Abstract
ABSTRACT Between the end of the Cold War and the financial crash of 2008, liberalism dominated the geopolitical stage, although it faced challenges. In his 2005 novel Saturday, Ian McEwan constructs a self-confident liberal protagonist facing the heterogeneity of the world. This novel’s engagement with the processes of identity formation can be discerned in some detail when read in light of John Rawls’s idea of public reason. By concentrating on formal debating spaces particularly, this reading discovers an iterative process of identity formation and social construction in the novel, in which the success or failure of directed dialogic exchanges shapes both personal identity and the chance for social change. The reader is presented with the potential for reimagined forms of and arenas for liberal debate to respond to the complexity of the world.
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