Book Review: Liberalism’s Religion, by Cécile Laborde

• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718762396
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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Notes
1. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 73–95; Judith Shklar “The Liberalism of Fear,” in
Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. N. Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989), 21–38.
2. For productive efforts to complicate the thin rationalism associated with promi-
nent liberal models, see Sharon Krause Civil Passions: Moral Sentiment and
Democratic Deliberation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013);
Lars Tønder, Toleration: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013).
3. Some representative cases include William Connolly, Identity/Difference:
Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002); Stephen White, Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Romand Coles, Rethinking
Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1997). A symptomatic critique is found in Jodi Dean, “The
Politics of Avoidance: The Limits of Weak Ontology,” Hedgehog Review 7, no 2
(2005): 55–65.
4. For the canonical instance, see Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of
Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
5. Similar questions are raised by Bonnie Honig, “The Politics of Ethos,” European
Journal of Political Theory 10, no. 3 (2011): 422–29.
Liberalism’s Religion, by Cécile Laborde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2017, 344 pp, US$35.00, ISBN 9780674976269.
Reviewed by: Benjamin R. Hertzberg, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
DOI: 10.1177/0090591718762396
The rise of religion-inflected nationalisms in many developed democracies
has made both intellectuals and the public doubt liberal-democratic institu-
tions’ ability to address the politicization of religious diversity. In her timely
work, Liberalism’s Religion, Cécile Laborde offers a crucial new statement of
liberal egalitarianism’s implications for religion and politics. Laborde argues
that liberal egalitarianism, properly understood, demands “minimal secular-
ism” (150–59). Liberal egalitarian principles permit some invocation of reli-
gious arguments in political discussions, some forms of symbolic
establishment, and some kinds of religious exemptions. Laborde shows that
these implications depend on liberal egalitarianism’s commitment to demo-
cratic sovereignty. Liberalism’s Religion demonstrates the coherence of a

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liberal egalitarian approach to these issues; it should be a defining influence
on future theoretical discussions of public justification, nonestablishment,
state neutrality, and religious exemptions.
Laborde’s achievement is in part a consequence of her deep knowledge of
literatures that many liberal egalitarians avoid. Discussions in religious stud-
ies are full of telling critiques of the contemporary practice of self-identified
liberal states, critiques that show those states’ actual regulations of religion
depart dramatically from what liberal theory demands. Liberal egalitarians
generally agree that their views require political secularism: the state should
treat citizens equally regardless of their religion and should not inhibit the
practice of any religion that meets minimal decency constraints. Yet in prac-
tice, liberal states often favor religions that are similar to those affirmed by
the majority...