Public political culture

Abstract

In political liberalism Rawls aims to show that it is possible for citizens with otherwise diverse beliefs and commitments to nevertheless converge on a conception of justice that can be used as a public regulative ideal. Given the fact of reasonable pluralism, a conception of justice can be broadly acceptable in this way only if it disavows reliance on comprehensive doctrines and is, instead, rooted in the ideas and principles of a democratic community’s public sphere. These ideas and principles constitute the public political culture. As Rawls explains, we start “by looking to the public culture itself as the shared fund of implicitly recognized basic ideas and principles” ( PL 8). The hope is to connect these ideas and principles together in a way that allows citizens to reach reflective equilibrium. Principles constructed in this way would be ones that “all citizens, whatever their religious view, can endorse” ( PL 10). So, it is by rooting the conception of justice in ideas from the public political culture that an overlapping consensus is made possible. The public political culture includes: The political institutions of a constitutional regime and the public traditions of their interpretation (including those of the judiciary), as well as historic texts and documents that are common knowledge … In a democratic society there is a tradition of democratic thought … seen as a fund of implicitly shared ideas and principles. ( PL 14)