Construing the Reasonable. Rawls’ Political Liberalism between Rorty and Habermas

This article investigates the notion of “reasonable”, arguably the systematic keystone in John Rawls’s Political Liberalism, highlighting the alternative interpretative possibilities it opens and assessing their consequences in order to gain a better grasp of Rawls’s project. The paper will firstly offer a brief presentation of Political Liberalism, followed by an analytic discussion of the notions of rational and reasonable at the domestic level; secondly, it will expose the fundamental ambiguity contained in the notion of reasonable with reference to the two paradigmatically opposite readings offered by Rorty and Habermas (respectively, a pragmatist and a Kantian reading); finally, it will show that said readings both ultimately fail to capture the specificity of Political Liberalism, but at the same time point out a crucial tension bearing far reaching consequences especially at the international level, and conclusively argues that this tension should be addressed through a reformulation of the notion of reasonable.