Complimenting rivals

I Public reasoning, Rawlsian style

Rawls’ model of public reasoning is the paradigmatic contemporary liberal formulation of the concept. It is also intricately related to Rawls’ ideal of political liberalism. The latter’s main questions are, first, ‘how is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?’ (Rawls, 1996: 4); second, the ‘fundamental question of political justice: namely, what is the most appropriate conception of justice for specifying the terms of social cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal, and as normal and fully cooperating members of society over a complete life’ (ibid.: 20).

Rawls’ principles of justice or justice-as-fairness exemplify the content of a liberal political conception of justice. Public reason is then the justificatory variant of a liberal political conception of justice as it offers a mechanism by which members of a liberal democratic order can come to see why justice-as-fairness or one of its political, not metaphysical, competitors is indeed the most appropriate conception of justice (Rawls, 1996: 6–7). More specifically, public reason is a concept used to regulate the justification of laws within a liberal democratic state. A politically liberal polity should debate about constitutional essentials or basic precepts of justice in such a manner that they uphold norms of reciprocity and, at least initially, treat all citizens as equal and autonomous members of said polity.

According to Rawls, the ideal of public reason is built into liberal democracy itself in that it helps the latter respond to two tasks. First is the issue of stability. Liberal democratic government derives legitimacy from the consent of the governed which at some level entails public deliberation by the governed on the forms of legal control that they are to find acceptable to submit to as well as, as Jeffrey Stout argues, to hold those in positions of power publicly accountable for their actions (Stout, 2010: 258). Second, these deliberations must invoke strategies for mediating pluralism. Liberal democracies, particularly early 21st-century ones, are characterized by varying degrees of ‘reasonable pluralism’; by the fact that a plurality of conflicting reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious, philosophical and moral, flourish within them and that citizens of such democracies cannot reach agreement or even approach mutual understanding primarily on the basis of their irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines (Rawls, 1999: 131). Given the facts of reasonable pluralism, it is impossible, Rawls and Stout both argue, to reach a ‘workable’ consensus on the truth of the comprehensive doctrines in play in a given liberal democracy (Rawls, 1996: 63: Stout, 2010: 229). Contra Stout, Rawls insists that public reason must differentiate itself from non-public reasoning by being autonomous from and impartial between (by not criticizing any) reasonable comprehensive views (Rawls, 1996: xxi) so as to provide a public basis of justification on ‘questions of political justice’ (ibid.: 101).

Working in light of these requirements Rawls generates a specific version of public reason that applies to certain fundamental political debates about constitutional essentials and basic rights that transpire within what he calls the public political forum in contrast to the non-public practices and/or cultural orientations citizens partake of. The former refers to the discourses of judges, the discourses of government officials and the discourse of candidates for public office (Rawls, 1999: 133). These are discussions that citizens enter into by taking the idealized perspective of these actors (ibid.: 135) so as to find fair terms of social cooperation and thus collectively justify the laws they are to live by with those who subscribe to divergent yet reasonable ethical orientations. Rawlsian public reason encourages its adherents to remove themselves from many of the cultural debates in the background culture as it ‘neither criticizes nor attacks any comprehensive doctrine, religious or nonreligious, except insofar as that doctrine is incompatible with the essentials of public reason and a democratic polity’ (ibid.: 132). Public reason operates independently from these doctrines by proceeding entirely within a political conception of justice thereby allowing for what Rawls calls the political autonomy of citizens – the ‘legal independence and assured political integrity of citizens and their sharing with other citizens in the exercise of political power’ (Rawls, 1996: xiv). This is partly what makes public reason democratic since a democracy unlike a community is not governed by a shared comprehensive vision nor an ‘account of the whole truth’ but merely ‘a political conception of justice’ (ibid.: 43).

Public reasoning is also not a necessarily secular activity (Rawls, 1999: 144). Its deliberative values are characteristic of democratic political institutions not determinate social or cultural entities. Given the fact of reasonable pluralism, public reason allows democratic citizens to avoid the self-defeating turn towards discerning a unifying comprehensive vision for grounding constitutional essentials by performing two tasks: ‘first, it identifies the fundamental role of political values in expressing the terms of fair social cooperation consistent with mutual respect between citizens regarded as free and equal; and second, it uncovers a sufficiently inclusive concordant fit among political and other values seen in a reasonable overlapping consensus’ (Rawls, 1996: 158).

Rawlsian public reason is built around Rawls’ dichotomy of the rational and the reasonable. The former refers to ‘a single unified agent (either individual or corporate) with the powers of judgment and deliberation in seeking ends and interests peculiarly its own’ (Rawls, 1996: 50). The term also applies to how those ends are chosen as well as the means to pursue them. Rational agents become potentially ‘psychopathic when their interests solely benefit themselves’ (ibid.: 51). Reasonable actors are more social. They are

… characterized in two ways: First, they stand ready to offer fair terms of social cooperation between equals, and they abide by these terms if others do also, even should it be to their advantage not to; second, reasonable persons recognize and accept the consequences of the burdens of judgment, which leads to the idea of reasonable toleration in a democratic society. (Rawls, 1999: 177; see also Rawls, 1996: 49)

Rawls also distinguishes reasonable from unreasonable comprehensive visions. The former are those that accept the constitutional principles of liberal democracy – equal rights for all citizens, most especially the rights of speech and the freedom of religion, and thus like reasonable persons endorse the value of reciprocity between opposed viewpoints (Rawls, 1999: 172). The latter, in some way, conflict with these principles. Reasonable comprehensive doctrines are not excluded from public deliberations. Rawls’ wide view of public reason allows ‘reasonable’ comprehensive doctrines to be introduced into public reason provided, as he puts it in his famous ‘proviso’, that in due time such an appeal can be justified via the dictates of public reason, not via appeals to shared metaphysics or cultural norms or traditions (ibid.: 152: Rawls, 1996: lii).

Rawls also recognizes that ‘citizens’ mutual knowledge of one another’s religious and nonreligious doctrines expressed in the wide view of public political culture recognizes that the roots of democratic citizens’ allegiance to their political conceptions lie in their respective comprehensive doctrines, both religious and nonreligious’ (1999: 153). Reasonable comprehensive visions, with their common respect for reciprocity and civility, comprise an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines that it is important for citizens to embrace at least one of along with a political conception of justice (ibid.: 177).

In then deliberating in the foreground of this overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive visions, citizens bracket out larger questions of the truth realizing that public reason cannot solve all their political disputes (Rawls, 1996: lvii and 214), only those considered by Rawls to be ‘fundamental differences’ (ibid.: 98). They can though use political conceptions of justice to provide public justifications ‘about what we think are the most reasonable political institutions and policies’, that not only ourselves but others who draw on contrasting but reasonable comprehensive visions can accept (Rawls, 1999: 155). A citizen engages in public reason, then, when he or she deliberates about issues of common concern in light of a political (not metaphysical) conception of justice that she or he sincerely regards as the ‘most reasonable’ since it is the one that other free and equal citizens with contrasting metaphysical orientations ‘might also reasonably be expected to reasonably endorse’ (ibid.: 140).

Rawls further stipulates that according to the wide view of public reason, once a comprehensive doctrine has passed the threshold of reasonableness it is to be tolerated not contested or defended. ‘When citizens invoke the grounding reasons of their comprehensive doctrines then the principle of reciprocity is violated’ and public reason is at an end (Rawls, 1996: lv). This is why political liberalism views the insistence on the truth of these precepts within public deliberations (as opposed to the private space of say a church) as contrary to the idea of ‘democratic citizenship and the idea of legitimate law’ (Rawls, 1999: 138). The autonomy of the public political realm vis-à-vis comprehensive visions is vital to all citizens, especially those who wish to use democratic methods to champion their non-public worldviews as ‘there is no other way fairly to ensure the liberty of its adherents consistent with the equal liberties of other reasonable free and equal citizens’ (ibid.: 151).

Justification itself involves three stages. Public reason is directly involved only in the first stage as it provides pro tanto justifications of political conceptions of justice since it considers only political values, each of which is autonomous from a comprehensive doctrine (Rawls, 1996: 386). Citizens are then to generate full justifications of a political conception of justice by embedding the principles of said conception within their comprehensive doctrines (ibid.: Rawls, 1999: 153). Public justification is complete when a reasonable overlapping consensus emerges whereby ‘all reasonable members of a political society carry out a justification of the shared political conception by embedding it in their several reasonable comprehensive views’ (Rawls, 1996: 387).

The fundamental problem of Political Liberalism, how to legitimate political conceptions of justice that can underlie durable sets of coercive laws given the deeply diverse nature of contemporary democratic polities, is a crucial one. Clearly there is something to be said for the intuition behind Rawlsian public reason that a self-consciously limiting account of public reason is needed as a basis for a justificatory framework. Many if not most of the issues that divide people in contemporary democracies are highly intractable and no manner of public deliberation can hope to conclusively resolve them. Toleration of contrasting comprehensive visions is necessary if citizens are to live productively with each other and within a stable liberal democratic polity. However, the drive towards the self-limitation of public reason does create its own problematics. Three issues are significantly trenchant: first, the boundaries between issues open and not open to public reason; second, the theoretical assumption that public reasoners reside within closed societies in which citizens draw on shared fundamental political ideals; third, the toleration of, but not critical engagement with, the varied comprehensive doctrines Rawlsian deliberators embrace prior to engaging in public reason.

In regards the first issue: Can the domain of questions addressable by public reason be defined as tightly as Rawls tries to do it? Public reason can at once appear too empty to mediate disputes in a deeply pluralist democracy or too partisan to those who, like Roman Catholics in Rawls’ abortion example, are pushed to see the reasonableness of political outcomes that legitimate what they take to be abhorrent practices. There are numerous issues like euthanasia or genetic cloning that touch on constitutional essentials and/or basic forms of justice that cannot be settled exclusively by public reasons alone. Non-public reasons be they of a scientific community or church organization inevitably become central in these cases as well as the many political disputes that Rawls admits cannot be settled exclusively by public reason. With the sidelining of comprehensive doctrines many citizens might find that large parts of political liberalism’s justificatory discussions have been settled beforehand without any substantive input of their own leaving them to feel less autonomous and equal while their concerns seem less reciprocated than others whose comprehensive visions appear to be more central to the overlapping consensus than their own.

Moreover, Rawls admits that it is highly desirable to settle all political issues via public reason. ‘Yet this may not always be so’ (Rawls, 1996: 215) as individuals frequently justify their political views by non-public reasons. This response begs the issues of whether the drive to maintain the autonomy of political liberalism’s values vis-à-vis comprehensive visions that do (and potentially can) embrace them precludes discourses that might generate more meaningful points of agreement and thus more meaningful and stabilizing acts of public justification than what Rawls’ model can generate?

Perhaps, as both Foucault and Stout were/are well aware, the reality that discourses of constitutional essentials and basic questions of justice are always already implicated in larger power/knowledge assemblages as well as informed by other political disputes in which ‘non-public’ reasons are involved means that effective public reasoning today involves a more porous understanding of its subject domain; one that involves appreciating both the roles of these other political realities in framing Rawlsian public reasoning’s subject domain but also problematizes the way truth claims are produced and reasoning proceeds within such political acts.

For example, are not the activities involved in Rawls’ three stages of justification themselves more inter-related than what he himself accounts for? Does not reasoning about the values within one’s own comprehensive vision have to transpire before one can decide that one should engage in public reasoning with others subscribing to different comprehensive visions? This itself would presuppose some level of critical thinking so as to assess the features of one’s comprehensive visions that allow them to appear as ‘reasonable’. Does not the possibility of achieving a reasonable overlapping consensus have to be seen as feasible by potential members of a democratic entity for such citizens then to engage in public reason? If the second is true then must such moments of realization be built upon some preliminary experiences of reasoning with others that – because they are not completely public – involve non-public reasons (at least initially)? Would not such a reality make the first assertion true? One has then to engage in a rather political (though Rawls would probably call it pre-political) critically reflective discourse on the reasons why the public (Rawls) values embedded in one’s ‘reasonable’ comprehensive doctrine should be embraced over other values for which public reason is anathema and thus compel oneself and other subscribers to their reasonable comprehensive vision to engage in public reason with others.

The second area of concern begins with Rawls’ claim that his model of public reasoning draws on shared intuitions for the validation of norms under consideration. In order then to make the content of his political conception of justice ‘free-standing’ Rawls must generate a means of appealing to intuitions while restricting access to the moral sources through which, as he himself admits, citizens gain access to them (Rawls, 1999: 172). Rawls makes two moves to accomplish this task. First, Rawls maintains that the content of a political conception of justice ‘is expressed in terms of certain fundamental ideas seen as implicit in the public political culture of a democratic society. This public culture comprises 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’ (Rawls, 1996: 13–14).

The problem with this presupposition is that these ‘fundamental’ ideas are themselves contestable and, given the dynamicism of 21st-century liberal democratic cultures, could become even more so. Without such a discourse participants in public reason simply reinforce an unlegitimated but assumed status quo of the supposed values of a political, not metaphysical, background culture that Rawls maintains public reason draws from. What are taken to be the ‘fundamental ideas’ of a given polity at a given moment in time might not correspond to the actual moral intuitions held by those who actually inhabit that polity. Many of these members such as recently naturalized and not yet naturalized immigrants whose exploitable presence is invaluable for the functioning of most (if not all) contemporary western polities, may not actually relate to the ‘public traditions of interpretation’ nor might they identify with a given set of ‘historic texts’. Today, as Charles Taylor notes, many immigrants do not so much assimilate to a dominant culture as bring with them new ‘contexts of choice’ that cannot be completely incorporated into dominant culture (Taylor, 1998: 149). In the process, they make the societal culture of their new state more heterogeneous and more an ensemble of interacting cultures that constantly generate changes in the ‘contexts of choice’ offered by each. What Rawls takes to be ‘common’ knowledge is not necessarily common to all, and frequently the subject of dispute by those integral to the maintenance of such polities yet marginalized and not so marginalized by the dissemination of such ‘common’ knowledge. Far from promoting inclusive practices of justification, Rawlsian public reason might only promote ‘the nonviolent preservation of political stability’ (Habermas, 1998: 69–70).

Rawls can rightly reply that marginalized yet reasonable citizens can contest any standard of common and thus public knowledge. Yet the key for Rawlsians is to account for how they do so and how their contestations are heard by others. How is reciprocity being shown to former outsiders in such situations? How are equality and autonomy enhanced and/or limited though such exchanges? To answer these questions Rawls would need to be able to problematize and critique the various forms of power at play in such encounters as well as the manners in which ‘public traditions’ change in response to the concerns of former outsiders.

Rawls though short-circuits these concerns by making a second move. He declares that, for the purposes of political theorizing, ‘the basic structure is that of a closed society: that is, we are to regard it as self-contained and as having no relations with other societies. Its members enter it only by birth and leave it only by death. This allows us to speak of them as born into a society where they will lead a complete life’ (Rawls, 1996: 12). Yet many of the members of actual democratic polities are members of more than one at least partially open society. Hence the notion of what is the background culture that supplies the intuitions which reasonable political conceptions of justice are to draw upon becomes increasingly harder to identify in anything but its most superficial and abstract qualities. Given the discrepancies between Rawlsian theory and reality the closed society assumption can only exacerbate the problem (Benhabib, 2008: 102).

Rawls would again beg to differ. It is precisely because of the complex nature of social reality that highly abstract ideal theories of deliberation like his version of public reason are needed. The increasingly pluralist and complex nature of actual existing democratic societies necessitates the move from social complexity to orderly abstract conceptions of polities built upon ‘fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture’ that can ‘uncover how citizens themselves might, on due reflection, want to conceive of their society as a fair system of cooperation over time’ (Rawls, 1996: 46).

Rawls is right to see the basis for potential agreement in deeply diverse polities as rooted somewhere in a public political culture. The key issue is how those potential points of agreement are to be found. Starting with a Rawlsian notion of a reasonable deliberator who can potentially conceive of their society as a ‘fair system of cooperation’ is an important first step. Clearly effective public reasoning depends upon actors approaching the process in a sincere, co-operative manner, one in which they are able to assume a representative as opposed to strictly self-centered point of view. However, conceptualizing reasonable reasoners and thinking through how they are to reason effectively with each other are two different tasks. By seeking to transcend issues of deep disagreement in the name of discerning unifying ‘ideas implicit in the public political culture’ abstract Rawlsian notions of reasoning might continue a public discussion but only at the cost of silencing others and through such silencings implicitly render as uncontroversial or ‘fundamental’ values, norms and ideals that might indeed be quite controversial. Moments of public reason might be realized but only at the cost of the profound alienation of many who might be subject to the laws or maxims which could eventually result from them.

The third area of concern draws upon the manners through which Rawls tolerates reasonable comprehensive visions. Rawls tells us that citizens can initially justify a political position via appeal to a reasonable comprehensive vision provided that (following the logic of his proviso) they can find a more political language to justify it in the future. Furthermore, citizens not only subscribe to a common political justification for a norm but they can also find resources within their reasonable comprehensive vision to support the norm as well (see Rawls, 2001: 192–5 for another iteration of this point). However, Rawls does not explain how individuals with different comprehensive visions are to engage in a critical engagement with others’ comprehensive visions. This appears to be an issue that is beyond the scope of Rawlsian public reason. The problem here is that tolerance can potentially take the form of a mask of power, implicitly valorizing the way of life of those capable of tolerating over those to be tolerated (Brown, 2006). Critique or the expectation thereof, of both a position and the elements of a comprehensive vision used to support it, is crucial to ameliorating such pernicious forms of power which is why tolerance and critique must maintain a necessarily fluid and tense relationship with each other. Without the possibility of some type of critical engagement with a comprehensive vision it is hard for those whose comprehensive visions might be in the minority to gain the confidence that their publicly expressed reasons (which often flow from their reasonable comprehensive doctrines) can shape the course of a deliberation, leaving it harder for such citizens to identify with the process of public reason than those adherents of more majoritarian reasonable comprehensive visions.

Rawls can brush aside this oft-repeated criticism. Nothing stops comprehensive visions from being debated within civil society. It is only when discussing matters of constitutional essentials and basic justice claims that these visions are suspended so that a ‘free-standing’ discussion of constitutional essentials can ensue. Moreover, Rawls tells us that the content of public reason ‘is not fixed, any more than it is defined by any one reasonable conception’ (Rawls, 1996: liii). Presumably this allows those who feel that there is one unjustly dominant understanding of a given political culture to critique that understanding on the grounds that it is in fact unreasonable because its defenders have smuggled in a set of sectarian and thus non-free-standing assumptions into the center of a given polity’s public political forum. Those who feel unjustly culturally dominated can raise a claim of political injustice but to do so they must invoke the logic of public reason or, following the wide view of public reason, do so via arguments that can eventually be made via the logic of ‘proper political reasons’.

This line of rebuttal is only partly successful as it does not address how public reasoners present and receive the arguments of their fellow deliberators, something that Kant with his discussions of the role of mature thinking (of a person who reasons publicly when she or he uses her or his own ‘scholarly’ voice to speak to the world ‘at large’ without presupposing an external authority) in public reason was open to (Kant, 1991: 54). A Kantian-inspired public reasoner (like the Foucaldian one to be shortly discussed) can ask ‘What exactly is a fair term of cooperation?’ ‘What exactly does reciprocity between opposing viewpoints mean and entail?’ What is important is the political realities that lie beneath the surface of such acts of public reasoning not only about the content of a given act of public reason but also about the manners in which actors, through their actions, interpret the values of reciprocity, autonomy and equality. These actions are themselves invariably informed by people’s most cherished beliefs if only because, as Rawls pointed out, these beliefs are the basis from which citizens understand their involvement within a given liberal democratic regime (Rawls, 1996: 147–8 and 218). Yet Rawls does not appear to be so open towards engaging such questions since for him the ideal setting for public reason is the public political forum: in which citizens take the idealized perspectives of judges, government officials and candidates of public office (Rawls, 1999: 133 and 135) by debating with their fellow citizens as much as possible within a common rubric for political justification that, as citizens, they expect other reasonable citizens to endorse. For Rawls it seems that answers to the above questions are somehow built into the idealized perspectives of the state-centric actors citizens should aspire to be like when publicly reasoning. Hence these questions are concerns that a mature Kantian subject who cherishes critique and thinking for oneself when confronting a variety of publicly relevant issues can focus on (as can, though in a slightly different manner, the Foucaldian perspective to be shortly discussed) as they publicly reason (Kant, 1991: 56). By contrast, Rawls with his limiting account of the framework for engaging in public reasoning does not seem to allow for sufficient engagement with the concerns of others who (might) think differently.

One of the challenges for Rawls and his disciples that emerges out of these three sets of concerns is to articulate practices of public reasoning that will promote more critically reflexive engagements with their fellow citizens by coming to grips with the cultural forces implicitly and explicitly at play in any given act of public reasoning. This task does not have to be anathema to Rawlsian public reason. In fact it might help to clarify and thus strengthen the commitment to reciprocity the concept is partly built upon. Successfully pursuing this objective could also enhance the legitimacy of the justifications public reason is meant to provide. Brushing aside such a chore in the hope of avoiding deep disagreements and/or maintaining an aura of toleration is to risk defending a model of public reasoning that is unable to accommodate a ‘reasonable’ pluralism as it actually exists in many contemporary polities. Far from promoting a democratically derived aura of stability such a model of justification might undermine stability as it could undermine the trust that many whose perspective appears to be unduly marginalized have in a given democratic process of collective deliberation.

Given this challenge perhaps the best means of making the ideal of public reason relevant to 21st-century democratic practices is, contra Rawls, to develop a model of public reasoning in which practices of critically engaging the varied social and ethical forces through which individuals inevitably reason play a prominent role. The later Foucault can be helpful here.

II Parrhesia and the government of self and others

The two concepts in Foucault’s later writings that are especially valuable for our present concerns are problematization and parrhesia. A problematization is a creative act undertaken by individuals in a specific historical situation that delimits the domain of possible responses to the problem it thematizes. The problematical thought frames the reality of the problem. Foucault analyzes specific problematizations as local histories, of specific ranges of answers (or responses) to a specific situation. The various forms the relationship between truth and reality has taken in western intellectual history are what Foucault saw himself trying ‘to analyze in the various problematizations of parrhesia’ (Foucault, 2001: 173). Like Rawls, Foucault was also concerned about the undemocratic proclivities of those who insist on making their version of the whole truth central to politics (ibid.: 19–20).

Instead of looking at the manners in which a given discourse is recognized as true Foucault’s specific studies of parrhesia focus on ‘analyzing the form in which, in his act of telling the truth, the individual constitutes himself and is constituted by others as a subject of a discourse of truth, the form in which he presents himself to himself and to others as someone who tells the truth, the form of the subject telling the truth’ (Foucault, 2011: 3). This is the parrhesiastic discourse and standpoint in philosophy; it is the discourse of the irreducibility of truth, power and ēthos, and at the same time the discourse of their necessary relationship, of the impossibility of thinking truth, power and ēthos without their essential, fundamental relationship to each other (ibid.: 68).

Politics is central to any parrhesiastic act since they are inherently pluralist activities in which other people – the persons one tells the truth to – play an irreplaceable role (2011: 5). Parrhesia can be read, as Foucault does, as part of a political practice – the governing of self and others. Looked at this way the problem of parrhesia, which is the explicit focus of Foucault’s last two series of lectures at the Collège de France, becomes one of seeing ‘how truth-telling [dire-vrai], the obligation and possibility of telling the truth in procedures of government can show how the individual is constituted as subject in the relationship to self and the relationship to others’ (Foucault, 2010: 42). In these works Foucault identifies three genres of parrhesiastic understandings: a nominally democratic one personified by Pericles in which parrhesia is directly linked with deliberation within the ancient polis; a Socratic one focused on practices of care of the self; and a Cynic one that is in many respects a radicalization of the second. His later thinking on Kant is an extension of the latter two.

How one comes to know oneself and how one goes about living one’s life can be isolated as separate practices for ancient thinkers, giving them a much fuller understanding of identity, subjectivity and the possibilities for changing both than modern ones which often focus strictly on self-knowledge. In his later work Foucault was in fact concerned that the modern focus on the ideal of the examined life as simply know thy self obscured the equally important parrhesiastic directives of care of the self. Later practices of self-constitution through truth-telling range from Stoic practices of self-examination where one memorizes and recounts one’s acts in order to reactivate forgotten codes of conduct to the Christian pastoral tradition (which the Roman Catholic institution of confession would be a later manifestation of) that committed believers to memorize laws or teachings so as to discover how one has sinned (Foucault, 1993: 206; Foucault, 2010: 348). All these practices helped to raise ‘the question of truth from the point of view of truth-telling as an activity’ within western culture (Foucault, 2001: 169). Parrhesiastic discourses never lose their connection to politics as they always involve a form of government be it of others in the early Periclean forms or of self in its later Socratic, Cynic and Christian variants.

One of the great tasks of western culture since early Christianity has been developing a hermeneutics of the self not on the sacrifice of the self via confessional acts but on the practical and conceptual emergence of the self as the locus of a plethora of games of truth. The aim of practices underlying not only law, medicine and psychiatry but also emergent discourses within political theory was ‘to constitute the ground of the subjectivity at the root of a positive self, what we would call the permanent anthropologism of Western thought. During the last two centuries the problem has been: what could be the positive foundation for the technologies of the self that we have been developing during centuries and centuries’ (Foucault, 2001: 222). The problem is that rather than cultivating healthy parrhesiastic practices, the dominant response has been to replace the pastoral ideal of the Christian self-sacrificial subject with the disciplinary one at the center of modern liberal capitalism. The powers of the individual are increased at the cost of increased constraint. We have the emergence of totalizing powers of governmentality even as these same powers help to individualize the subject (ibid.: 223).

What might be a more productive angle to take here? Reconnecting with some of the ancient understandings of parrhesia in a critical manner that adapts what is adaptable from it but jettisons that which is not relevant for the present is one possible productive alternative response. Foucault hints at doing so in his final lectures on ‘Courage to Truth’ where he devotes considerable resources to the Cynic tradition and its eventual influence on early Christianity.

Another possibly healthy genre of parrhesiastic practices can be derived from understanding the question of what living in the present means and here Foucault returns to Rawls’ philosophical godfather Kant to develop his own sketch of an attitude of modernity, an attitude that links his later parrhesiastic concerns with Foucault’s transgressive proclivities. Foucault sees Kant as founding two great critical traditions, one embodied by his focus on pure reason or ‘an analytic philosophy of truth in general’ to which Habermas and Rawls gravitate and the other focused on explicating an ontology of ourselves and the actual world(s) in which we reside (Foucault, 2007: 95). In Foucault’s earlier writings he focuses on the former, seeing Kant as responsible for spreading a unifying (and thus limiting) anthropological understanding of philosophy and the truth-producing subject (Foucault, 2008: 123; Foucault, 1970: 340–1; Foucault, 1977: 40–4). The Foucault of the late 1970s and early 1980s turns to the latter tradition focusing on how out of Kant’s work emerges the problem very much at the forefront of thinkers ranging from Hegel, Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School, Charles Taylor and himself of constructing a critical ontology of who we at the present are (Foucault, 1994: 148).

Foucault’s later work on Kant has been much commented on over the past three decades. I merely want to highlight 4 features that are relevant for our current parrhesiastic concerns. First, Foucault insists on problematizing the very relationships of belonging he sees Kant as nobly trying to elucidate when answering a question that is now central to almost all philosophical inquiries: how do we as individuals belong to a ‘certain “us,” to an us that concerns a cultural totality characteristic of one’s own time’ (Foucault, 1994: 141; Foucault, 2000a: 443; Foucault, 2000b: 335)? Foucault compels his contemporaries to see critical thinking as driven by parrhesiastic practices of problematization of the limits of what we have become so as to make possible acts of transgression and, with that, freedom. Modern parrhesiastic practices like those Foucault glorifies in his studies of antiquity involve a series of complex connections between the self and truth.

Second, we need to develop new types of subjectivity by refusing the kinds of individuality celebrated over the past several centuries of western history (Foucault, 2000b: 336). Foucault compels us to ask ‘in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?’ (Foucault, 1985: 45).

Third, critique today needs to be seen as an investigation into the contingencies that have led individuals to recognize themselves as subjects ‘of what we are doing, thinking, and saying’ (Foucault, 1985: 46). Critique involves practically testing the limits of what we supposedly are by engaging in ‘work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings’ (ibid.: 47). Critique also involves unmasking the thoughts that exist in even the most ‘stupid’ institutions, ‘behind all social realities’, showing that these realities, be they practices, values, or customs, ‘are not as obvious as people believe, making it so that what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted. To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy’ (Foucault, 2000c: 456).

Fourth, these parrhesiastic practices of problematization, subjectivity creation and critique need to have a normative focus. The latter should be on developing new lines of thinking which put themselves ‘to the test of reality’, of determining where progressive changes can be made and the precise form such changes should take. Modern parrhesiastic thinkers need to emphasize how the ‘theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined’, and consequently subjects are ‘always in the position of beginning again’ (Foucault, 1985: 47).

When it comes to Rawls, it is clear that these four aspects of Foucault’s modern parrhesiastic thinking cannot provide the building blocks for an analytically concise means of justifying conceptions of justice like justice as fairness. However the Foucaldian themes briefly illuminated here can point towards an approach to public reasoning that allows for a more porous understanding of the subject domain(s) of public reasoning (1st set of critical concerns with Rawls), allows for the problematization of the social and ethical forces deliberators reason in light of (2^nd set of concerns) and thus promotes a critical engagement with the comprehensive visions (3^rd set of concerns) that are or could be part of the overlapping consensus of world views within which the results of public reason are ultimately justified (Rawls’ 3^rd stage of justification).

Put differently, a Foucaldian approach to public reasoning can provide the mindset necessary to potentially achieve and re-achieve the meaningful points of agreement which Rawlsian public reason strives to attain. Foucaldian parrhesiastic discourses do not simply change the boundaries of public reason but, through their emphasis on problematization and truth-telling, have the ability to bring to awareness heretofore unrecognized points of ethical agreement which can potentially lead to more compelling and inclusive points of accord within acts of public reason than what Rawls and his analytically oriented disciples can conceptually provide for.

Rawls and his devotees are not prima facie antagonistic towards Foucaldian parrhesiastic practices in general or the modern parrhesiastic ethos sketched here. In fact they can be quite useful in helping individuals engage in a necessary part of Rawlsian public reasoning – grounding the outcome of public reason within the family of reasonable comprehensive doctrines participants momentarily step out of when they engage in public reason. For Rawls though, such practices belong outside the sphere of public reason as they engage the truth claims embedded in non-public reasons. Rawls asserts in his second stage of justification and elsewhere that it is up to citizens themselves to figure out how the precepts of public reason and justice-as-fairness fit with what they view as their truthful comprehensive visions.

Here emerges a crucial point of disagreement between Rawls and Foucault. The latter emphasizes how truth is produced through the acts of humans engaged in parrhesiastic endeavors. Through our telling of a truth claim we often produce not only the content of a truth claim but the manners in which a given truth claim has meaning and significance within the lives of subjects who subscribe to it. Comprehending how a truth is produced allows others who are not subscribers to think through manners in which they could constructively problematize a given truth claim when debating with subscribers of that truth. To insist on the whole truth for Foucault is to recognize the need to analyze how a truth claim is produced, defended and involved in the problematization of other truth claims. Seen in a Foucaldian light, the insistence on truth or how truth is produced by and for deliberations is not anathema to public reason. In fact it presumes a form of reciprocity in that deliberators, as members of a democratic community, should be able to question and defend the existence or production of the truth claims upon which a shared political vision is attempting to be built. The question of how a given truth claim is either directly within or in the background of a discourse regulated by public reason becomes crucial to judging the worthiness of the merits of the truth claim as either a justificatory principle or a basis for legitimating a justificatory principle.

Hence for Foucault there is nothing more political than the whole truth. Unlike the ‘unreasonable’ advocates of comprehensive doctrines that Foucault would feel Rawls rightly fears ² the Foucaldian emphasis on practices of being truthful (rather than the acceptance of a finite set of controversial truth claims) calls forth a level of reflexivity that public reasoners need if they are to practically exemplify the virtue of reciprocity Rawls takes as central to being ‘reasonable’. Rather than toleration of ‘reasonable’ comprehensive visions, Foucault’s work can help us actually engage them in meaningfully reciprocating manners. His work on critique and problematizing the contingent limits of being also can serve as the basis of techniques that can make individuals more receptive to others as they are more reflective on themselves, the larger contingent discursive structures in light of which they politically deliberate and the varied regimes of truth from which their most cherished beliefs and those of others take their bearings.

III Public reasoning in places many liberal political theorists rarely explore

Public reasoning is very much alive today though in venues where Rawlsians might not seek to find it. In fact it frequently flourishes within the actions of grass-roots organizations often initially motivated by theistic concerns. Jeffrey Stout’s Blessed Are the Organized chronicles a number of such entities. Stout focuses on IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation) groups organizing in New Orleans, the Rio Grande Valley, southern and northern California. IAF actors mobilize exploited immigrants and other vulnerable subjects from across the theistic (and sometimes non-theistic) spectrum. Many of these organizations involve religious groups such as Roman Catholic churches with Opus Dei priests and others who espouse beliefs on issues like abortion that folks like Stout ‘do not share’. Like Rawls, Stout’s actors are concerned with the link between public power and the consent of the governed. Unlike Rawls, these actors do not focus on ultimately grounding coercive laws. Rather, IAF activists yearn to make power-holders accountable to those they exercise power over. This entails reasonableness and solidarity among a varied group of subjects with incommensurable ethical perspectives. Stout’s heroes have found that cultivating the solidarity to hold such a group together and the reasonableness needed to question power-holders in a manner acceptable to all members of a given IAF constituency entails reasoning from ethical convictions, rather than independently of them. This often involves critically engaging the manners such not-so-liberal actors work through their ethical proclivities to produce the political truth claims they wish to deploy in their engagements with power-holders. Stout’s heroes are compelled to ask when such truth claims can become inclusive ones that a variety of actors might come to subscribe to and organize around and when such truths are exclusionary and need to be open to more moderate iterations so that more inclusive political orientations can be developed. Obviously if a more inclusive ethical orientation could not be developed out of apparently exclusive ones then IAF actors became faced with the issue of whether or not adherents of the latter could become part of the coalitions they were trying to build. At the end of the day not every group can be organized as some will not be open to modification of their exclusionary ethical perspectives.

The actors Stout works with understand that theistic messages always play a larger role in the ‘wide view of culture’ to show the political implications of their ethical commitments (Stout, 2010: 201). The churches many of these actors emerge from often act as mediating institutions between the profane world in which believers live and the sacred commitments they hold (ibid.: 208). More specifically, these churches themselves play an important role in citizen organizations promoting grass-roots democracy among the disadvantaged and vulnerable as well as playing a crucial role in the fight for social justice (ibid.: 203).

Many of the individual actors emulate Rawls in using their Christian faith (comprehensive doctrine) as a means of grounding their presence in the political realm as well as giving them the ethical motivation to continue with their specific struggles (Stout, 2010: 193–4). They are also frequently the embodiment of the actors Andrew March asks left liberals to applaud (March, 2013). Unlike Rawls they do see their deliberations as distinctly secular ‘in the sense that the people participating in it cannot reasonably take for granted a single conception of sacred value, when conversing or debating with one another. The discussion does not proceed from a consensus on sacred value, but it does give expression to multiple, contestable, contested conceptions of sacred value’ (Stout, 2010: 224). Contra Rawls, Stout’s heroes see public deliberations emptied of passions/spiritedness/comprehensive visions as potentially anti-democratic as such forums (when they actually exist) are primarily monopolized by technocratic elites (ibid.: 65). IAF organizations try to disrupt this reality (ibid.: 66) by – mirroring Foucault’s first Kantian imperative – channeling the anger of the dominated so they can transgress and free themselves from this limiting sense of subjectivity through becoming able to act as ‘people who behave and feel as citizens do’ by putting those whose actions are the source of such anger ‘on notice’ (ibid.: 67). Central to their form of organizing are micro-level practices of ‘one-on-one conversations, neighborhood walks, and house meetings’, as well as more relatively macro-level efforts of assembling diverse constituencies (ibid.: 44).

The stories Stout tells are interesting partly because of the parrhesiastic practices the actors within them deploy in their attempts to generate citizens’ organizations that are democratic and advance the interests of their constituents. Stout’s work shows that solidarity- generating practices of public reasoning involving many not-so-liberal actors are in fact happening today (Stout, 2010: 290). The particular moments of democratic activism Stout chronicles are themselves specific iterations of broader lessons that actors in other contexts can and do generate their own unique iterations of. To cultivate the bonds of solidarity they need to gain the trust of those they seek to represent and to continue to represent, Stout’s IAF activists need to be aware of how they engage with the concerns of others, where they are coming from when doing so, and finally how they mitigate the problem of their own distorted understandings of their present and future representees. However, these practices are fraught with risk and can produce outcomes that might be counter-progressive, potentially generating chauvinistic self-understandings that promote fragmentation rather than the points of meaningful solidarity IAF organizers strive for. In order to produce productive outcomes, Stout’s IAF organizers need to promote deliberative activities that embody many of the parrhesiastic imperatives the later Foucault’s work discussed.

First, citizens need to learn that using one’s power as a democratic citizen includes being involved in an approach to living that is social because it tries to build up solidarity-generating human relationships built on reciprocity between citizens, egalitarian in that it is open to all who wish to partake of it, and develops social relationships that minimize domination and increase political autonomy. Finally, it is political ‘because it attends to shared human arrangements in light of concerns and judgments that are not always in harmony’ (Stout, 2010: 93). How though do the political aspects of this practice reinforce the social and egalitarian ones?

Mirroring Foucault’s discussion of the good parrhesia of Pericles, Stout recognizes that citizens can best mitigate the domination many feel subjected to only if some of them acquire the moral authority to speak the truth about their shared situation to others and only if other citizens can recognize the moral authority these citizens have earned (Stout, 2010: 94). After establishing the moral authority to speak the truth of the lives of have-nots, IAF leaders then spend considerable time constructing public zones of accountability so as to perpetually render public officials responsible for the decisions they make. At the same time, those who speak for citizens can themselves be held accountable by officials for the promises they make as well as the citizens they claim the moral responsibility to speak the truth for. We thus have a space of accountability in which all who claim to speak the truth for others can be held accountable both by each other and also by the citizens they seek to represent (ibid.: 110).

Similar to Foucault’s need to have people literally speak the truth of their situation, IAF organizers constantly rearrange the manners in which house meetings are run, thereby allowing for the presence of different truth-producing moves/possibilities. This allows for opportunities to rearrange the implicit power structures within actual meetings and thus provides diverse manners of allowing ordinary citizens to speak out against elite dominance (Stout, 2010: 120). More importantly, face-to-face meetings are built upon citizens speaking their concerns. Organizers get people to tell stories about their lives (ibid.: 151). The latter tales express the passions of ordinary citizens and by empathetically listening to a citizen’s story in person, an organizer not only learns the content of a citizen’s concerns but also, through witnessing the manner in which they present their tales, a good organizer develops a better understanding of the importance and meaning of these concerns for the given storyteller (ibid.: 162).

Moreover, effective house meetings, paralleling Foucault’s second Kantian imperative of developing new forms of subjectivity (or in this case new, more productive political identities) by recognizing the arbitrary nature of many present forms, often move toward precise application of value-laden concepts as well as shift the focus on what ought to be changed from what one is upset about. Stout’s IAF organizers attempt when conducting house meetings not only to get a sense of somebody’s interests but also to challenge her or him to think constructively about the situation (to see the contingent, arbitrary features of it) and thus go from being a source of bitterness to one of constructive power (2010: 206).

Echoing the second of Foucault’s Kantian themes Stout’s IAF organizers engage in transforming themselves and their members’ attachments through campaigns for social justice. Fighting for justice is not feuding. The struggle for social justice and recognition of the truth claims of the oppressed is conflictual but ‘often prepares the ground for reconciliation’. What begins with a polemical discourse against a given foe in one contingent situation can later end in mutual respect for the said adversary. This can often lead to a future alliance in another contingent situation (2010: 124).

IAF leaders recognize that power without accountability equals domination. Central to their work is – following Foucault’s third Kantian parrhesiastic imperative – the critique of power relations between corporate and public sector elites as well as assumptions among ‘have-not’ populations about what can be politically possible. IAF leaders do not suppose that those with power will automatically recognize the needs of those without. Critique needs to constantly encourage the have-nots to transgress the boundaries of the power relationships they assume themselves to be within by ‘learning to name power and by learning how to acquire and exercise it responsibly’ (2010: 63).

IAF leaders themselves need to constantly engage in – again mirroring Foucault’s first Kantian imperative – problematizing their own understandings of the needs or truth claims of those they represent (2010: 129). The goal of these acts of ‘reflexive critical evaluations’ is to ‘learn how to speak the plain truth about how things were going, but also how to do so without being cruel or trying to score points. And they needed to learn how to hear criticism of their own weaknesses’ (ibid.) and what senses of the truths of their constituents they are not properly attentive to. Leaders, also echoing Foucault’s 4th Kantian point about putting their normative ideals to the test of reality, have to authentically speak for others. This has to be demonstrated in practice (ibid.: 128). Also, playing on the same parrhesiastic theme of putting norms to the test of reality, a leader in Stout’s sense must simultaneously expose social injustices while also providing confidence that these problematics can be addressed (ibid.: 259).

More importantly, Stout’s work shows that a modern parrhesiastic focus on understanding and critiquing the limits of what we supposedly are forces subjects to seek out and differentiate the arbitrary from the legitimate constraints put upon their manners of thinking about issues involving basic rights and social justice, constraints rooted in the various comprehensive visions their identities draw from. Put in Rawlsian terms, these deliberators promote a more fluid relationship between the public and non-public reasons at play in public justification processes as a whole and those governed by public reason in particular. These modes of theorizing are not only about themselves and what they can (as opposed to have) become but also about the norms that they feel they share with other members of a given polity.

Indeed, following Foucault and contra Rawls, Stout tells us that our most cherished beliefs can indeed be politically problematic but why argue that they could ever be bracketed out of real politics? Yes many who are militant believers (of whatever ethos) might refuse to engage in such parrhesiastic practices. However, many others who are a bit more moderate but not necessarily liberal often do so. Furthermore, what people care about most is very relevant politically and it is what is often bound to motivate them. Grass-roots politics today – be it focused on a living wage or a basic constitutionally essential right – involves a variety of citizens with deeply held theistic, agnostic and atheistic convictions and often transpires within religious and/or sacred settings. In these politicized realities ‘religious identifications are made evident’, but the boundaries separating religious communities are often transgressed. ‘Small group meetings transform initially inchoate concerns, expressed in the first-person language of desire and passion, into evaluative claims, expressed in the second-person language of reasons. The broader the coalition’s base, the clearer it becomes that no single religious outlook can be taken for granted as a framework for discussion’ (Stout, 2010: 227). Hence in contrast to those who strive to reason apart from comprehensive doctrines these Foucaldian-like deliberators have the potential to generate the less partial perspective of the ideal Rawlsian judge, the privileged subject within his account of public reason, because they are more cognizant of the peculiarities of where many of their fellow deliberators reason from and why they do so.

All of the forms of grass-roots activism Stout chronicles are fraught with incommensurability and disagreement if only because the sacred in sacred value, the key source of motivation for most of Stout’s actors, is a highly contestatory term among theists as well as between theists, non-theists and those somewhat betwixt and between these polarities (2010: 223). Public deliberation as Stout’s actors show is always limited by the not-so-malleable beliefs participants bring with them into their grass-roots activities. These ethical disputes play out around political questions of what is worthy of collective recognition, what if any symbolic rituals should be conducted, what might be prohibited and who should enforce said prohibitions (ibid.).

A Foucaldian-like focus on understanding and critiquing the limits of what we supposedly are helps here by encouraging subjects to seek out and differentiate the arbitrary from the legitimate constraints put upon their manners of theorizing – constraints rooted in the various comprehensive visions their identities draw from. These modes of theorizing are not only about themselves and what they can (as opposed to have) become but also about the norms that they feel they share with other members of a given polity. Reasoning through the ethical sources that comprehensive visions draw upon compels individuals to make contingent or at least problematize many but not all of their beliefs that they took to be foundational. These parrhesiastic practices thus compel subjects to do the legwork necessary to achieve the real world semblance of partial autonomy from one’s intuitions that Rawls craves. Moreover, turning again to Foucault’s - Kantian imperative, to seek to unmask the intuitions even behind the most ‘stupid’ intuitions is not to simply negate these intuitions but to clarify them so as to produce shared norms that can underlie conceptions of justice, like justice-as-fairness, that, following in a Rawlsian line of thought, can regulate the development of not-so-stupid institutions.

Stout’s IAF organizers sympathize with these themes. In order to organize liberal and not necessarily liberal citizens Stoutian actors have to think through what beliefs can be called into question and modified in response to demands from more fundamental beliefs (2010: 102). These parrhesiastic endeavors allow for – echoing our point at the end of section II – novel positions to emerge within political discourse and become new points for solidarity, and a new basis upon which diverse actors can organize so as to hold governing elites accountable (ibid.: 128). Engaging in such parrhesiastic practices is central to a democratic leader’s task of opening up the political process ‘to concerns that are deeper and broader than a preference for a slightly higher wage or a slightly lower tax rate’ (ibid.: 218). Stout feels that the form of reasoning involved in making these sacred disputes advance towards productive political outcomes must be one in which the people participating in it ‘cannot reasonably take for granted a single conception of sacred value, when conversing or debating with one another. The discussion does not proceed from a consensus on sacred value, but it does give expression to multiple, contested conceptions of sacred value’ (ibid.: 224).

Stout’s IAF organizers have learned that the core beliefs of actual individuals must be the starting point for any public reasoning process concerning questions of social justice. Deliberating then with those who have conflicting accounts of the sacred can provide unexpected experiences of reasoning that can allow individuals to critically analyze parts of their acculturated beliefs and values. However, this

… process of critical reflection would not be aided by confining ourselves to premises already certified by critical reasoning as sound … To be able to think critically is itself initially to be acculturated into practices of accountability of a particular kind, practices that permit us to call some things into question, but only while taking others, for the moment, as the default starting point of our questioning. (Stout, 2010: 147)

Seeing the interrelationships between the truths one speaks and the constitution of the self that engages in given practices of truth-telling can help individuals better appreciate the contingent natures of who they and their fellow interlocutors have become. Not only does this allow us, as Foucault hoped, to loosen and strengthen the holds certain practices have on our individual identities as we work on our limits. It can also allow for both a strengthening and a loosening of allegiances to certain moral and ethical truth claims advanced by oneself and others, thus opening oneself and others up to the possibility of finding not-so-predictable points of accord. Indeed Stout’s IAF groups ‘because they valued both their bridge-building efforts and their capacity to learn from their interactions with others, their understanding of themselves as a group was flexible without being entirely amorphous’. Members of an IAF group’s self-understandings of what they value and the truths they try to speak change over time ‘in response to the group’s interactions with other groups including both the haves and the have-nots’ (Stout, 2010: 130).

From a Foucaldian perspective, Stout’s work on IAF organizing shows that public reasoning can become a wider and more inclusive enterprise as it becomes open to engaging moral and, for a Rawlsian, not so political sources of justification. In the process of critically reflecting on practices of truth-telling, individuals, momentarily transgressing parts of (but not the complete whole of) the frameworks of their perceived comprehensive ethical visions, can open themselves up to ideas previously considered off limits. At the same time they become critically receptive to others’ comprehensive visions potentially providing contestatory arguments that force others to reappraise their own moral and ethical allegiances. We thus have forms of deliberation based on direct engagement with comprehensive visions that can potentially produce new and more compelling justifications of norms of justice because they are built upon more compelling forms of overlapping consensus (Rawls) or more compelling criterions of accountability (Stout).

IV The necessity of trying to reason through our deepest commitments

One of the key democratic challenges of the moment, as Stout notes, ‘is to construct effective publics of accountability for every existing or emerging power holder, ranging from the sheriff of a small town to the CEO of a company with workers, stockholders, and effects all over the world. That includes local, state, and national governments, but is hardly limited to them’ (2010: 258). In order to create the solidarity needed to develop such publics through which the consent of the governed can be either given or withdrawn, subjects need to be able to deliberate with each other in such manner that their most cherished concerns are central to such discourses. Public dialogue is messy, contentious and frequently unsatisfying. This is especially the case for those whose previously held commitments reveal heretofore unproblematized inadequacies. However, dialogue about our deepest commitments is vital to having meaningful senses of belief in them and hence is central to cultivating something like a shared set of political norms that members of a given democratic community, be it local, national, or transnational, can embrace. The latter can serve either as a basis for public accountability (Stout) or as a foundation for justifying principles of governance (Rawls).

Today, democratic deliberation, be it on a global, local, or smaller level, always transpires within a context and this context is itself an outgrowth of power relationships, many of which are naturalized even as others are problematized by acts of shared deliberation. This is why theorists like Nancy Fraser increasingly draw attention to demands for ‘meta-political democratization’ or demands to problematize not only the who of whose perspectives should be privileged in public deliberations but also how such deliberations are constructed and carried out (Fraser, 2005: 86). To get at the how often involves, as Stout’s IAF actors show, reasoning through the biases that underlie the values participants bring with them to debates about what principles, norms, or notions of desert should be privileged over others. A dynamic for public reasoning like the Foucaldian-informed one sketched here and partly illuminated by Jeffrey Stout provides one potentially important path by which reasoning through our deepest commitments can be incorporated into a conceptual framework for public reasoning about the who and the how of justice today.

Rawlsians can justifiably counter that Foucaldian parrhesiastic practices of public reasoning can easily exacerbate political conflict rather than limiting it. Yet many in the academy who are drawn to Rawls’ account of public reasoning often need to realize that, paraphrasing Raymond Geuss, politics needs crafts such as Foucaldian parrhesiastic practices. Effective acts of democratic deliberation require ‘the deployment of skills and forms of judgment that cannot easily be imparted by simple speech, that cannot be reliably codified or routinized, and that do not come automatically with the mastery of certain theories’ (Geuss, 2008: 15). Parrhesiastic practices, moreover, have always been risky as Foucault was quite aware. Similar to the original parrhesiastes, contemporary Foucaldian parrhesiastes, like Stout’s heroes, are frequently less powerful than their interlocutors and often risk their wrath (Foucault, 2001: 17–18). Today, as always, there is the risk that many in the face of such challenges to a cherished comprehensive ideal will turn away from public reasoning altogether, either creating perniciously fragmented democratic practices or eschewing democratic exercises altogether. However, this does not detract from the point that if democratically legitimate forms of political stability and meaningful forms of democratic accountability are to be achieved as well as maintained it is only through fluid discourses in which the precepts of reasonable conceptions of justice (political or otherwise) are continually put at risk in processes of public deliberation that all who are to be effected by the outcomes can be engaged within.