RELIGION, DEMOCRACY, AND CITIZENSHIPspecific form of politically organized human coexistence, which results from the articula-
tion between two different traditions: on one side, political liberalism (rule of law, separa-
tion of powers and individual rights), and on the other side, the democratic tradition of
popular sovereignty.
Second, it should also be clear that when I am speaking of liberal democracy, I am
referring to the ideal type of apoliticalform of society and not to the ‘‘really existing
liberal democratic societies’’ in their complexity. Envisaged from that angle, liberal de-
mocracy—in its various appellations: constitutional democracy, representative democ-
racy, parliamentary democracy, pluralist democracy, modern democracy—cannot be
viewed as the application of the democratic model to a wider context, as some would
have it. In other words, the difference between ancient and modern democracy is not one
ofsizebut ofnature. The crucial difference resides in the acceptance ofpluralismthat is
constitutive of modern liberal democracy. By ‘‘pluralism’’ I mean the end of a substantive
idea of the good life, what Claude Lefort calls ‘‘the dissolution of the markers of cer-
tainty.’’ Pluralism indicates a profound transformation of the symbolic ordering of social
relations. This is something that is totally missed when one refers, like John Rawls, to the
factof pluralism. There is, of course, a fact, which is the diversity of the conceptions of
the good that we find in a liberal society. But the important difference is not an empirical
one; it consists in the legitimation of division and conflict and concerns thesymboliclevel.
What is at stake here is the emergence of individual liberty and the assertion of equal
liberty for all.
When liberal pluralist democracy is envisaged in that way, and its specificity as a new
regime acknowledged, we can, I believe, formulate questions that were impossible before,
and we can also offer a solution to problems that had appeared insoluble. For instance,
the question of the relation between democracy and liberalism has long been a very dis-
puted issue. According to Carl Schmitt pluralist liberal democracy is a contradictory
combination of irreconcilable principles: whereas democracy is a logic of identity and
equivalence, its complete realization is rendered impossible by the logic of pluralism,
which constitutes an obstacle to a total system of identification. Franz Neumann, for his
part, points to the fact that, while both sovereignty and the rule of law were constitutive
elements of the modern state, they were irreconcilable with each other, for highest might
and highest right could not be realized at one and the same time in a common sphere. So
far as the sovereignty of the state extends, there is no place for the rule of law. According
to him, all attempts at reconciliation come up against insoluble contradictions.
It cannot be denied that, through the articulation of liberalism with democracy, two
logics that are ultimately incompatible have been linked together. But I do not consider
that we should therefore accept Schmitt’s conclusion concerning the nonviable character
of liberal democracy. We can, it seems to me, envisage this question in a different way. It
is evident that the complete realization of the logic of democracy, which is a logic of
identity and equivalence, is made impossible by the liberal logic of pluralism and differ-
PAGE 319319.................16224$ CH16 10-13-06 12:35:37 PS