How “political” is Quong’s political liberalism?

Abstract

In this short paper I ask to what extent the sharp contrast between the political and the comprehensive, on which political liberals such as Rawls and Quong place primary emphasis, caters to a truly “political” conception of liberalism. I argue that Quong’s own take on this point is more distinctively “political” than Rawls’s, in that it assigns far less weight to citizens’ comprehensive doctrines. Indeed, I suggest that Quong’s exclusion of comprehensive doctrines (exemplified by his worries about an “overlapping consensus”) has more radical implications than Quong himself seems to think. In doing so, I offer a streamlined version of Quong’s critique, which encompasses two more or less direct criticisms of Rawls’s doctrine of the overlapping consensus. I will call them the “sincerity objection” and the “liberal objection”.

Keywords

• comprehensive doctrines
• overlapping consensus
• political liberalism
• public reason
• rawls