Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

Rawls and the “Reasonable” Suppression of Differences 
While Rawls recognizes and begins from the fact of pluralism, his main objective, on my 
reading, is to suppress those differences by bracketing them outside the political sphere. For 
Rawls, the word “reasonable” does a great deal of work. “Persons are reasonable…when, among 
equals say, they are ready to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to 
abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will likewise do so” (Rawls 1993, 49).
Given that, “reasonable persons affirm only reasonable comprehensive doctrines,” with these 
being defined a reasonable comprehensive doctrine defined as one that: a) “covers the major 
religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of human life in a more or less consistent and 
coherent manner;” b) effectively singles “out which values to count as especially significant and 
how to balance them when they conflict;” and c) “belongs to, or draws upon, a tradition of 
thought and doctrine” (Rawls 1993, 59). This definition, as Rawls notes, is meant to be quite 
broad because we ought to consider many competing comprehensive doctrines as reasonable, 
even if we do not endorse them or live by them ourselves. A comprehensive doctrine constitutes 
a view of the good, and it is a reasonable view of the good when it meets the above criteria.
Rawls (1993, 60) then asserts that “reasonable persons will think it unreasonable to use political 
power…to repress comprehensive views that are not unreasonable, though different from their 
own.” Or, as he puts it later, the reasonable person will “recognize that to insist on their own 
comprehensive view must be seen by the rest as their simply insisting on their own beliefs” (
ibid.

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127-28). In other words, it is unreasonable to seek to enact one’s own conception of the good 
insofar as other’s have divergent conceptions of the good.
Here, Rawls essentially defines “reasonable” as “liberal.” Sandel (1996, 10) contends 
that “Kantian liberals,” like Rawls, “draw a distinction between the ‘right’ and the ‘good’ – 
between a framework of basic rights and liberties, and the conceptions of the good that people 
may choose to pursue within that framework.” If a liberal is one who (among other things) 
prioritizes the right over the good – that is, they promote a society in which each individual has 
the right to pursue their own conception of the good, so long as their doing so does not infringe 
on other’s right to do the same – then this seems to be an effort to sneak in liberal principles 
behind the guise of reasonability. Rawls defines reasonability as the willingness to bracket one’ 
view of the good in politics and view it as a purely private matter. As Mouffe (2000, 24-25) puts 
it: 
What is this if not an indirect form of asserting that reasonable persons are those 
who accept the fundamentals of liberalism? In other words, the distinction 
between ‘reasonable’ and ‘unreasonable’ helps to draw a frontier between the 
doctrines that accept the liberal principles and the ones that oppose them. It 
means that its function is 
political
and that it aims at discriminating between a 
permissible pluralism of religious, moral or philosophical conceptions, as long as 
those views can be relegated to the sphere of the private and satisfy the liberal 
principles – and what would be an unacceptable pluralism because it would 
jeopardize the dominance of liberal principles in the public sphere. 
Indeed, one of the key distinctions between non-liberal and liberal comprehensive doctrines 
seems to be on this exact point: should society specify and promote a particular conception of the 
good, or should it avoid specifying a conception of the good and allow each individual to decide 
this question for herself? Mouffe’s point here is not that this is necessarily the wrong view, and I 
my aim is not to argue against the priority of the right over the good. Rather, the relevant point 
here is simply that not everyone agrees with the priority of the right over the good or thinks that 

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our moral commitments ought to be left to the private sphere (including, for example, 
Aristotelians, communitarians, and radical democrats). Coles (2005, 3), for example, highlights 
the conflict that exists between the project of radical democracy and the Rawlsian doctrine of 
political liberalism. Rawls’ approach disqualifies “a priori diverse advocates of more-radical 
democracy as proponents of ‘comprehensive doctrines’” while disguising its own political and 
historically-specific nature. In other words, political liberalism sees “all but the most 
instrumental movements toward radical democracy to be simply illegitimate attempts to 
empower ‘a highly contentious view of the human good’” (Coles 2005, 39). Thus, in casting 
reasonableness as a liberal prioritizing of the right over the good – and characterizing all who 
believe that their vision of the good life ought to be the one that is shared by society as a whole 
as “unreasonable” – “allows Rawls to present as a moral exigency what is really a political 
decision” (Mouffe 2000, 24). Rawls imposes the liberal comprehensive doctrine, while acting 
as though he is treating all comprehensive doctrines equally.
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As such, in the guise of 
developing a pluralist account of democracy, I see Rawls as suppressing difference and 
undercutting diversity.