Book Review: The Habermas-Rawls Debate, by James Gordon Finlayson

• Author: Todd Hedrick
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719896034
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 835

79; John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in Collected Papers,

ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Jürgen

Habermas, “‘The Political:’ The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance

of Political Theology,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, by Judith

Butler et al., eds. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2011), 15–33.

2. Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom?: How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom,

Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press,

1991); Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville,

TN: Abingdon Press, 2010); John Milbank, “The Gift of Ruling: Secularization

and Political Authority,” New Blackfriars 85, no. 996 (March 1, 2004): 212–38.

3. Benjamin R. Hertzberg, “Convergence’s Democracy Problem: A Critique of

Kogelmann and Stich,” American Political Science Review 112, no. 2 (May

2018): 423–27, https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305541700065X.

The Habermas-Rawls Debate, by James Gordon Finlayson. New York: Columbia

University Press, 2019, 312 pp.

Reviewed by: Todd Hedrick, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University,

East Lansing, MI, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591719896034

The series of essays and replies now known as the Habermas-Rawls debate

took place in 1995 and was, at the time, hotly anticipated in the world of

ideas—Rawls and Habermas were widely regarded as the leading figures in

Anglo-American and European-continental political philosophy, respec-

tively. Both were in the midst of their late career primes, having recently

completed landmark works, namely, Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993)

and Habermas’s 1992 magnum opus of legal and democratic theory,

Faktizität und Geltung (translated [1996] as Between Facts and Norms).

Moreover, their mutual affinity for neo-Kantian methods in normative the-

ory, and their shared goal of deepening and extending the democratic wel-

fare-state, made them look like potentially apt conversation partners (7).

While the exchange has not been without influence, it is nevertheless

widely perceived as something of a misfire; initially focused on a relatively

narrow set of issues, the great philosophers appear to have ended up largely

talking past one another. While not seeking to entirely dispel this impres-

sion, James Gordon Finlayson’s book, The Habermas-Rawls Debate, con-

vincingly makes the case that a great deal can be learned about the strengths

and shortcomings of these theories by grasping the sources of the authors’