reference to a set of absolute moral values—so I will not reiterate here what has already been stated above. Suffice it to say that the core of the argument has consisted in showing that the specific conception of democracy I have sought to justify on the basis of a form of philosophical relativism contains enough grounds within itself to justify a set of constitutional limitations on the democratic exercise of political power, which can presumably prevent or at least re-

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sist that possibility without needing to rely on any external or transcendent (that is, ultimately religious) sources of legitimacy. From the perspective of the ongoing debate on the relationship between constitutionalism and democracy, this can be interpreted as another way of arriving at the idea that there is an internal (that is, necessary) relationship between them, without relying on the problematic notion of communicative rationality that Habermas appeals to for this purpose. What deserves further discussion in the present context, however, is a thought I already touched upon toward the end of the previous chapter in response to the objection that such a conception of constitutionalism is not capable of providing an absolute guarantee that democracy will not overthrow itself by democratic means: namely, that the idea of an absolutely secure or risk-free democracy may ultimately turn out to be more problematic than the apparent paradox it is meant to solve. The first thing that is worth noting in this respect is that requiring an absolute guarantee that democracy will not overthrow itself by democratic means seems to beg the question against relativism, since the latter is defined precisely as the unavailability of such guarantees in the first place. This confirms a more general point I have already made in chapter 2: namely, that many of the objections made against relativism seem to implicitly presuppose a form of moral absolutism, and for this reason cannot really establish any rational grounds to criticize relativism as such. More importantly, however, the idea that in a situation in which the overwhelming majority of people are opposed to the democratic principle itself, a democratic regime could potentially overthrow itself doesn’t really amount to a paradox, since it doesn’t seem to involve any inherent contradiction or even imply that the conception of democracy on which it is predicated must be abandoned. Rather, all that would seem to follow is that, under such circumstances, the decision to abolish democracy would be the last democratically legitimate decision taken by the regime in question. This doesn’t imply that the decision itself would be contradictory or that the conception of democracy on which it is predicted must be considered faulty or defective. To be sure, a committed democrat might find it tragic, and even wrong, if a democratic regime were to commit suicide in this way. And of course, he or she is entitled to do whatever is allowed by the rules of the democratic system itself in order to try to prevent that. But in the final analysis, if the overwhelming majority of a population is genuinely opposed to the

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democratic principle itself, he or she would be coherently required to bite the bullet and recognize that this is what his or her commitment to democracy commits him or her to in the present circumstances—just as a friend may find it wrong and appalling if you or I were to decide to commit suicide and may perhaps do his or her best to try to persuade us not to, but in the final analysis the friend would be required to respect our decision in order to respect our dignity and autonomy as friends. It is also not possible to retort that the idea is merely to suspend the democratic process in order to protect it from a greater threat in the long run. For that clearly begs the question of who is entitled to establish that the conditions for the democratic exercise of political power hold or do not hold in the given circumstances. From a democratic perspective, the only way of making such a politically charged decision is through an exercise of the democratic principle of collective self-government itself. But that simply reaffirms the idea that in a situation in which the overwhelming majority of people were opposed to the democratic principle, a democratic order could legitimately suspend itself—either permanently or temporarily. It cannot establish the democratic legitimacy of ignoring or superseding the people’s will, as expressed by the democratic procedures. What this analysis accordingly reveals is that the real paradox is not so much the idea that a democratic regime founded on a form of philosophical relativism could potentially overthrow itself by democratic means; rather, the paradox lies in the idea of an absolutely secure or risk-free democracy, which must be implicitly appealed to in order to make such a possibility into the ground for an objection against a conception of democracy founded on relativism. For the idea of an absolutely secure or risk-free democracy ultimately proves to belong to an anti-democratic mind set, which does not really locate the ultimate grounds of political legitimacy in the principle of collective self-government, but rather appeals to a higher authority, which is ultimately dependent on a notion of the absolute and therefore conceptually independent from what actual people really want. This is what traps it in the (all-too-familiar) contradiction of potentially justifying the imposition of democracy on a people who don’t necessarily want it or agree with it. Finally, the last theoretical issue mentioned in the introduction as having a bearing on the present discussion concerns the question of the relationship between politics and religion in a context in which religious views have ceased to be shared universally by all members of the polity, but are nonetheless not in the process of withering away entirely or even of be-

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ing restricted to the marginal domain of the private sphere. As I already pointed out in the introduction, my impression is that the way in which this question has been addressed by contemporary political theory has been rather limited, because it has essentially consisted in the attempt to define a set of normative guidelines for the incorporation of different religious and non-religious views within the framework of the democratic public sphere, without taking into account the content of what religious organizations are actually demanding. This is one of the reasons why, in the present analysis, I have sought to engage with a specific argument actually advanced by a real religious organization in the contemporary public sphere. This has led me to both examine and challenge the idea that democratic societies need to make reference to a set of absolute moral values because otherwise they remain open to the potential threat of overthrowing themselves by democratic means. On this basis, it may be possible to return to the contemporary debate concerning the relation between politics and religion in contemporary societies in order to put forward a conception of such relations that isn’t imposed arbitrarily on what citizens of different religious persuasions happen to believe, but rather emerges immanently from a confrontation with what the members of at least one highly influential religious organization are actually saying in the contemporary public sphere. Such an endeavor requires spelling out the way in which the relations between politics and religion are implicitly structured by the specific conception of democracy I have developed in order to construct a response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, a project that could potentially take up a whole other book, but whose main lines I will attempt to delineate here. The first thing that can be pointed out in this respect is that the philosophical foundation for the specific theory of democracy I articulated and attempted to defend here can be considered secular in the sense that it does not presuppose a faith in the existence of a transcendent domain, but rather only appeals to arguments whose validity is capable of being established in this world. It follows that religious views as such cannot be assumed to hold any privileged position within this specific conception of democracy. For, the ultimate grounds for the legitimacy of the democratic order as a whole are not understood as inherently religious. Thus, no particular set of religious views or beliefs can claim to have privileged access to them or even to provide more grounds for practically adhering to them.

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On the other hand, this does not imply that religious views or convictions can have no place at all within the framework of this conception of democracy. For the specific kind of relativism on which I have proposed to ground its legitimacy is compatible with any kind of first-order views or opinions, as long as those entertaining them are capable of relating reflexively to them and recognizing that they depend on a prior set of categories and assumptions that cannot be justified absolutely. Thus religious citizens can be integrated within this conception of democracy on the same basis as everybody else. That is: as bearers of a specific set of views and opinions that have an intrinsic value because they are valid or true for them, but that cannot legitimately be imposed on anybody else without their consent. The best way to describe the conception of the relations between politics and religion implicit in this conception of democracy is therefore perhaps to say that religion is integrated in the political process on the same terms as all other views and opinions entertained by the members of that political community. This includes interests, desires, conceptions of the good and the right, and even aesthetic tastes. Thus, from this perspective democracy assumes the form of a society-wide process of articulation of a multitude of individually or collectively raised claims concerning the way in which public affairs should be run on the basis of the principles of freedom and equality. Within this framework, religion is neither privileged nor proscribed, but rather allowed to exercise the same degree of political influence it already effectively exercises within society. Thus, the concrete implication is that the kinds of laws that are passed should in principle reflect the views and opinions entertained by the individuals composing the polity: if there is a majority of religious citizens, the laws are likely to enshrine certain religious values, while if the majority of citizens have an irreligious conception of the good or the right, the kinds of laws that will be passed are likely to reflect that. The key point, however, is that these laws are not considered legitimate because they reflect certain religious views (or not), but rather because they have been agreed to by the majority of citizens to whom they are supposed to apply. In this sense, the specific conception of secularism I am advocating for is not situated on the same conceptual level as the religious beliefs that may or may not exist within society: it is rather a feature of the philosophical foundation for democracy in the first place. This implies that it must in principle

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be possible to be both a secularist and religious at the same time—just as it is possible to be both religious and a relativist at the same time, as long as one is willing to adopt a second-order attitude with respect to one’s religious beliefs, which recognizes the fact that they are based on prior categories and premises that are not capable of being justified absolutely. A further implication that follows from this is that the notion of democracy itself cannot be appealed to in order to impose restrictions on what a person is allowed to advocate for within a democratic context. On the contrary, the notion of democracy itself inclines toward a maximal inclusion of all possible views and opinions within the political process—even if what I have stated implies that a democratic regime can legitimately impose limitations upon itself and therefore alter the degree to which it remains democratic from then onward. This suggests that the specific conception of democracy I have sought to articulate and defend in this book can be understood as tracing a sort of middle path between a conception of secularism that seeks to actively inhibit the expression of religious views and opinions in the public sphere, and a form of post-secularism understood as implying that religious views and opinions ought to be accorded a privileged role within the political process and perhaps even be made into the foundation for its legitimacy in the first place. To be sure, an objection that is likely to be raised against this conception of secularism is that it is not “neutral” among all possible religious views, because some such views may be categorically opposed to the conception of relativism on which it is predicated and therefore may be unwilling to engage in the reflexive relativization of their own premises. However, this objection misses the point of the overall conception of democracy I have sought to articulate and defend in this book. For the latter has never aimed to be absolutely ‘neutral’ between all possible religious views and opinions, but rather to give expression to a specific set of substantive values that are assumed to follow logically from the assumption of a form of philosophical relativism. That this can also be assumed to imply a conception of secularism that traces a middle course between the active repression of religious views as such and the idea that they should be accorded a privileged place within society is a consequence that follows from that. But just as private interests, desires, and aesthetic tastes that violate the necessary preconditions

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of democracy are to be repressed if this kind of political regime is to be possible, so religious views that are unwilling to recognize their own relativity and therefore engage in a reflexive process of confrontation with others based on the principles of freedom and equality have no place within a democratic society.

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1. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Messa pro Eligendo Romano Pontefice, April 18, 2005, www.vatican.va/gpII/documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_en .html. 2. This point was made for example by René Girard in an interview entitled “Ratzinger is Right,” New Perspectives Quarterly 22, no. 3 (2005). The number of official documents and public statements by members of the Catholic Church denouncing relativism is far too large to give an exhaustive list. For illustrative examples, see the address given by Pope Benedict XVI to the members of the international theological commission on October 5, 2007, and the statement delivered by Cardinal Silvano Maria Tomasi at the sixteenth ordinary session of the human rights council on religious freedom at the United Nations (UN) on March 10, 2011, both available at www.vatican.va. For scholarly publications by Catholics or institutions connected with the Catholic Church, see Peter Kreft, A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999); Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air (New York: Baker Books, 2005); Peter Berger, ed., Between Relativism and Fundamentalism: Religious Resources for a Middle Position (Washington: Eedermans, 2010). For publications in other languages, see also Roberto de Mattei, La Dittatura del Relativismo (Turin: Lindau 2010); Stefano Zamagni and Adriano Guarnieri, eds., Laicità e Relativismo

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nell’Epoca Post-Secolare (Bologna: Mulino, 2009); and Jacques Rollet, La Tentation Relativiste: La Démocratie en Danger (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 2007). 3. I borrow this expression from Howard Lesnick, “The Rhetoric of AntiRelativism in a Culture of Certainty,” Buffalo Law Review 55, no. 887 (2007). For a further discussion of the pervasiveness of anti-relativist discourse in contemporary American conservative discourse, see also Lewis Hyrum, “The Conservative Capture of Anti-Relativist Discourse in Post-War America,” Canadian Journal of History 43, no. 3 (2008). 4. Evangelical Leaders Survey, www.christianpost.com/news/evangelicals -abortion-moral-relativism-tops-moral-issues-list-42662. 5. John Piper, The Challenge of Relativism, address given at the National Ligonier Conference in 2007, www.ligonier.org/learn/conferences/orlando_2007_national _conference/the-challenge-of-relativism. 6. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (London: Islamic Book Services, 2006), 1. 7. For an interesting collection of essays on the history of anti-democratic thought, see Erich Komfel, ed., Anti-Democratic Thought (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008). See also Joseph Femia, Against the Masses: Varieties of Anti-Democratic Thought Since the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 8. See Plato, The Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 268–79. 9. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 1993, §101, www.vatican.va/holy_father/john _paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_06081993_veritatis-splendor_en .html. 10. Piper, The Challenge of Relativism. 11. The non-religious literature attacking relativism as a political problem, and in particular as a threat for democracy, is almost as vast as the religious one, and perhaps even more heterogeneous. Leo Strauss, for example, identified the spread of a form of moral relativism as one of the principal symptoms of a supposed “crisis” of Western civilization. See, for instance, Strauss, “Relativism,” in Relativism and the Study of Man, ed. H. Schoeck and J. Wiggins (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1961), 135–68. For other texts making comparable claims from a similar perspective, see also Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1992). Moral relativism has however also been vigorously criticized from the perspective of a rationalistic defense of liberal values. In this respect, see, for instance, Raymond Boudon, The Poverty of Relativism (London: Bardwell, 2005). See, for example, the essays by Thomas Scanlon, Martha Nussbaum, and Gordon Graham in the reader P. Mosher and T. Carson, eds., Moral Relativism (Oxford:

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Oxford University Press, 2001). Finally, Alain Badiou has vigorously criticized what he perceives as the relativism implicit in contemporary “post-modern” philosophy from a Marxist perspective. See, for example, Badiou, Ethics (London: Verso, 2001). Further exemplary critical discussions of relativism from a non-religious perspective can be found in Steven Lukes, Moral Relativism (New York: Picador, 2008); Patrick Phillips, The Challenge of Relativism (London: Continuum, 2007); Maria Baghramian, Relativism (New York: Routledge, 2004); Paul O’Grady, Relativism (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2002); Stephen Hales, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011). 12. See Leo XII, Humanum Genus, 1884, www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/ encyclicals/documents/ hf_l-xiii_enc_18840420_humanum-genus_it.html. 13. On this point, see, for instance, Kenneth Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown, Religion and Politics in the United States (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). See also Clide Wilcox and Carin Robinson, Onward Christian Soldiers: The Religious Right in American Politics (Philadelphia: Westview, 2011); and Glenn Utter and James True, Conservative Christians and Political Participation (Oxford: ABC Clio, 2004). 14. For an overview of contemporary trends of Roman Catholicism in the United States, see, for instance, Chester Gillis, Roman Catholicism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). See also John Portmann, Catholic Culture in the USA (New York: Continuum, 2010). 15. For an interesting collection of statistics relating to this, see the recent special issue “The Geopolitics of the Vatican” of Diplomatie 4 (August-September 2011). Catholicism is currently the largest denominational affiliation in the world, with an estimated number of over a billion and a half believers. The Vatican currently entertains diplomatic relations with 178 countries, of which over 100 host permanent diplomatic missions from the Holy See. According to a Gallup poll in 2009, the political influence of the Catholic Church on the politics of these countries is judged “very high” by over 90 percent of the population in 39 of these countries. 16. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 2006), 145–56. 17. In the work of Jürgen Habermas, for example, the notion of popular sovereignty is effectively decomposed into the set of procedures assumed to be necessary to reach a rational consensus. From the point of view of the question under consideration, this can be seen as substituting a post-metaphysical conception of rationality for the theological notion of the absolute. See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). 18. The term “post-foundationalism” was first used by Richard Rorty to describe his own views in Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Since then, however, it has been expanded to include a wider variety of political and philosophical views. A recent book titled Post-Foundational

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Political Thought, for example, includes contributions on Claude Lefort, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, and Ernesto Laclau. Oliver Marchart, ed., Post-Foundational Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 19. For more literature concerning this apparent paradox of democracy, see Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1946); Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952); Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000); Jan WernerMuller, “A ‘Practical Dilemma Which Philosophy Alone Cannot Resolve’? Rethinking Militant Democracy,” Constellations 19, no. 4 (2012). 20. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 63–67. 21. On this point, see, for instance, Alan Kahan, Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Political Culture of Limited Suffrage (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). See also Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 22. For a clear statement of this interpretation of the role and significance of human rights, see Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law (New York: Gordian, 1971). See also Michael Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution (New York: House of Anansi Press, 2000). 23. The author who is most commonly associated with this view among contemporary political theorists is probably Jürgen Habermas (see, for example, Between Facts and Norms). However, other prominent authors who have also defended analogous views are Stephen Holmes and Bruce Ackerman. See Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Bruce Ackerman, We The People, vol. 1, Foundations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 24. For an interesting discussion of the empirical data on the persistence of religion in the contemporary world, see Peter Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington: Eerdmans, 1999). For a more recent set of both empirical and theoretical essays, see Peter Nynas, Mika Lassander, and Terhi Utrainen, eds., Post-Secular Society (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2012); and Kristina Stoeckl and Massimo Rosati, Multiple Modernities and Post-Secular Societies (London: Ashgate, 2013). 25. On this point, see, for instance, the introduction to Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). 26. From this point of view, the paradigmatic articulation of the secularist position has been taken to be embodied by Rawls’s conception of public reason, which boils down to the idea that only arguments acceptable to all individuals who recognize one another as free and equal ought to be tolerated in the democratic public sphere. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press,

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1996). Habermas’s much discussed “post-secularist” turn consists essentially in a revision of this idea, based on the claim that it imposes an unfair burden on religious citizens to translate their views in terms acceptable to public reason. See, in particular, Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” in Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 2008). Finally, other post-secularists, writing in the vein of Habermas’s revision of Rawls, have proposed to further relax even the formal limits imposed on the public expression of religious belief by the requirement of translation, on the grounds that religious arguments tap into deep-seated resources of meaning and identity, and should therefore not be excluded from the public sphere even if they cannot be adequately translated in communicatively rational terms right away. See, for example, the contributions by Courtney Bender, Eduardo Mendieta, and Craig Calhoun in Philip Gorski, David Kim, John Torpey, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, eds., The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society (New York: New York University Press, 2012); and the interventions by Charles Taylor, Jose Casanova, Craig Calhoun, and Rajeev Bhargava in Craig Calhoun, Marc Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Rethinking Secularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 27. On this point, see, for instance, Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” New Perspectives Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2008). See also Alessandro Ferrara, “The Separation of Religion and Politics in a Post-Secular Society,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 35 (2009): 77–92. 28. In the encyclical Humanum Genus, for example, Leo XIII writes the following with specific reference to the masonic sects that had been accused of endorsing relativism as their moral and philosophical standpoint: “That they would wish to constitute States according to this example and model, is too well known to require proof. For some time past they have openly endeavored to bring this about with all their strength and resources; and in this they prepare the way for not a few bolder men who are hurrying on even to worse things, in their endeavor to obtain equality and community of all goods by the destruction of every distinction of rank and property.” 29. This point is, for instance, raised by Jürgen Habermas in the context of his discussion of the kind of relativism he imputes to much of recent post-modern philosophy in Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 96. For a more detailed exposition and discussion of the same objection, see also Harvey Siegel, Relativism Refuted: A Critique of Contemporary Epistemological Relativism (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987). 30. Indeed, as I seek to emphasize, this definition of relativism implies that it is not only possible but also necessary to be a relativist about one’s own relativism. For this refers to the possibility of adopting a “third-order” standpoint, from which the affirmation of relativism itself must also appear relative to a prior set of categories and assumptions. Far from being a problem for the specific definition of relativism

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INTRODUCTION

I have proposed, the logical regression this initiates is precisely the reason why I affirm that an absolute ground for moral judgments is unavailable: ultimately, all such judgments are made from the perspective of a given set of premises and categories, and must therefore remain relative to them. 1. THE DISCOURSE OF ANTI-RELATIVISM IN THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

1. The decision to restrict the terrain of study to the official documents published by the Vatican is justified by the specific role this institution is assumed to play within the framework of Catholicism by the Catholic faith itself. Indeed, as we will see in more detail, inasmuch as they constitute integral components of the Catholic Tradition, the official pronouncements by the Vatican are considered a locus fidei, almost on the same level as Scripture itself. This should not be taken to imply, however, that Catholicism is not an internally heterogeneous religion, encompassing a variety of different theological strands and religious views within itself. It would be impossible for such a large organization not to develop internal tensions. However, because of the specific magisterium that the Vatican is assumed to exercise by all the strands that are recognized as belonging to Catholicism in the first place, it appears legitimate to focus exclusively on the official documents of the Catholic Church, at least as a starting point for this analysis. A more detailed discussion of the way in which the discourse of anti-relativism has been employed by the other strands of Catholicism, not necessarily represented at the level of the Vatican, would be an interesting extension of the analysis conducted here, but for the time being must remain outside the scope of this study. 2. For a detailed discussion of the theoretical premises underpinning the notion of conceptual history, as well as various examples of its application, see Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). For a different, although related, treatment of the same issues, see also Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). In this context, I do not intend to get involved in the complex technical debates that emerge in connection with this notion of conceptual history. I am only using the term in the loose sense that I have attempted to define. 3. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “relativism” was first employed in the English language in a review of the work of the British philosopher William Hamilton published in the North British Review in 1857: “Instead of the great realist Hamilton should be called the great relativist.” This shows that from the start, the notion of relativism was employed to serve a polemical function, as a criticism of the positions described. The first author to appropriate it as a positive description of his own views was probably Herbert Spencer, who wrote in 1863, “I diverge from other relativists in asserting that the existence of a non-relative is . . . a positive deliverance of consciousness.” See Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Po-

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litical, and Speculative (London: Kessinger, 2010). The term nonetheless remained relatively obscure until it was popularized by the use made of it by the Catholic Church a few decades later. 4. The first official condemnation of the freemasonry by the Catholic Church was made by Clement XII in a papal bull of 1738, and after that it gradually became one of the standard tropes of the Catholic Church’s critique of modernity, mentioned also, for example, by Pius IX in his encyclical Qui Pluribus of 1846. For further literature on the history of the relations between the Catholic Church and the freemasonry, see also Leon de Poncins, Freemasonry and the Vatican: A Struggle for Recognition (London: Britons, 1968); Dudley Wright, Roman Catholicism and the Freemasonry (London: William Rider and Son, 1922). 5. For a detailed exposition of the development of official Catholic doctrine in the aftermath of the French Revolution, see Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), as well as Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 1830–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Emile Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); John Vidmar, The Catholic Church Through the Ages: A History (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 2005); Joe Holland, Modern Catholic Social Teaching: The Popes Confront the Industrial Age (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 2003); Facoltà Teologica dell’Italia Settentrionale, L’Ecclesiologia dal Vaticano I al Vaticano II (Brescia: La Scuola, 1973); John Bury, History of the Papacy in the 19th Century: Liberty and Authority in the Roman Catholic Church (New York: Schocken 1964); Maurice Nédoncelle, ed., L’Ecclésiologie au XIXe Siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1960). 6. Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, §§19–23, www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/ encyclicals/documents/ hf_l-xiii_enc_18840420_humanum-genus_it.html. 7. By way of comparison, consider, for instance, the following passage from the encyclical Mirari Vos: “Now is truly the time in which the powers of darkness winnow the elect like wheat. . . . Depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty dissolute. The holiness of the sacred is despised and the majesty of divine worship is not only disapproved by evil men but defiled and held up to ridicule.” To this, Pius IX was only going to add a more detailed analysis of how such “errors” had led to the “monstrous consequences” of both the “French Revolution” and the “upheavals of 1848” in the preface to his Syllabus of Errors. 8. Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, §22. 9. For a further discussion of the Catholic Church’s interpretation of the French Revolution and of the way it has sought to relate it to the Terror regime that ensued, see Thomas Bokenkotter, Church and Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1998); John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (London: Church Historical Society, 1969); and Edward Hales, The Catholic Church in the Modern World: A Survey from the French Revolution to the Present (New York: Image, 1958). 10. Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, §13.

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11. For a further discussion of the history of the Catholic Church’s views on liberalism, see Robert Augert, The Church in the Age of Liberalism (New York: Crossroad, 1981). See also Bernard Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition: Aspects of Catholic Thought in 19th Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Antonio Cardini and Francesco Pulitini, eds., Cattolicesimo e Liberalismo (Siena: Rubettino, 2000); Guido Verucci, I Cattolici e il Liberalismo (Padua: Liviana, 1968). 12. Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, § 27. 13. On the complex interplay between change and continuity with the history of official Catholic doctrine, see Charles Curran, ed., Change in Official Catholic Moral Teachings (New York: Paulist, 2003). 14. For a detailed discussion of Leo XIII’s pontificate and his overall pontifical mission, see Francis Thomas Furey, Life of Leo XIII and a History of His Pontificate (London: Catholic Educational Company, 2012). See also Edward Gargan, Leo XIII and the Modern World (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961). 15. Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, §§1–2. 16. Ibid., §12. 17. In his Syllabus of Errors, for instance, Pius IX had defined the notion of immanentism as the idea that “there exists no supreme all-wise, all-provident Divine Being, distinct from the universe . . . in effect, God is produced in man and in the world and all things are God and have the very substance of God, so God is one and the same thing with the world.” Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors Condemned by the Catholic Church, 1864, §1, www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9syll.htm. 18. Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, §16. 19. Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors, §16. 20. For a detailed discussion of the significance of the notion of compromise within the framework of Leo XIII’s social doctrine, see Massimo Introvigne, La Dottrina Sociale di Leone XIII (Verona: Fede e Cultura, 2010). See also Antonio Acerbi, Chiesa e Democrazia da Leone XIII al Concilio Vaticano II (Rome: Vita e Pensiero, 1991). 21. Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 1885, §§39–40, www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/ encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_01111885_immortale-dei_en.html. 22. On this point, see, for instance, Robert Augert, The Church in the Industrial Age (New York: Crossroad, 1981). See also Ernesto Vercesi, Tre Papi: Leone XIII, Pio X e Benedetto XV (Milan: Athena, 1929). 23. For an interesting set of articles on the history of the Catholic Action and of its complex relations with Vatican authorities, see Jeremy Bonner, Christopher D. Denny, and Mary Beth Fraser Connolly, eds., Empowering the People of God: Catholic Action Before and After Vatican II (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 24. Pius X, Il Fermo Proposito, 1905, §1, www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/ p10fermo.htm.

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25. Ibid., §§24–27. 26. On this point, see, for instance, Emilio Gentile, Contro Cesare: Cristianesimo e Totalitarismo nell’Epoca dei Fascismi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2010). See also Charles Delzell, The Papacy and Totalitarianism Between the Two World Wars (New York: Wiley, 1974). 27. For further literature on the Church’s relations with authoritarian regimes during the interwar years, see also David Cymet, History vs. Apologetics, The Holocaust, the Third Reich and the Catholic Church (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2010); John Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism, 1929–1932: A Study in Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Lewy Guenter, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1965); Daniel Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941). 28. For further information on the history and politics underlying these concordats, see Franck Coppa, ed., Controversial Concordats: The Vatican’s Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1999). See also Norman Cooper, Catholicism and the Franco Regime (London: Sage, 1975). 29. In this respect, see, for instance, the encyclicals Non Abbiamo Bisogno (1931) and Mit Brenner Sorge (1937), respectively devoted to the Vatican’s relations with the fascist state in Italy and National Socialism in Germany: www.vatican.va/holy _father/pius_xi/encyclicals/index.htm. 30. Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, 1937, §2, www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/ encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19031937_divini-redemptoris_en.html. 31. “If we would explain the blind acceptance of Communism by so many thousands of workmen, we must remember that the way had been already prepared for it by the religious and moral destitution in which wage-earners had been left by liberal economics. . . . No one thought of building churches within convenient distance of factories, nor of facilitating the work of the priest. On the contrary, laicism was actively and persistently promoted, with the result that we are now reaping the fruits of the errors so often denounced by Our Predecessors and by Ourselves.” Ibid., §16. 32. Ibid., §23. 33. Ibid., §22. 34. On this matter, see Carlo Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII (London: Faber, 1970). See also Franck J. Coppa, ed., The Policies and Politics of Pope Pius XII: Between Diplomacy and Morality (New York: Lang, 2011). 35. For a further discussion of the Catholic Church’s social doctrine in the context of the Cold War, see Owen Chadwick, The Christian Church in the Cold War (London: Penguin, 1992). See also Michael Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust and the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); and Peter Kent, The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2002).

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36. It is in fact interesting to point out that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, there also developed from within the intellectual current of Marxism a distinctively anti-capitalist strand of the discourse of anti-relativism, which attacked precisely the perceived sense of moral decadence assumed to be implicit in the logic of late capitalism. In this respect, see, for example, Georg Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason (1952; London: Humanities Press, 1981); and Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 37. The text of this speech, titled Col Cuore Aperto, is available from the Vatican’s website: www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/speeches/1955/documents/hf_ p-xii_spe_19551224_cuore-aperto_it.html. 38. On this point, see, in particular, Franck Coppa, “Pope Pius XII and the Cold War: The Post-War Confrontation Between Catholicism and Communism,” in Religion and the Cold War, ed. Dianne Kirby (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 39. Pius XII, Humani Generis, 1950 §§14–16, www.vatican.va/holy_father/ pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis_en.html. 40. For an interesting account of the history of the Church’s opposition to heresy, see Michael Thomsett, Heresy in the Roman Catholic Church: A History (London: McFarland, 2011). See also Ian Hunter, John Christian Laursen, and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Ashgate, 2005). 41. For an account of the history of the Church’s opposition to modernism, explicitly linking it to the previous history of heresy hunts, see Lester Kurtz, The Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). See also Darrell Jodock, ed., Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Guido Verucci, Eresia del Novecento: La Chiesa e la Repressione del Modernismo in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 2010). 42. For an overview of the secondary literature on the significance of this council, see Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering, eds., Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Massimo Faggioli, Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning (New York: Paulist, 2012); Philippe Chenaux, Il Concilio Vaticano II (Rome: Carrocci, 2012); William Madges, ed., Vatican II: Forty Years Later (London: Wipf and Stock, 2011); Agostino Marchetto, The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council: A Counterpoint for the History of the Council (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2010); Gilles Routhier, Vatican II: Herméneutique et Réception (Montreal: Fides, 2006); Herbert Vorgrimler, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969); James Manz, Vatican II: Renewal or Reform? (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1966); Hans Kung, The Changing Church: Reflections on the Progress of the Second Vatican Council (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965).

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43. For an overview of the ongoing debate on this question within the Church, see Benedict XVI, Theological Highlights of Vatican II (New York: Paulist, 2009); John Paul II, Sources of Renewal: The Implementation of the Second Vatican Council (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980). 44. See John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, §§19–28. 45. For a more in-depth discussion of the doctrine of the signs of the times, see Charles Curran, Catholic Social Teaching: A Historical, Theological and Ethical Analysis (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2002). See also Curt Cadorette, Catholicism in Social and Historical Contexts (New York: Orbis, 2009). 46. On this point, see, for instance, Antonio Acerbi, Chiesa e Democrazia da Leone XIII al Concilio Vaticano II (Rome: Vita e Pensiero, 1991). 47. Pastoral Constitution, Gaudium et Spes, 1965, §§3–4, www.vatican.va/archive/ hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium -et-spes_en.html. 48. For a detailed discussion of the history of the repercussions of the Second Vatican Council on the internal politics of the Catholic Church, see Giuseppe Alberigo, Jean-Pierre Jossua, and Joseph A. Komonchak, eds., The Reception of Vatican  II (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1987). See also James Heft with John O’Malley, eds., After Vatican II: Trajectories and Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2012); M. Lamberigts and L. Kenis, eds., Vatican II and Its Legacy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002); Adrian Hastings, ed., Modern Catholicism: Vatican II and After (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 49. Although the Second Vatican Council had been called by Pope John XXIII, he died less than a year after this council had begun to meet. Since Canon Law stipulates that all Church councils must come to a close with the death of the pope that called them, this made it a real question whether the council would even continue after the death of John XXIII. The encyclical Ecclesiam Suam that Pope Paul VI promulgated almost immediately upon coming to office is the document in which he formally confirmed that he intended this council to continue, while at the same time exposing his vision for the way its deliberations ought to be oriented and the specific “limits” that ought to be imposed upon it. 50. Paul VI, Ecclesiam Suam, 1964, §46, www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/ encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_06081964_ecclesiam_en.html. 51. Ibid., §§48–51. 52. Marcel Lefebvre, I Accuse the Council! (San Francisco: Angelus Press, 1998), 66–67. 53. For an overview of John Paul II’s life and thought prior to being elected pope, as well as his role within the Church’s internal politics at the time, see George Williams, The Mind of John Paul II: The Origins of His Thought and Action (New York: Seabury, 1981). See also George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York: Cliff Street Books, 1999).

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54. For an in-depth discussion of John Paul II’s overarching theological and political orientation, see the excellent book by Philippe Portier, La Pensée de Jean Paul II (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 2006). See also Gerard Mannion, ed., The Vision of John Paul II: Assessing His Thought and Influence (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008); Charles Curran, The Moral Theology of Pope John Paul II (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2005); John McDermott, ed., The Thought of Pope John Paul II: A Collection of Essays and Studies (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1993). 55. See John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, 1979, www.vatican.va/holy_father/ john_paul_ii/encyclicals/ index.htm. 56. See, for example, the encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, promulgated in 1987, www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/index.htm. 57. See, for example, the article published by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post on April 6, 2005, titled “How the Pope Defeated Communism,” www .washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28398–2005Apr5.html. 58. For an interesting discussion of the history of the Catholic Church’s political intervention on specifically moral issues in the United States, see Charles Curran and Leslie Griffin, ed., The Catholic Church, Morality and Politics (New York: Paulist, 2001). For a discussion focused more specifically on the issue of bioethics, see Pádraig Corkery, Bioethics and the Catholic Moral Tradition (Dublin: Veritas, 2011). 59. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 1993, §5, www.vatican.va/holy_father/ john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_06081993_veritatis-splendor _en.html. 60. Ibid., §1. 61. “Man’s genuine moral autonomy in no way means the rejection but rather the acceptance of the moral law, of God’s command. . . . Hence obedience to God is not, as some would believe, a heteronomy, as if the moral life were subject to the will of something all-powerful, absolute, extraneous to man and intolerant of his freedom. . . . Others speak, and rightly so, of theonomy, or participated theonomy, since man’s free obedience to God’s law effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in God’s wisdom and providence.” Ibid., §41. 62. Ibid., §4. 63. Ibid., §84. 64. Ibid., §101. 65. Ibid., §99. 66. Ibid. 67. For a detailed discussion of the workings of this cooperation, see Mary Ann Walsh, From John Paul II to Benedict XVI: An Inside Look at the End of an Era, the Beginning of a New One, and the Future of the Catholic Church (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). See also Giovanni Miccoli, In Difesa della Fede: La Chiesa di Giovanni Paolo II e Benedetto XVI (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007).

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68. For an insightful discussion of Benedict XVI’s overall theological vision, focusing in particular on the intellectual premises underscoring his pontificate, see William Rusch, ed., The Pontificate of Benedict XVI: Its Premises and Promises (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2009). See also Thomas Rourke, The Social and Political Thought of Benedict XVI (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2010); John Cavadini, ed., Explorations in the Theology of Benedict XVI (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2012); and Massimo Introvigne, Tu Sei Pietro: Benedetto XVI Contro la Dittatura del Relativismo (Rome: Sugarco, 2011). 69. See introduction. 70. During the course of his otherwise very prolific pontificate, Benedict XVI promulgated only three encyclical letters, of which only one is dedicated to social and political matters. See Caritas in Veritate, 2009, www.vatican.va/holy_father/ benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/caritas-in-veritate_it.html. This document contains a stern condemnation of relativism as leading to an “indiscriminate acceptance of types of conduct and life-styles,” which is ultimately assumed to have the effect of “making everyone poorer” and therefore of “adversely affecting the effectiveness of aid to the most needy populations, who lack not only economic and technical means, but also educational methods and resources to assist people in realizing their full human potential” (§61). However, the theoretical premises that underscore this judgment are largely taken for granted, in part because this is not really the central topic with which the encyclical is concerned, but in part surely also because Benedict XVI must have taken himself to have already adequately articulated the grounds for his critique of relativism elsewhere. 71. Reprinted in John Thornton and Susan Varenne, eds., The Essential Pope Benedict XVI: His Central Writings and Speeches (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 227–42. 72. Reprinted in Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006). 73. Benedict XVI, Values in a Time of Upheaval (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 53–74. 74. Joseph Ratzinger, “Relativism: The Central Problem for Faith Today,” in Thornton and Vareene, The Essential Pope Benedict XVI, 228. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 229. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Joseph Ratzinger, “That Which Holds the World Together: The Pre-Political Moral Foundations of a Free State,” in Ratzinger and Habermas, The Dialectics of Secularization, 27. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid.

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82. Ibid. 83. Benedict XVI, Values in a Time of Upheaval, 56–57. 84. Ibid., 60–61. 85. Ibid., 63. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., 54. 88. Ibid., 37. 89. Ibid., 38. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid., 39. 92. Ibid., 34. 93. Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello Pera, Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 75. 94. For a detailed account of the vicissitudes surrounding this succession, see Antonio Spadaro, Da Benedetto a Francesco: Cronaca di una Successione al Pontificato (Turin: Lindau, 2013). 95. For an overview of the early reactions sparked by Francis I’s election, see Andrea Tornielli, Francis I: Pope of a New World (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013); Paul Vallely, Pope Francis I: Untying the Knots (London: Continuum, 2013); Massimo Faggioli, Papa Francesco e la Chiesa-Mondo (Rome: Armando, 2014). 96. Francis I, Evangelii Gaudium, 2013, §27, www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en /apost_exhortations/ documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii -gaudium.html. 97. Ibid., §32. 98. Ibid., §§15–38. 99. Ibid., §36. 100. Ibid., §38. 101. Ibid., §39. 102. www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2013/march/documents/ papa-francesco_ 20130322_corpo-diplomatico.html. 103. On this point, see, for instance, Amanda Lanser, Pope Francis I: Spiritual Leader and Voice of the Poor (Minneapolis: ABDO, 2014). 104. Francis I, Evangelii Gaudium, §§61–62. 105. http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2014/february/documents /papa-francesco_ 20140207_ad-limina-polonia.html. 2. ELEMENTS FOR A PUBLIC CRITIQUE OF THE CATHOLIC DISCOURSE OF ANTI-RELATIVISM

1. Joseph Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 37.

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2. From this point of view, it may be pertinent to point out that although historically encyclical letters have never been considered “confidential” and have always been made readily available to the general public, the first ones among those I discussed in the previous chapter were formally addressed “to the bishops, archbishops and other patriarchs of the Catholic Church.” Over the course of the past century, however, it became common practice to formally address these letters to a wider audience too. For example, Leo XIII’s encyclical Humanum Genus (which, as we saw, is the first official document of the Catholic Church to explicitly mention the term “relativism”) also contains “all people of good will” as an explicit addressee. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor, on the other hand, doesn’t contain any formal addressee, which presumably means it is addressed to the whole of humanity at large. The pertinence of the points raised in the rest of this chapter is obviously directly proportional to the generality of the audience for which the arguments discussed were intended in the first place. 3. Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, §§12–13, www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/ encyclicals/documents/ hf_l-xiii_enc_18840420_humanum-genus_it.html. 4. Ibid., §7. 5. Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval, 50. 6. Clifford Geertz, “Anti-Anti-Relativism,” American Anthropologist 86, no. 2 (1984): 265. 7. Benedict XVI, Address given on the occasion of the XXth World Youth Day, August 20, 2005, www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2005/august/ documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20050820_vigil-wyd_en.html. 8. Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval, 62. 9. Geertz, “Anti-Anti-Relativism,” 264. 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1967), 17–18. 11. Ibid., 18. 12. John Dewey, The Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 24. 13. Ibid., 29. 14. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004). 15. See Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, §3, www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/ encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_01111885_immortale-dei_en.html. 16. Something may indeed be colloquially said to be partially true. However, what this usually means is that the object in question is a complex entity, made of a multitude of different components, some of which are true and others false. Every individual unit of judgment nonetheless remains either true or false. 17. To be sure, within the context of contemporary political theory, there has been an attempt to reinterpret the concept of truth in a post-metaphysical sense in order to overcome these troubling political implications and make it into the

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foundation for a more inclusive and pluralist conception of democracy. I will discuss the political theory that stems from this attempt in a later chapter of this book, offering some reasons for finding it unsatisfactory. Independently of that discussion, what needs to be made clear in this context is that the conception of absolute truth that the advocates of the Catholic Church have in mind as an antidote to relativism does not belong to this strand of thought. As I have already pointed out, the Church’s conception of truth remains resolutely metaphysical and anchored in a tradition that categorically opposes it to the dimension of error. 18. Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval, 39. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. See Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 2006), 91–142. 22. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 23. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 2006), 159–64. 24. This is a point made, for example, in Samuel Moyn, “Hannah Arendt on the Secular,” New German Critique 35, no. 3 (2008). 25. Arendt, On Revolution, 162. 26. Ibid., 186–99. 27. Ibid., 157. 28. Norberto Bobbio, The Future of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 116–17. 29. Pius IX, Quanta Cura, §3. 30. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, §§36–31. 31. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in The Proper Study of Mankind (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 197–98. 32. This is a point that has already been raised by numerous commentators about Kant, since his philosophy of freedom seems to run into a similar paradox. On the one hand, Kant defines freedom as autonomy, that is, as the capacity of the faculty of the will to set itself its own maxims without being determined by any external impulses. On the other hand, however, he also seeks to establish a priori which specific kinds of behavior are compatible with freedom and which aren’t through the mechanism of the categorical imperative. For example, he notoriously claims that lying is always incompatible with autonomy. Hannah Arendt has suggested that this may be because Kant himself was frightened by the radical implications of his definition of freedom, and therefore attempted to tame it by giving it a concrete content. For her, however, this is merely a way of “reintroducing obedience through the back door.” From a strictly logical point of view, there appears to remain a tension in Kant’s moral philosophy between the intention to ground it in the principle of freedom and the desire to nonetheless specify a concrete content of the moral law

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a priori. See Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken, 2003), 67–73. 33. Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval, 54. 34. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Freedom,” 119. 35. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of The Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken, 2005). 36. See Pius XII, Non abbiamo Bisogno and Mitt Brenner Sorge, www.vatican.va/ holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/index.htm. 37. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994). 3. RATIONALISM: BETWEEN RELATIVISM AND RELIGION

1. Commenting on Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative, for instance, in his Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes: “However essential it may be to emphasize the rationality of the will as the root of duty . . . to cling on to this point of view without making the transition to the concept of ethics reduces this gain to an empty formalism, and moral science to an empty rhetoric of duty for duty’s sake. For, from this point of view, no immanent theory of duties is possible. One may indeed bring in material from outside and thereby arrive at particular duties, but it is impossible to make the transition to the determination of particular duties from the above determination of duty as absence of contradiction, as formal correspondence with itself, which is no different from the specification of abstract indeterminacy.” G. W. F Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 162. 2. This expression occurs, for instance, in the preface to Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), xl; this was also reiterated in the context of Habermas’s contribution to his debate with Cardinal Ratzinger, reprinted in Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 102. 3. In his essay “Metaphysics After Kant,” for instance, Habermas asserts that “Kant has shown convincingly that the perception of objective reality is alwaysalready mediated by categories located in the human mind.” For him, it follows that human beings can never obtain an “unmediated” access to reality itself. For that would effectively require “stepping outside” the categories employed to perceive reality in the first place. Thus Habermas maintains that political philosophy after Kant must be “post-metaphysical” in the sense of not supposing that normative values can be grounded in an objective perception of reality itself (which for him also obviously includes religious revelation as a ground for normativity). Jürgen Habermas, “Metaphysics After Kant,” in Post-Metaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 11–12.

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4. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 83–87. 5. Ibid., 104–5. 6. See, for instance, ibid., 279–81. 7. Habermas, Post-Metaphysical Thinking, 135. 8. On this point, see chapter 2. 9. On this point, see, for instance, Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon, 1984), 8–42. For a further discussion of the core of Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality, see also Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978); John Thompson and David Held, eds., Habermas: Critical Debates (London: Macmillan Press, 1982); and Peter Dews, ed., Habermas: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 10. See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 17–27. 11. See ibid., 287–328. 12. On this point in particular, see Jürgen Habermas, “Human Rights and Popular Sovereignty: The Liberal and Republican Versions,” Ratio Juris 7, no. 1 (1994). 13. See Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:1–8. 14. On this point, see, for instance, ibid., 1:102–42. For a more succinct formulation, see also Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 3–4. 15. See Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:38. 16. See ibid., 1:305–19. 17. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston: Beacon, 1987), 119–52. 18. See Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:312–17. 19. See, for instance, Thomas McCarthy, “Rationality and Relativism in Habermas’ Overcoming of Hermeneutics,” in Thompson and Held, Habermas: Critical Debates; Allen Wood, “Habermas’ Defense of Rationalism,” New German Critique 35 (1985); Jonathan Culler, “Communicative Competence and Normative Force,” New German Critique 35 (1985); and William Rehg, “Reason and Rhetoric in Habermas’s Theory of Argumentation,” in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, ed. Walter Jost and Michael Hyde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 20. See Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:273–338. 21. See Wood, “Habermas’ Defense of Rationalism.” 22. See Culler, “Communicative Competence and Normative Force.” 23. See Wood, “Habermas’ Defense of Rationalism,” 156. 24. Another way of formulating this objection that has been put forward by several of Habermas’s commentators transposes it onto the historical or cultural plane. From this point of view, the contention becomes that the specific kind of language use Habermas focuses on to ground his theory of communicative rationality—that is, the exchange of criticizable validity claims oriented toward reaching

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a rational understanding—is a historically specific construct, which has emerged, and is therefore comprehensible, only from within a given cultural context, which in the final analysis proves to be that of “modern” and indeed “Western” societies. If that is the case, it appears difficult to hang on to the claim that a recognition of the rational validity of a consensus reached under the conditions of an ideal speech situation must be implicitly presupposed by all competent uses of language, because that would effectively imply that pre-modern or non-Western societies must be incapable of using language in a competent way. For a formulation of the objection in these terms, see, for instance, Bernard Flynn, Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics (New York: Humanities Press, 1992), 121–55. 25. See Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:273–338. 26. On this point, see, in particular, ibid., 1:286–95. 27. See Wood, “Habermas’ Defense of Rationalism,” 154. 28. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1:287. 29. In this respect, see, in particular, McCarthy, “Rationality and Relativism in Habermas’ Overcoming of Hermeneutics”; and Flynn, Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics. 30. For a further discussion of these themes, see also the collection of essays published in English under the title Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon, 1979). 31. See Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:186–216. 32. For a further discussion of these notions, see also ibid., 2:153–98. 33. On this point in particular, see Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, 152–58. 34. See ibid., 134. 35. See ibid., 139–45. 36. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1:68. 37. This point was in fact already raised incisively by Thomas McCarthy in the context of his commentary of the Hegelian strand of Habermas’s argument for his theory of communicative rationality, in which he writes: “In short, mythicomagical world-views are marked, in Habermas’ view, by insufficient differentiation of the objective, social and subjective domains of reality, and of the validity claims proper to them. . . . It is obvious that this characterization is drawn from ‘our’ (or Habermas’) perspective. It thus seems to presuppose quod est demonstrandum; i.e. the universal significance of the categories and assumptions on which it is based. Only when the latter has been demonstrated is the description itself warranted as anything more than a particularistic and culturally biased account of alien forms of life.” McCarthy, “Rationality and Relativism in Habermas’ Overcoming of Hermeneutics,” 67. 38. Indeed, it is interesting to note that in some of his latest writings on the relation between philosophy and religion Habermas himself seems to have come close

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to conceding this. In the text of his contribution to the famous debate he had with Cardinal Ratzinger in 2004, for instance, Habermas included an excursus on the relation between his conception of communicative rationality and the notion of religious revelation, in which he asserted the following: “When reason reflects on its deepest foundations, it discovers that it owes its origin to something else. And it must acknowledge the fateful power of this origin, for otherwise it will lose its orientation to reason in the blind alley of a hybrid grasp over its own self.” Habermas and Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 20. As Habermas himself later implicitly acknowledges, this recognition has the effect of situating reason and revelation on the same conceptual plane. For this appears to be a necessary condition of the reconceptualization of the process of secularization as a “two-fold and complementary learning process” that Habermas proposes in this text. See ibid., 22–25. From the point of view of Habermas’s earlier articulations of the relationship between religion and rationality, such statements may perhaps appear somewhat surprising and perhaps even incoherent. However, what I have attempted to demonstrate through the analysis presented is that in reality they are perfectly coherent, and indeed logically implied, by the way in which Habermas has attempted to justify his theory of rationality from its earliest formulations. For a further discussion of this point, see also Eduardo Mendieta’s introduction to the Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). 39. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms. 40. See ibid., 118–32. 41. On this point in particular, see ibid., 76–81. 42. For further discussion of this particular aspect of Habermas’s constitutional democracy, see also Stefan Rummens, “Democratic Deliberation as the OpenEnded Construction of Justice,” Ratio Juris 20, no. 3 (2007). 43. See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 213–22. 44. See Robert Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster, “The General Theory of Second Best,” Review of Economic Studies 24, no. 1 (1956). 45. It should be noted, however, that the point I am raising is a relatively standard trope in the literature on the relation between “ideal” and “non-ideal” theory, and more generally in the theoretical reflection on the relation between abstract models and concrete practice, not only in the domain of political theory. What I am proposing can therefore be understood as an application of this general logic to Habermas’s argument for constitutional democracy in particular. For a further discussion of the so-called problem of the second-best, see also Liam Murphy, Moral Demands in Non-Ideal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and David Estlund, Utopophobia: Political Philosophy Beyond the Feasible (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

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46. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3. 47. Ibid., 104–5. 48. See John Rawls, Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 492. 49. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 3. 50. Ibid., 4–5 (emphasis added). 51. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 53. 52. For a more detailed discussion of the definition of the notion of the “original position,” see Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 15–19 and 102–60. See also Ronald Dworkin, “The Original Position,” in Reading Rawls: Critical Studies on Rawls’ Theory of Justice, ed. Norman Daniels (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). 53. For such a characterization of the original position as an “epistemic tool,” see David Estlund, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 54. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, xviii. 55. This is arguably the core of the case moved by so-called communitarian critics against Rawls’s justification of his theory of justice. In the influential essay “Atomism,” for instance, Charles Taylor objected to the view that “men are selfsufficient outside society,” positing instead that “man is a social animal, indeed a political animal, because he is not self-sufficient alone, and in an important sense not self-sufficient outside a polis” as an explicit critique of the Rawlsian, as well as other kinds of, “individualistic social contract theories.” Charles Taylor, “Atomism,” Philosophical Papers 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 189–91. Similarly, in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Michael Sandel argues that individuals can only coherently think of themselves as “members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of this history, as sons or daughters of this revolution, as citizens of this republic,” and therefore that the kind of individualism on which Rawls’s theory of justice is predicated is a “metaphysical impossibility.” Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 179. 56. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 27. 57. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 124–25. 58. Ibid., 78–81. 59. Ibid., 53. 60. John Harsanyi has, for example, objected that Rawls’s deduction seems to rely on the unwarranted assumption that individuals in the original position are “risk-averse” in the sense that they are unwilling to trade the possibility of ending up with a better lot in exchange for the risk of having less, depending on the

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relevant probabilities. See John Harsanyi, “Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? A Critique of John Rawls’s Theory,” in Essays on Ethics, Social Behavior, and Scientific Explanation (Boston: Reidel, 1976). 61. This is admittedly a shorthand way of summarizing the logic of maximization that underscores Rawls’s two principles of justice, but, as far as it extends, it is accurate. For as I already pointed out, the first of these principles states that individuals should enjoy as “wide” a scheme of “basic liberties” as is compatible with the same scheme being enjoyed by others. This is a direct application of the logic to the notion of “basic liberties.” The second principle of justice, on the other hand, is based on the so-called maximin principle, according to which a society should aim to maximize the amount of basic “social and economic goods” held by those who have less within it. From the perspective of the individual decision-making problem set by the original position, this is still a way of ensuring that I get the most, compatibly with what everybody else gets. 62. This is a point that has in fact already been raised by several commentators about Rawls. In his insightful essay “Designing Consensus: John Rawls,” for instance, Perry Anderson writes: “In order to get the parties in the original position to produce his principles of justice, Rawls has to surreptitiously endow them with sympathies that only those principles themselves could induce. The logical circle betrays the historical petitio principii. In effect, far from being a genuinely aboriginal condition, like the state of nature posed in earlier social contract theory, Rawls’ position originates in assumptions possible only with the advent of developed industrial capitalism. The ‘veil of ignorance’ draped around his actors is all too diaphanous: beyond lies the familiar landscape of an established—if not enacted— morality.” Perry Anderson, “Designing Consensus: John Rawls,” in Spectrum (London: Verso, 2005). On the same point, see also Richard M. Hare, “Rawls’ Theory of Justice,” in Reading Rawls: Critical Studies on Rawls’ Theory of Justice, ed. Norman Daniels (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); David Lyons, “Nature and Soundness of the Contract and Coherence Arguments,” in Daniels, Reading Rawls. 63. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 16. 64. Ibid., 123. 65. In fact, this objection too has already been raised by several commentators about Rawls’s attempted justification of his principles of justice on the basis of the argument from the original position. In a critical article published soon after the publication of A Theory of Justice, for instance, Thomas Nagel wrote: “I do not believe the assumptions of the original position are either ‘weak’ or ‘innocuous’ or ‘uncontroversial.’ . . . The suppression of knowledge required to unanimity is not equally fair to all the parties, because the primary goods are not equally valuable in the pursuit of all the conceptions of the good. They will serve to advance many different individual life plans (some more efficiently than others) but they are less useful in implementing views that hold a good life to be readily achievable only in cer-

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tain well-defined types of social structure. . . . The model therefore contains a strong individualistic bias, which is further strengthened by the motivational assumptions of mutual disinterest and absence of envy. . . . In this sense, the original position seems to presuppose not just a ‘neutral’ theory of the good, but a liberal, individualistic conception, according to which the best that can be wished for someone is the unimpeded pursuit of his own path, provided it does not interfere with the rights of others. The view is persuasively developed in the later portions of the book, but without a sense of its controversial character.” Thomas Nagel, “Rawls on Justice,” in Daniels, Reading Rawls, 7–10. Indeed, adopting a more charitable principle of interpretation, this could be interpreted as being the key objection that is also at the heart of the “communitarian” critique of Rawls’s theory of justice (although, to be fair, authors like Taylor and Sandel seem to insist more on the truth of their own conception of subjectivity, and therefore on the falsity, or at least untenability, of Rawls’s conception of individualism, rather than its non-neutrality). On this basis, therefore, I reach the conclusion that Rawls’s argument from the original position fails to provide adequate rational grounds for justifying his theory of justice. 66. For a further discussion of the way in which Rawls employs the notion of reflective equilibrium, see Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 42–43. See also Thomas Scanlon, “Rawls on Justification,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 67. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 26. 68. Ibid., 101–4. 69. In his essay “Rawls on Justification,” for instance, Thomas Scanlon seems to treat the following statement as the grounds for a potential objection to the method of justification based on the notion of reflective equilibrium: “Suppose I have carried through the process Rawls describes and found principles that are in reflective equilibrium with my considered judgments. It could still be claimed, not implausibly, that some other person who was equally well-informed might carry through the process just as conscientiously and reach a different result. Is the defender of reflective equilibrium not then committed to the claim that the incompatible sets of principles we have reached are both justified?” Thomas Scanlon, “Rawls on Justification,” in Freeman, The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, 152. Similarly, in his contribution to the same volume of collected essays on Rawls’s thought, Joshua Cohen writes: “Rawls restricts the domain of application of his theory of justice to democratic societies. Thus, it might be said that, in telling us what justice requires in a democratic society, Rawls suggests that the content of justice is always determined relative to a society’s political culture. So we could ask what the most reasonable conception of justice is for a democracy, for an aristocracy, or for a community with a shared religious outlook, but not simply ask, What does justice require?” Joshua Cohen, “For a Democratic Society,” in Freeman, The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, 88. Finally, in his essay “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” Richard

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Rorty treats the specific kind of “ethnocentric relativism” he imputes to Rawls as a reason for praising him, and for ultimately endorsing his views: “Reading ‘A Theory of Justice’ as political rather than metaphysical, one can see that when Rawls says that . . . ‘we should not attempt to give form to our life by first looking to the good independently defined’ he is not basing this should on a claim about the nature of things in themselves. ‘Should’ is not to be glossed by ‘because of the intrinsic nature of morality’ . . . but by something like ‘because we—we modern inheritors of the traditions of religious tolerance and constitutional government—put liberty ahead of perfection. This willingness to invoke what we do raises, as I have said, the specters of ethnocentrism and relativism.” Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivism, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 186. 70. To get a measure of this failure, it is interesting to compare the way in which the notion of moral truth is respectively treated in Rawls’s early and later writings. As I already pointed out, for instance, in A Theory of Justice, Rawls begin by drawing an analogy between the notion of justice and that of truth, which suggests that what he wants to provide is a criterion of legitimacy that can fulfill the same function in the domain of politics as the notion of truth in the domains of religion, science, and philosophy. In this respect, he even goes as far as writing that “we should strive for a kind of moral geometry with all the rigor which this term connotes.” Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 104. In his later treatise Political Liberalism, on the other hand, Rawls insists at several junctures that, in its revised version, his theory of justice is not to be understood as providing a conception of moral truth. Indeed, in this respect he even writes: “Holding a political conception as true, and for that reason alone the one suitable basis of public reason is exclusive, even sectarian, and so likely to foster political division.” Rawls, Political Liberalism, 129. 71. To be sure, there is a sense in which the distinction I am trying to draw here between the philosophical grounds of Rawls’s and Rorty’s respective theories of democracy and the conception of relativism I will be relying on to develop a more convincing response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism cannot be pushed too far. For the specific theory of democracy I will seek to develop in the next chapter also supposes an agreement on something, namely, on the validity of the form of philosophical relativism on which it is predicated in the first place. However, my contention is that, even conceding this, it is still possible to maintain there is a quantitative (if not qualitative) between Rawls’s and Rorty’s theories and mine. For both Rawls’s and Rorty’s theories are predicated on the assumption of an agreement over a set of substantive moral values, while the specific conception of democracy I will be relying on to advance my argument only requires an agreement on the fact that the later may be unavailable. To the extent that agreeing to disagree in this way is less onerous than finding an agreement over something in particular, this suggests that the kind of consensus on which my response to the Catholic discourse of

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anti-relativism will rely is much thinner than the one on which Rawls’s and Rorty’s respective theories of democracy are predicated. I hope this will become clearer when, in the course of the next chapter, I clarify the way in which I propose to understand the notion of philosophical relativism as a second-order metaphysical standpoint, that is, not as a substantive moral judgment in itself, but as a judgment upon this kind of judgment as such. 4. DEFENSE OF A RELATIVIST CONCEPTION OF DEMOCRACY

1. The attempt to relate Hans Kelsen’s political theory to a set of more contemporary theoretical issues can be considered an intellectual contribution in itself since, despite their interest and fertility, Kelsen’s works on the relation between relativism and democracy are not very well known within the field of contemporary Englishspeaking political theory. It should, however, be noted that my interest in this respect is not merely philological or antiquarian. My goal is to show that Kelsen’s ideas and arguments offer the basis for a compelling response to the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism. For this reason, it will be necessary to relate Kelsen’s texts to a set of concerns he didn’t really address and also to consider some of the most significant objections that have been raised against his theory since it was first outlined. In some cases, this will require complementing what Kelsen wrote explicitly: an operation that I take to be justified by the fact that what is at stake here is not the history or intellectual pedigree of the ideas being developed, but rather their rational validity. In this sense, Kelsen’s thought functions here as an intellectual springboard for constructing an argument that is meant to be self-standing. 2. Hans Kelsen, What Is Justice? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 28. 3. For a further discussion of this objection, see Harvey Siegel, Relativism Refuted: A Critique of Contemporary Epistemological Relativism (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987), esp. 145. 4. On this point, and for a more detailed defense of a conception of relativism analogous to the one I am trying to articulate here, see, for instance, Bernard Williams, “The Truth in Relativism,” in Moral Luck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 5. From the perspective of the current philosophical debate on the notion of relativism, this can be interpreted as a form of “logical” or “foundational” relativism, which implies the possibility of “faultless disagreement.” For a further discussion and defense of this kind of relativism, situating it in the context of the broader philosophical literature on this topic, see also George Harman, “Moral Relativism Defended,” Philosophical Review 84 (1975); Steven Hales, “A Consistent Relativism,” Mind 106 (1997); John MacFarlane, “Making Sense of Relative Truth,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (2005); and Mark Richard, When Truth Gives Out (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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6. Kelsen, What Is Justice?, 22. 7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Liberty Fund, 2010), 298–99. 8. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2003), 243. 9. Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Philosophy (New York: Penguin, 1977), 240. 10. Ibid., 245. 11. Ibid., 248. 12. Ibid., 5. 13. Ibid., 6. 14. On this point, see, for instance, Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Distinction, and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). See also Max Weber, “Objectivity of Social Science and Social Policy,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946); John Searle, “How to Derive Ought from Is,” Philosophical Review 73, no. 1 (1964); and Irina Davidona and Wes Sharrock, “The Rise and Fall of the Fact/Value Distinction,” Sociological Review 51, no. 3 (2003). 15. For the purposes of this discussion, I shall also leave aside the question of whether the kind of relativism I am proposing to endorse applies to the domain of rationality, understood minimally as the set of norms regulating the logic of inference and non-contradiction in formal argumentation. On the one hand, these are norms I certainly have been and will be relying upon in what follows. In this sense, their validity is presupposed by what has been and will be said here. On the other hand, I am also aware that these norms cannot themselves be justified rationally without either circularity or endless regression. Even though it appears hard to imagine, it might therefore be conceivably possible to develop an entire system of logic based on a different set of rules of inference and contradiction from the ones being appealed to here. All this goes to show, however, is that my own argument is situated within the context of a set of prior assumptions, which cannot themselves be justified absolutely. Far from undermining its validity, this ultimately confirms the internal coherence of the specific conception of relativism I have proposed, as long as it remains clear that the scope of its validity is restricted to the range of subjects that agree to the basic premises on which it is based. 16. See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 213–15. 17. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 4–15. 18. On this point, see, in particular, ibid., xviii–xix and 64. 19. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

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20. See Charles Sanders Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” in Selected Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 21. See Richard Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 22. See John Dewey, “The Development of American Pragmatism,” in The Essential Dewey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 23. Evidence for this can be found in the fact that the first full English-language translation of Kelsen’s most important text on democracy—his treatise The Essence and Value of Democracy, published in 1929—was only published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2013. To my knowledge, the only book-length study of Kelsen’s political theory in the English language is Sandrine Baume, Hans Kelsen and the Case for Democracy (Essex: ECPR Press, 2012). For an interesting discussion of the reasons for the relative neglect of Hans Kelsen’s political theory in the English language, see, in particular, the introduction to Baume’s book. 24. Hans Kelsen, The Essence and Value of Democracy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 27. 25. Hans Kelsen, “Foundations of Democracy,” Ethics 66, no. 1 (1955): 26. 26. Ibid., 39. 27. Kelsen, The Essence and Value of Democracy, 104. 28. Ibid., 102. 29. Kelsen, “Foundations of Democracy,” 38. 30. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 63–67. 31. See, for instance, David Estlund, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence and the Rule of the Many (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); and Jon Elster and Hélène Landemore, eds., Collective Wisdom: Principles and Genealogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 32. Kelsen, The Essence and Value of Democracy, 102. 33. For a further elaboration of these themes from a Kelsenian perspective, see also Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, “La Normativité Démocratique entre Vérité et Procédures,” Raisons Politiques 31, no. 4 (2014). 34. Kelsen, What Is Justice?, 14. 35. Kelsen, “Foundations of Democracy,” 39. 36. See Declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae (1965), www.vatican .va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207 _dignitatis-humanae_en.html. 37. Kelsen, “Foundations of Democracy,” 38. 38. Kelsen, The Essence and Value of Democracy, 103. 39. Ibid.

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40. Ibid., 152. 41. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 39. 42. In his book The Limits of Doubt, for instance, Peter Lom makes a similar case with respect to the writings of Machiavelli, Montaigne, Descartes, and Diderot— all of whom, for him, started from skeptical premises but reached “authoritarian” and therefore “illiberal” political conclusions. Peter Lom, The Limits of Doubt: The Moral and Political Consequences of Skepticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). Similarly, in the article “Skepticism and Toleration in the Seventeenth Century,” Richard Tuck focuses more closely on the political thought of Lipsius and Montaigne to challenge what he calls the “natural assumption” that there exists “at the very least an emotional kinship between the belief in the desirability of toleration and a skeptical attitude towards religious or ethical beliefs.” Richard Tuck, “Skepticism and Toleration in the Seventeenth Century,” in Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan Mendus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 43. Hobbes, Leviathan, 39 (emphasis added). 44. Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 65–69. 45. Thomas Hobbes, On The Citizen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 94. 46. Ibid., 96. 47. On this point, see, for instance, Norberto Bobbio, Elementi Filosofici sul Cittadino di Thomas Hobbes (Turin: Unione Tipografico Editrice Torinese, 1948). 48. On this point, see, for instance, Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 49. Hobbes, Leviathan, 131. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. See Gustavo Zagrebelsy, Il Crucifige e la Democrazia (Turin: Einaudi, 1995). 53. Kelsen, The Essence and Value of Democracy, 27–28. 54. Ibid., 29. 55. Ibid., 31. 56. Ibid., 68. 57. Ibid., 69–70. 58. Ibid., 70. 59. Kelsen, “Foundations of Democracy,” 41. 60. Ibid., 42. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 54. 63. Ibid., 43. 64. Ibid.

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65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 42. 67. On this point, see, for instance, Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2005). 68. On this point, see, for instance, Nadia Urbinati and Maria-Paula Saffon, “Procedural Democracy: The Bulwark of Equal Liberty,” Political Theory 41, no. 3 (2013). See also Norberto Bobbio, Democracy and Liberalism (London: Verso, 2004). 69. For a discussion of this “dual” nature of constitutional norms, as both enabling and limiting of political practice, see Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 70. On this point, see, for instance, John Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 71. This can be interpreted as a restatement of the Habermasian thesis of the “cooriginality” of human rights and popular sovereignty discussed in chapter 3. However, the specific justification that has been provided for it here is unmoored from the theory of communicative rationality in which Habermas has inscribed it. For this reason, it does not run into the problems that Habermas is forced to confront, which I sought to show in the previous chapter of this book. Thus, in the final analysis the specific conception of democracy I have been articulating in this chapter can be said to afford the same degree of stability as that provided by the Habermasian theory of constitutional democracy, without, however, needing to rely on the problematic notion of communicative rationality, which—as I have argued—ultimately makes it fall back on a disavowed form of political theology. 72. As a matter of fact, it should be noted that the way Hitler came to power in Germany was not by regular election, but through an exercise of article 48 of the Weimar constitution, which allowed the president of the Republic to suspend certain basic rights within the constitution and assume full sovereign power himself in order to deal with specific cases of emergency: elections only happened after Hitler had been nominated in this way and with the emergency provision still in place. Whatever this might mean concerning the legitimacy of Hitler’s rise to power, from a purely juridical point of view, it means that it is inaccurate to say that Hitler came to power legally, because the principle of legality itself had effectively been suspended by the exercise of article 48 of the Weimar constitution. The specific kind of juridical situation that had thereby been created has been more accurately described as a situation of “indeterminacy” between legality and factuality, corresponding to the legal paradox of a juridical order suspending its own application. On this point, see, for instance, Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 73. For a discussion of the problems and paradoxes raised by the notion of legal entrenchment, see Melissa Schwartzberg, Democracy and Legal Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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74. Carl Schmitt, “The Guardian of the Constitution,” in The Guardian of the Constitution: Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt on the Limits of Constitutional Law, ed. Lars Vinx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 75. For an overview of the literature on this question, see Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2003); Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Samuel Mitcham, Why Hitler? The Genesis of the Nazi Reich (Westport: Praeger, 1996); and William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960). 76. Hans Kelsen, “La Difesa della Democrazia,” in Sociologia della Democrazia (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1991), 50. CONCLUSION

1. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 2006). 2. This is arguably the key feature of Arendt’s own attempt to establish the legitimacy of a specific form of republicanism on the basis of her conception of the political as a space that appears when human beings act in concert on the basis of a mutual recognition of their freedom and equality. On this point, see, for instance, ibid., 141–178. It is also, rather explicitly, the core of Claude Lefort’s theory of democracy, since this is based on the idea that the “dissolution of the markers of certainty” establishes the “irrevocable legitimacy of a debate over what is legitimate and what is illegitimate.” Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 40–41. Finally, the same idea also arguably underscores the thought that the ground for the legitimacy of democratic institutions is always already “to come,” which was recently articulated by both Jacques Derrida and JeanLuc Nancy in their writings on this topic. On this point, see, for instance, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). All these authors’ respective views were in fact insightfully discussed and systematized recently in Olivier Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 3. On this point, see, for instance, Stephen Crook, Modernist Radicalism and Its Aftermath: Foundationalism and Anti-Foundationalism in Radical Social Theory (London: Routledge, 2003). See also Mark Bevir, “Postfoundationalism and Social Democracy,” Teorema 20, no. 1 (2001). 4. On this point, see, for instance, ibid. 5. This is arguably the core of the notion of militant democracy that is sometimes appealed to in order to justify the suspension of certain basic democratic rights for the purpose of protecting a democratic regime from the threat of overthrowing itself by democratic means. On this point, see, for instance, Karl Loewenstein, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights,” American Political Science Review 31, no. 3 (1937); Andras Sajò, ed., Militant Democracy (Utrecht: Eleven International, 2004); and Alexander Kirshner, A Theory of Militant Democracy: The Ethics

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of Combatting Political Extremism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). My contention, however, is that such a conception of militant democracy is ultimately incoherent, because it opens democracy’s flank to another kind of authoritarian abuse from within: namely, the abuse stemming from the risk of those entitled to decide who is supposed to constitute a threat for the democratic regime using the tools of militant democracy to arbitrarily exclude potential competitors from the possibility of participating in the democratic game. For a further development of this thought, see Carlo Invernizzi Accetti and Ian Zuckerman, “What’s Wrong with Militant Democracy,” forthcoming. 6. See Peter Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington: Eerdmans, 1999). For a more recent set of both empirical and theoretical essays, see also Peter Nynas, Mika Lassander, and Terhi Utrainen, eds., Post-Secular Society (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2012); and Kristina Stoeckl and Massimo Rosati, Multiple Modernities and Post-Secular Societies (London: Ashgate, 2013). 7. This is arguably the view defended by both Rawls and Habermas in the context of the recent debate on the role and place for religious arguments in the democratic public sphere, since both ultimately argue that the kinds of religious arguments that are not capable of being “translated” in terms of principles and values that can be rationally understood by all citizens who recognize one another as free and equal should not be considered legitimate in a democratic context, and at a minimum should be excluded from formal decision-making, such as parliaments and the other “basic institutions” of a democratic society. On this point, see, for instance, Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens,” in Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). 8. This is arguably the idea that the Catholic Church ultimately seeks to justify through its critique of relativism. On this point, see, for instance, Adriano Guarneri and Stefano Zamagni, eds., Laicità e Relativismo nell’Epoca Post-Secolare (Bologna: Mulino, 2009).

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INDEX

absolute moral truth, 98–105; content of, 100–101; existence of, 98–100; faith and, 100; theory of communicative rationality and, 172; utility and, 98–100 absolute truth: authority and, 82; Catholic Church and, 62; Christianity and, 5; conception of, 75; democracy and, 3–6; immanentism and, 83; indifferentism and, 83; as moral, 20; political order and, 6; Ratzinger on, 69; relativism and, 3–6; social order and, 82; totalitarianism and, 64 absolute values, 94–96 absolutism: democratic, 69; nihilism and, 164–67; philosophical, 179; political, 62–63; relativism compared to, 91–94, 164–67, 204–7 absolutization, 133 Ackerman, Bruce, 224n23

active nihilism, 93 aggiornamento (renewal), 54 American Revolution, 112; political order after, 10 Anderson, Perry, 242n62 anti-anti-relativism, 92 anti-relativism: authority and, 19, 81; Benedict XVI on, 79–80; Catholic Church and, 1–2, 11–12, 16–18, 80–85, 134–36, 197–209; during Cold War, 57–64, 230n36; freedom and, 19; Habermas on, 134–36; John Paul II and, 57–64; Leo XIII on, 34–41; Marxism and, 230n36; Platonic heritage of, 4, 6; as political, 50, 64–76; public critique of, 87–89; rationalist response to, 22–27; theories of justice and, 150; totalitarianism and, 19; truth and, 19 apathy. See moral apathy

266

Arendt, Hannah, 21, 89; on authority, 106; on freedom, 236n32; on moralization of politics, 124; On Revolution, 9–10, 109, 111–12; “Truth in Politics,” 169–71 atheistic communism, 43 “Atomism” (Taylor), 241n55 Austin, J. L., 24 authoritarianism, 179; mob rule and, 197 authority: absolute truth and, 82; antirelativism and, 19, 81; autonomy compared to, 61; democratic theory of, 107–13; etymological origin of, 106; Hobbes’s conception of, 108; pactum subjectionis and, 108–9; pactum unionis and, 108–12; Platonic conception of, 106; under Second Vatican Council, reassertion of, 53–55; social order and, 82, 107; social unity and, 105, 107; stability and, 105, 107; truth and, 105–7 autonomy: authority compared to, 61; for Christianity, 61; freedom and, 236n32; moral, 232n61; Rousseau on, 194 Badiou, Alain, 222n11 Benedict XVI (Pope), 221n2, 233n70; abdication of, 76; on anti-relativism, 79–80; collaboration with John Paul II, 65; on relativism, 92 Bergoglio, Jorge Mario, 76 Berlin, Isaiah, 118–21; on moral pluralism, 174 Bethlehem Baptist Church, 2 Between Facts and Norms (Habermas), 146 The Bible. See New Testament Bishops of the Episcopal Conference of Poland, 80 Bobbio, Norberto, 89, 112–13, 189 Bolshevik Revolution, 18, 41–48

INDEX

Bolsheviks, 21 Brunner, Emil, 197–99; Kelsen’s critique of, 198–99 capitalist democracies, 47 Catholic Action movement, 41–42 Catholic Church, 7–9; absolute truth and, 62; as anti-relativist, 1–2, 11–12, 16–18, 80–85, 197–209; conception of truth, 235n17; condemnation of freemasonry, 227n4; critique of communism by, 17, 47; critique of modernism, 48–57; critique of political absolutism, 63; democracy as enemy of, 17; extra ecclesiam nulla salus principle, 101; Fascism and, 44, 46; in Fascist Italy, 124; on freedom, 114–15; intellectual leadership of, 8; during interwar years, 44–46; liberalism as enemy of, 17, 36; logic of substitution for, 57; lumen naturale for, 88; magisterial authority in, challenges to, 49; National Socialism and, response to, 44, 46; natural law and, 104; opposition to popular sovereignty, 59; parliamentary democracy crisis within, 44; as political force, 9; purpose of, 52; size of denomination, 8, 223n15; social thought within, 21; tolerance endorsed by, 183; on validity of human rights, 103, 105. See also Roman Catholicism; Second Vatican Council; the Vatican; Vatican doctrine Chesterton, G. K., 95 Christianity: absolute truth and, 5; autonomy for, 61; freedom as concept within, 115–16; hierarchy in, 68–69; natural laws and, 78, 84; relativism in, 48–50 Citizen, The (Hobbes), 189–92 city of God, 16–17, 38; Leo XIII on, 40

INDEX

city of Man, 16–17, 38; Leo XIII on, 40 civil peace, 78 Clement XII (Pope), 227 Cohen, Joshua, 243n69 Cold War, anti-relativism during, 57–64, 230n36 collective will of people, 10 communicative rationality, theory of, 23–26, 249n71; absolute moral truths and, 172; democracy and, 135; fallibilism and, 165; justification of, 139; language in, 238n24; operationalization of, 145–48; philosophy of history and, 141–43; pluralism and, 165; religious revelation and, 239n38; universal pragmatics of language and, 22, 24, 136–48 communism: atheistic, 43; Catholic Church’s critique of, 17, 47; John Paul II’s critique of, 58–59; relativism and, 41–43; as tyranny, 84 Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, 65–66, 71 consent, democracy and, 189–90, 213 constitutionalism: democracy and, 30, 135, 146, 200–204, 215; hierarchies within, 202–4; path-dependency within, 203; as self-limiting, 203 constitutional order, 195 constructivism, 130 Culler, Jonathan, 139 cultural relativism, 27; limitations of, 159–61 culture, relativism and, 175 de la Rivière, Mercier, 169 democracy: absolute truth and, 3–6; authority and, 107–13; capitalist, 47; Christianity and, 76; Christian thesis for, 71–72; consent as part of, 189–90,

267

213; constitutionalism and, 30, 135, 146, 200–204, 215; constitutional order under, 195; critique of relativism and, 3–6; defined, 126; as degenerate form of government, 4; as enemy of Catholic Church, 17; equality and, 182; ethical relativism and, 62; as evil, 45; freedom and, 182; hierarchy of norms in, 195; human rights and, 75; Kelsen’s theories of, 178–86, 192–97, 201, 209, 245n1; legitimacy of, 213; limitation of, from within, 4; metaphysical thesis for, 71–72; militant, 250n5; modernity and, 16, 35; in Nazi Germany, 204–5, 204–7, 249n72; normative justification of, 214; paradox of, 12–14, 201, 214–16; parliamentary character of, 196–97; philosophical foundations for, 71–76; philosophical relativism and, 186–87, 198, 202, 205–6, 208; Plato on, 12; from political institutionalization, 30; political legitimacy of, 4; post-foundationalist theories of, 11, 212, 214; principle of majority rule in, 194–95; radical, 13; rationalist theories of, 11; Ratzinger on, 67, 70; Rawls on, 244n71; relativism and, 83–84, 159, 176–97, 245n1; relativist conception of, 27–32, 73; riskless, 207–9, 216; as selfdefeating, 5; self-government through, 3, 31; sovereign authority of God and, 81; suspension of, 216; theory of communicative rationality and, 135; tolerance and, 182–84. See also collective will of people; liberal democracies; sovereignty, popular Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 99, 168–69 democratic absolutism, 69 democratic theory, 3

268

INDEX

Ecclesiam Suam, 231n49 economic goods, 25; rational self-interest and, 153 encyclicals. See papal encyclicals Enlightenment, secret sects during, 34–35 epistemological fallibilism, 165, 171–72 equality: democracy and, 182; philosophical relativism and, 188; relativism and, 29, 177 Essence and Value of Democracy (Kelsen), 178, 180, 247n23 ethical relativism, 62 Ethics, 197 ethnicity, relativism and, 175 ethnocentric relativism, 165, 171–76, 243n69; liberalism and, 172 evangelical churches: as anti-relativist, 2; as anti-secularist, 2; on liberalism, 2 evolution, theory of, 74–75 extra ecclesiam nulla salus principle, 101

Fascist Italy, 21, 124; Catholic Church in, 124 Il Fermo Proposito, 41–42 first-order moral judgments, 28, 94 foundational relativism, 245n5 Francis I (Pope): apostolic exhortations of, 76–77, 79; doctrinal revolution under, 76–80; moral relativism and, 78; transformation of missionary style, 77 Franco, Francisco, 44 freedom, 113–22; anti-relativism and, 19; for Arendt, 236n32; autonomy and, 236n32; Catholic Church on, 114–15; Christian concept of, 115–16; conceptual manipulation of, 113–19; democracy and, 182; hierarchical value spheres for, 119–22; humanity and, 60–61; John Paul II on, 116–17, 120; for Kant, 236n32; moral law and, 117–18; moral relativism and, 97; philosophical relativism and, 188; as political concept, 118; relativism and, 29, 61, 176–77; responsibility and, 28; social order destroyed by, 48; the Vatican’s acceptance of, 116; Western tradition of, 114 freemasonry: Catholic Church’s condemnation of, 227n4; modernity and, 34; relativism and, 38 French Revolution: American Revolution compared to, 10; failure of, 10; general will after, 13; intellectual foundation of, 36; intransigentist doctrine as result of, 16; secret sects during, 34–35 Future of Democracy, The (Bobbio), 112–13

faith: absolute moral truth and, 100; relativism and, 65–69 fallibilism: philosophical, 146–47; relativism and, 171–76; theory of communicative rationality and, 165, 171–72 Fascism, the Vatican’s response to, 44

Gaudium et Spes, 52 Geertz, Clifford, 91–92 general will, after French Revolution, 13 Germany: National Socialism in, 21–22; Weimar constitution in, 249n72. See also Nazi Germany

de Vitoria, Francisco, 74 Dewey, John, 95–96 Dialectics of Secularization, 239n38 dictatorship, relativism and, 1, 4, 65 Dignitatis Humanae, 183 Discourses of the First Decade of Livy (Machiavelli), 99 discrimination, 181 disorder, tyranny and, 4 divine rights of monarchy, 10 Divini Redemptoris, 44, 124 dogmatic modernism, 50 dogmatism, rationalism and, 131

INDEX

269

Girard, René, 221n2 God, sovereign authority of, 81. See also absolute will of God the good, 29–30; as absolute, 181; natural theory of, 243n65; the right in conflict with, 30 Gregory XVI (Pope), 35 Grotius, Hugo, 74

human rights: Catholic Church’s validation of, 103, 105; co-originality of, 249n71; democracy and, 75; natural law and, 101–5; will of God and, 84 Humanum Genus, 34–47, 225n28; city of God in, 38; city of Man in, 38; critique of meta-ethical skepticism, 34; moral relativism in, 42

Habermas, Jürgen, 132, 138–39, 146, 224n23, 239n37; on Catholic antirelativism, 134–36; conception of reason, 131; on constitutional democracy, 240n45; on human rights, 249n71; ideal speech situation for, 22–23, 130, 134, 147; on neo-Kantian constructivism, 130; on performative contradiction, 132; philosophical fallibilism for, 146–47; philosophy of history and, 141–45; on popular sovereignty, 223n17; as post-secularist, 224n26; rationalization of life-world for, 142–43; Ratzinger debate with, 65, 69–71, 102; on relativism, 132–33, 224n29; universal pragmatics for, 22, 24. See also communicative rationality, theory of Hamilton, William, 226n3 Harsanyi, John, 241n60 heresy, 49–50; modernism and, 50 hierarchy of norms, 195 Hitler, Adolf, 44, 204–7, 249n72. See also Nazi Germany Hobbes, Thomas, 107, 188–90; on absolute moral values, 188; on authority, 108; political philosophy of, 188; public interest, 191; on superiority of monarchic rule, 190–92 Holmes, Stephen, 224n23 human freedom. See freedom Humani Generis, 49

ideal speech situation, 22–23, 130, 134, 147 ideal theory, 240n45 illocutionary speech acts, 24, 140 immanentism, as doctrine, 17; absolute truth and, 83; intransigentist doctrine and, 41; modernity and, 39; in Syllabus of Errors, 228n17 Immortale Dei, 98–99 indifferentism, 17, 39; absolute truth and, 83; intransigentist doctrine and, 41; relativism and, 96–97, 167–71 intransigentist doctrine: classical themes of, 18; critique of modernity, 35, 52; after French Revolution, 16; immanentism and, 41; indifferentism and, 41; Leo XIII and, 35; neointransigentism and, 56–57 Islamism, political, 3 ius gentium, 74 J’Accuse le Concile (Lefebvre), 56–57 Jesus Christ, 5 John Paul II (Pope), 80; on absolute truth, 5; on anti-relativism, 57–64; Benedict XVI’s collaboration with, 65; on communism, 58–59; critique of totalitarianism, 58; on democracy, 5; on freedom, 116–17, 120; on morality, 59; on relationship between relativism and freedom, 67; on socialism, 58; Veritatis Splendor, 5, 59–64, 72–73, 116–17, 235n2

270

John XXIII (Pope), 51, 54, 57–64; condemnation of Vatican II, 58; as conservative, 58; Pacem in Terris, 103; Second Vatican Council and, 231n49 justice, theories of, 22, 26–27; anti-relativism and, 150; circularity in, 151–54; communitarian critiques of, 241n55, 243n65; maximin principle in, 242n61; metaphysical suppositions in, 151–54; neutrality and, 154–56; original position arguments in, 150–51; philosophical relativism and, 161; political culture and, 157–58, 160; primary goods and, 153, 155–56; rational self-interest and, 153; reflective equilibrium and, 26, 156–58, 243n69; relativism and, 158–59; social contract theory and, 151; truth as analogy of, 244n70; as virtue of social institutions, 149 Kant, Immanuel: categorical imperative for, 237n1; constructivism for, 130; on freedom, 236n32; on morality, 130–31; perceptions of objective reality, 237n3 Kelsen, Hans, 27–28, 71–76, 89, 164–66, 180, 206–7, 247n23; on connection between relativism and democracy, 178–86, 245n1; critique of Brunner, 198–99; interpretation of New Testament, 184–86; on philosophical absolutism, 179; on philosophical relativism, 184; on political authoritarianism, 179; on principle of majority rule, 194–95; relativism defined by, 168; on religion, 72; theories of democracy, 178–86, 192–97, 201, 209, 245n1 knowledge, relativism and, 66 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 24, 144 Laclau, Ernesto, 223n18 laicism, 229n31

INDEX

language: communicative uses of, 138; declamatory uses of, 140; illocutionary speech acts, 24, 140; literary uses of, 140; perlocutionary speech acts, 140; in philosophy of history, 141–43; in prayer, 139; strategic uses of, 138; in theory of communicative rationality, 238n24. See also universal pragmatics, of language Lefebvre, Marcel, 56–57; excommunication of, 56 Lefort, Claude, 21, 126, 223n18 legitimacy. See political legitimacy Leo XIII (Pope), 225n28; anti-relativism and, 34–41; on city of God, 40; on city of Man, 40; Humanum Genus, 34–47; Immortale Dei, 98–99; intransigentist doctrine and, 35; liberalism as target of, 36–37; modernity and, rejection of, 37–38; political projects of, 37–41; popular sovereignty as target of, 36–37; relativism defined by, 89–90, 102; theological projects of, 37–41. See also Second Vatican Council Leviathan (Hobbes), 107, 188–92 liberal democracies: Pius XII’s support of, 46–47; as political expression of modernity, 57 liberalism: as enemy of Catholic Church, 17, 36; ethnocentric relativism and, 172; evangelical churches on, 2; as evil, 45; Leo XIII on, 36–37; modernity and, 16, 36; in nineteenth century, 13 Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Sandel), 241n55 liberty, as primary good, 25 Limits of Doubt, The (Lom), 248n42 locus fidei, 226n1 logical relativism, 245n5 Lom, Peter, 248n42 lumen naturale, 88

INDEX

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 99, 248n42 Marchart, Oliver, 223n18 Marxism, 230n36 Mayflower Compact, 109–11 McCarthy, Thomas, 239n37 meta-ethical skepticism, 34 metaphysical thesis, for democracy, 71–72 Milestones (Qutb), 2–3 militant democracy, 250n5 Mirari Vos, 35, 227n7 mob rule, 197 modernism: dogmatic, 50; heresy and, 50; theological, 50 modernity: Catholic Church’s critique of, 48–57; democracy and, 16, 35; as evil, 44–45; freemasonry and, 34; immanentism and, 39; indifferentism and, 39; intransigentist doctrine and, 35, 52; Leo XIII’s rejection of, 37–38; liberal democracies as political expression of, 57; liberalism and, 16, 35; naturalism and, 39; political order and, 9–10; rationalism and, 39; totalitarianism and, 126–28 monarchy: divine rights of, 10; Hobbes on, 190–92 moral apathy, 97 moral autonomy, 232n61 morality: absolute truth and, 20; firstorder judgments, 28, 94; John Paul II’s emphasis on, 59; Kant on, 130–31; moral relativism and, 2; second-order judgments, 94 moral law, freedom and, 117–18 moral nihilism, 28 moral pluralism, 174 moral relativism: as crisis in Western civilization, 222n11; Francis I’s condemnation of, 78; freedom and, 97; in Humanum Genus, 42; as moral issue, 2;

271

responsibility and, 97; second-order perspective for, 96–97 Mussolini, Benito, 44 Nagel, Thomas, 242n65 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 223n18 National Socialism: in Germany, 21–22; John Paul II’s critique of, 58; totalitarianism and, 21; as tyranny, 84; the Vatican’s response to, 44 naturalism, modernity and, 39 natural laws: absolute will of God and, 13; for Catholic Church, 104; as Christian doctrine, 78, 84; human rights and, 101–5; inversion of, 63; rational laws and, 74–75; Ratzinger on, 73–76; theory development for, 74; theory of evolution and, 74–75; will of God and, 84 nature, 102; relativism and, 178–79 Nazi Germany: Catholic Church’s alliances with, 124; democracy overthrown in, 204–7, 249n72; totalitarianism in, 124 neo-intransigentism, 56–57 neo-Thomism, 102 New Testament, 184–86 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 197–98 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 92–93 nihilism: absolutism and, 164–67; active, 93; moral, 28; passive, 93; relativism and, 19–20, 28, 89–91, 164–67 non-ideal theory, 240n45 On Revolution (Arendt), 9–10, 109, 111–12 order. See political order Oxford English Dictionary, 226n3 Pacem in Terris, 103 pactum subjectionis, 108–9, 111, 190 pactum unionis, 108–12, 190

272

papal encyclicals: confidentiality of, 235n2; Divini Redemptoris, 44, 124; Ecclesiam Suam, 231n49; Il Fermo Proposito, 41–42; Humani Generis, 49; Humanum Genus, 34–47; Immortale Dei, 98–99; Mirari Vos, 35, 227n7; Pacem in Terris, 103; Quanta Cura, 115; Vatican doctrine in, 7; Veritatis Splendor, 5, 59–64, 116–17, 235n2 paradox of democracy, 12–14, 214–16 passive nihilism, 93 Paul VI (Pope), 54; Ecclesiam Suam, 231n49; relativism defined by, 89 performative contradiction, 132 perlocutionary speech, 24, 140 perspectivism, 175 petitio principii, 242n62 philosophical absolutism, 179 Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, The (Habermas), 132 philosophical fallibilism, 146–47 philosophical relativism, 31; coherence of, 186–87; democracy and, 186–87, 198, 202, 205–6, 208; equality and, 188; freedom and, 188; for Kelsen, 184; as procedural, 202; rationalism and, 131; totalitarianism and, 199 philosophy, religion and, 239n38 philosophy of history, 141–45; lack of foundation for, 143–45; postmetaphysical stage in, 142; primitive stage in, 142; rationalization of lifeworld and, 142–43; theological stage in, 142; in Theory of Communicative Action, 141–42 Philosophy of Right (Kant), 237n1 Piaget, Jean, 24, 144 Piper, John, 2, 6 Pius IX (Pope), 35, 96; Mirari Vos, 35, 227n7; Quanta Cura, 115; Syllabus of Errors, 35, 115, 227n7, 228n17

INDEX

Pius X (Pope), 41–43; on relativism, 42 Pius XI (Pope), 44–46; Divini Redemptoris, 44, 124 Pius XII (Pope), 46–49; Humani Generis, 49; support of liberal democracies, 46–47 Plato, 4, 72; on authority, 106; Christian thesis for democracy and, 71–72; metaphysical thesis for democracy and, 71–72; on paradox of democracy, 12 pluralism, 165; moral, 174; relativism and, 171–76 political absolutism, 62–63. See also democratic absolutism political culture, 157–58, 160 political Islamism, 3 political legitimacy: of democracy, 4; standards of, 148 Political Liberalism (Rawls), 88, 149–50, 152, 156–57, 173, 244n70 political order: absolute truth and, 6; after American Revolution, 10; divine rights of monarchy and, 10; legitimacy of, 9; modernity and, 9–10 politics: anti-relativism in, 50, 64–76; Catholic Church’s influence, 9; contemporary theories for, 235n17; moralization of, 122–25; relativism as problem in, 1; religion in, 14, 216–18, 251n7 popes. See papal encyclicals; specific popes post-foundationalism: conceptual development of, 223n18; democracy and, 11, 212, 214 Post-Foundational Political Thought, 223n18 post-secularism, 14–15; Habermas and, 224n26 poverty, 79 pragmatism, 175

INDEX

prayer, 139 Presidents of the Doctrinal Commissions of the Bishops’ Conferences of Latin America, 65 primary goods, 25; theories of justice and, 153, 155–56 principle of majority rule, 194–95 prosperity, 78 Protestantism: natural laws and, 74; Roman Catholicism in conflict with, 8 Protestant Reformation, 20 public reason, 224n26 public interest, 191 Quanta Cura, 115 Qutb, Sayyid, 2–3 radical democracy, 13 radical skepticism, 170 Rancière, Jacques, 223n18 rationalism: anti-relativism and, 22–27; communicative, 23–25; content and, 130–31; democratic theories and, 11; dogmatism and, 131; modernity and, 39; neo-Kantian, 22–23; philosophical relativism and, 131; self-interest and, 25; in A Theory of Justice, 155 rationalization of life-world, 142–43 rational laws, 74–75 rational self-interest, 153 Ratzinger, Joseph: on absolute truth, 69; on Christianity hierarchy, 68–69; Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith and, 65–66, 71; debate with Habermas, 65, 69–71, 102; on democracy, 67, 70; on dictatorship of relativism, 1; on natural law, 73–76; positive definition of relativism, 67; on totalitarianism, 72. See also Benedict XVI Rawls, John, 88, 148–61, 173, 244n70; on neo-Kantian constructivism, 130; on

273

public reason, 224n26; on the self, 151; theory of democracy, 244n71. See also justice, theories of reason: Habermas’ conception of, 131; public, 224n26. See also rationalism reflective equilibrium, 26, 156–58, 243n69 relativism: absolute truth and, 3; absolutism compared to, 91–94, 164–67, 204–7; absolutization and, 133; for Benedict XVI, 92; in Christianity, 48–50; communism compared to, 41–43; as conception of democracy, 27–32, 73; conceptual development of, 226n3; as contemporary issue in faith, 65–69; in critique of democracy, 3–6; cultural, 27, 159–61; culture and, 175; defined, 28–29, 66–67, 89–97, 164–67, 213, 225n30; democracy and, 83–84, 159, 176–97, 245n1; dictatorship and, 1, 4, 65; distinction between fact and values, 167–71; equality and, 29, 177; ethnicity and, 175; ethnocentric, 165, 171–76, 172, 243n69; fallibilism and, 171–76; first-order moral judgments and, 28, 94; as form of nihilism, 19–20, 28; as form of tolerance, 29; freedom and, 29, 61, 176–77; freemasonry and, 38; Habermas on, 132–33, 224n29; in Humanum Genus, 34–47; indifferentism and, 96–97, 167–71; for Kelsen, 168; knowledge and, 66; for Leo XIII, 89–90, 102; logical, 245n5; nature and, 178–79; nihilism and, 19–20, 28, 89–91; non-religious critique of, 222n11; Paul VI on, 89; performative contradictions of, 167; Pius X on, 42; pluralism and, 171–76; political consequences of, 96, 122; as political problem, 1; popular sovereignty and, 83; public critique of, 18–22; Rorty’s theory of, 244n71; scope of, 169; second-order moral

274

relativism (continued ) judgments and, 94, 166; social consequences of, 96; as social problem, 1; theories of justice and, 158–59; third-order perspective and, 225n30; tolerance and, 66, 177–78; totalitarianism as result of, 3–5, 17; truth and, 90–91; tyranny through, 4. See also anti-anti-relativism; anti-relativism; moral relativism; philosophical relativism relativistic positivism, 198 religion: Kelsen on, 72; philosophy and, 239n38; in politics, 14, 216–18, 251n7; wars of, 20 religious absolutism, 26 religious revelation, 239n38 renewal. See aggiornamento Republic, The (Plato), 4, 72 republicanism, 250n2 responsibility: freedom and, 28; moral relativism and, 97 the right, the good in conflict with, 30 riskless democracy, 207–9, 216 Roman Catholicism, 8 Rorty, Richard, 223n18, 243n69; conception of relativism, 244n71 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 13, 99, 181, 190, 194 Russia, Bolshevik Revolution in, 18 Sandel, Michael, 241n55 Scanlon, Thomas, 243n69 Schmitt, Carl, 124, 206 scripture. See New Testament second-order moral judgments, 94, 166 Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), 48–57; aggiornamento under, 54; deductive methods for, in transformation of Catholic Church, 51–52; Dignitatis Humanae, 183; doctrinal innova-

INDEX

tions by, 51–53; historical development of, 231n49; inductive methods for, in transformation of Catholic Church, 51–52; John XXIII and, 231n49; principle of authority under, reassertion of, 53–55; public reaction to, 53–57; reformist reading of, 55–56 secret sects, 34–35, 225n28 secularism: evangelical churches on, 2; relativist conception of, 218–20. See also post-secularism the self, 151 self-government, through democracy, 3, 31 self-interest, as rational, 25 skeptical secularism, 198 skepticism, 175–76; meta-ethical, 34; radical, 170 Social Contract, The (Rousseau), 99, 181, 194 social goods, 25; rational self-interest and, 153 social order: absolute truth and, 82; authority and, 82, 107; freedom and, 48; social unity and, 110; stability and, 110; under totalitarianism, 127 social unity, 105, 107, 110 sovereignty, popular: Catholic Church’s opposition to, 59; as doctrine, 36; Habermas on, 223n17; human rights and, 249n71; Leo XIII on, 36–37; paradox of, 13; principles of, 17; relativism and, 83 Soviet Union, collapse of, 18. See also Cold War speech: ideal speech situation, 22–23; illocutionary, 24; perlocutionary, 24 speech acts, 137 Spencer, Herbert, 226n3 stability: authority and, 105, 107; social order and, 110

INDEX

275

Strauss, Leo, 222n11 subjectivism, 175 Syllabus of Errors, 35, 115, 227n7; immanentism in, 228n17

tyranny: chaos and, 4; civil peace and, 78; communism as, 84; disorder and, 4; prosperity and, 78; through relativism, 4; socialism as, 84

Taylor, Charles, 241n55 terrorism, Bolshevik Revolution and, 45 theological modernism, 50 Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas), 138–39; philosophy of history in, 141–42 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), 149, 154–55; rationality in, 155; truth as analogy of justice in, 244n70 Thomas Aquinas, 102 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 99, 168–69 tolerance: Catholic Church’s endorsement of, 183; democracy and, 182–84; relativism and, 29, 66, 177–78 Tomasi, Silvano Maria, 221n2 totalitarianism, 122–28; absolute truth and, 64; anti-relativism and, 19; as evil, 123–24; historical development of, 21; John Paul II’s critique of, 58; modernity and, 126–28; in Nazi Germany, 124; philosophical relativism and, 199; Ratzinger on, 72; relativism and, 3–5, 17; social order under, 127 truth: anti-relativism and, 19; authority and, 105–7; Catholic Church’s conception of, 235n17; error and, 20; interpretation of, 20; justice and, 244n70; reconceptualization of, 235n17; relativism and, 90–91; in A Theory of Justice, 244n70. See also absolute moral truth; absolute truth “Truth in Politics” (Arendt), 169–71 Tuck, Richard, 248n42 “Two Concepts of Freedom” (Berlin), 118–21

United States (U.S.): Catholic Church in, expansion of, 8–9; constituents’ founding of, 109–10; founding of, 109– 10; Mayflower Compact and, 109–11 universal pragmatics, of language, 22, 24, 136–48; speech acts, 137; for understanding, 139–41; validity claims and, 137–38, 238n24 validity claims, 137–38, 238n24 values, 94–96; absolute moral, 188; facts and, 167–71; in relativism, 167–71 the Vatican: councils, 33–34; Fascism and, response to, 44, 46; on freedom, 116; locus fidei, 226n1; National Socialism and, response to, 44, 46. See also Second Vatican Council Vatican doctrine: under Francis I, 76–80; in papal encyclicals, 7. See also Second Vatican Council Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Veritatis Splendor, 5, 59–64, 72–73, 235n2; freedom in, 116–17 von Pufendorf, Samuel, 74 Weber, Max, 97 Weimar constitution, 249n72 What is Justice (Kelsen), 165–66 will of God: collective will of people in conflict with, 10; human rights and, 84; natural law and, 84 Will to Power (Nietzsche), 93 Wood, Allen, 138–39 Zagrebelsky, Gustavo, 192