Abstract

Alessandro Ferrara’s The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism poses an important challenge to recent defenders of ‘realism’ in political theory and shows that a renewal of Rawlsian ideal theory is possible. Ferrara focuses on the contemporary condition of ‘hyperpluralism’, in which every comprehensive worldview and religion has to admit the equal validity of at least one other conception, and claims that only a ‘pluralist justification of pluralism’ can lead to a genuine revival of the democratic horizon. Naming such a project of democracy the ‘multivariate’ polity, he uses Rawls’ method of conjecture to show how such a justification strategy is possible. I argue that the multivariate polity may attain pluralism but not stability and may fail in securing democratic respect among equal citizens for each other’s point of view.