"Laïcité" and Public Reason

Some Comments on Eric Schliesser’s essay “Public Reason and Unreasonable Pluralism”

Eric Schliesser has a very interesting essay recently published in Liberal Currents. The text is interesting especially from a French perspective as it includes a discussion of the controversial (and hard to understand from any but for a French person) laïcité. This is at a time when French authorities have decided to ban from schools the abaya, a Muslim clothe that an increasing (but still insignificant in absolute terms) number of teenagers have been wearing. Eric’s essay is however not restricted to religion and deals more generally with the issue of how a liberal society can cope with disagreement based on “unreasonable” beliefs. This is not a new problem of course, but there are a few points in Eric’s text that I would like to emphasize and briefly address.

Let’s start with the French laïcité, which Eric singles out as one of the two “liberal” poles of how to deal with diversity and disagreement. He writes:

“Such radical secularism basically vacates the public sphere from most religious expression and relegates it to the private sphere. In practice, this contrast is not so easy to draw and, when implemented, it often is either inconsistent or an excuse to be quite illiberal including the ban on wearing burkinis or other expressions of religious identity in public. In fact, because of such features I tend to think of Laïcité as republican and illiberal in character.”

It is definitely correct to say that laïcité is “illiberal in character.” Note that as such, this doesn’t mean that France’s radical secularism is wrong or mistaken. It might happen that the best response to the problem of religious diversity is not among the liberal ones. But of course, if your default belief is that the liberal approach is presumably the correct one, then the fact that laïcité must trigger the alarm bell. This is a complex and hot topic but let me indulge for two short remarks. First, there is the big elephant in the room here, which in France is close to being an absolute taboo (in part because we don’t have the data to easily address this issue): what are the effects in terms of social exclusion and education of France’s radical secularism? French politicians from the right and part of the left have stuck to the same principles for decades. The public space should be immune from religious manifestations. But what are the consequences of the strict application of these principles for teenagers (especially girls) who, at least for some of them, end up in private religious schools where it is absolutely not clear that they are taught the values of the République. In Weberian terms, politicians who remain committed to the principles of laïcité display an “ethics of conviction.” But the “ethics of responsibility” would demand to confront the likely negative consequences (for individuals and for society in general) of, as a matter of fact, forbidding young people from benefiting from public schooling. This may justify loosening one’s commitment to principles.[1]   

Second, the French laïcité is grounded on the postulate that it is by excluding religions from the public space that we make sure that all religions are treated in the same way. If no religious signs are permitted in the public space (at school or for civil servants when they are assuming their public functions), then no religion is favored over others. But this is false because not all religions are equal in terms of what they require of their believers. The practice of some religions – and this is the case of Islam – interferes with public and professional life and cannot be easily restrained to the private sphere. Radical secularism is incompatible with religions that have this characteristic. Again, it might happen that the appropriate answer (appropriate at least to preserve social peace and stability) to this fact is just illiberal. But the French example, in a country where as a matter of fact there are several religions which have well-entrenched in the population (whether one likes it or not), suggests that this is unlikely.

The opposite pole that Eric identifies is public reason liberalism. Here, there is no debate about the liberal nature of this approach. However, Eric suggests that laïcité and public reason liberalism have three features in common: (i) they transcend the right/left opposition, (ii) they demand considerable public censorship, and (iii) they are both grounded in a Platonic skepticism about the ability of truth to dominate mere opinion in a democratic context. Consider feature (ii) first. I think this remark (and thus the underlying criticism) is valid as far as the Rawlsian version of public reason is concerned. As we know, Rawls argues that the overlapping consensus required for the justification of principles of justice and legitimacy of state coercion must be established between “reasonable comprehensive doctrines.” Initially, Rawlsian public reason was conceived precisely as a way to overcome the difficulties of comprehensive forms of liberalism established along Kantian or Millian lines that run the risk of excluding moral and religious views that are incompatible with individualistic values. As Eric notes however, Rawlsian public reason ends up advocating very strict norms of public discourse and deliberation that, in practice, exclude the use of religious reasons in the public space.

I don’t think however that it is correct to make the same assessment of the kind of public reason liberalism promoted by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier (see two of my posts on sectarianism and political liberalism here and here). At least, we should recognize that Gaus and (even more) Vallier try hard to revise public reason liberalism to make it appealing as much as possible to religious diversity. Their “convergence approach” tolerates the appeal in the justificatory endeavor to all kinds of reasons, including religious and “unreasonable” ones, as long as they are mutually intelligible. The main problem of this approach is that it risks far too often resulting in inconclusiveness and undecidability. Assuming that secular and religious reasons are intelligible by any citizen endowed with normal mental capacities, there will often be a clash of reasons and the impossibility to publicly justify some laws.

While staying within the confine of public reason, we may imagine two answers to this problem. One is just to return to the good old liberal tolerance principle, according to which unless there is a decisive (public) reason for the contrary, there is no reason to restrict religious practices that, after all, are harming no one. Though these practices may displease, we should tolerate them. The other answer is to try to show that diversity, including religious diversity, benefits everyone. Everyone would therefore have a reason to accept a variety of religious practices, including in the public space.

These two solutions go against however the “Platonic skepticism” that Eric attributes to public reason liberalism. If you think that, in a democratic context, opinions will systematically overcome truth (or reasonableness), then you’ll be prone to consider that there are strict limits to toleration and that non-regulated diversity is not synonymous with mutual benefits. Are public reason liberals really skeptics in this sense? When asking this question, it should be acknowledged that public reasons also display a more common form of liberal skepticism about the pretense of establishing what the ideal society is. Again, I don’t think this applies to the kind of public reason liberalism promoted by Gaus and Vallier, which in general tends to rely on the “wisdom of crowds” argument.[2] I happen to be far less optimistic, especially if we don’t limit the discussion to religious reasons and incorporate all kinds of unreasonable economic and political views.    

In the last part of his essay, Eric suggests that the best answer to the threat of unreasonable pluralism is constitutional, following Madison and Lippman:

Of course, at this point one may well wonder whether the polity can survive the lack of harmony that unreasonable pluralism presupposes. Here’s where Madisonianism enters in. Madison writes in Federalist 51, “by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.” This is achieved by fracturing territorially and temporally the representation of the people (through federalism, bicameralism, staggered elections, and only partially overlapping constituencies, for example). Lippmann was much impressed by the temporal “architecture” we find in, as Elizabeth Cohen notes, in “every democratic state.” As the political theorist Richard Bellamy has remarked on Madison’s insight, “different forms of representation mean that they are not treated as a homogeneous entity with a singular, all commanding will.” For Lippmann the right constitutional structures could, thus, be made resilient in part through structuring open-ended and fierce political contestation in the right way.

This is also a traditional liberal answer, one that combines well with both Platonic skepticism and toleration. Putting myself into the shoes of many of my compatriots, I can imagine at least two objections from a radical secularism viewpoint. First, what constitutional design can specifically neutralize the risks related to the pervasiveness of unreasonable beliefs, especially when they are religious in nature? The primary risk is not so much that an authoritarian political power emerges than, progressively, some beliefs and practices become so widespread that they start to put pressure on those we don’t share them. This is just Popper’s paradox of tolerance: What should we do if unreasonable views do not tolerate other views, reasonable or not? Something like Chandran Kukathas’s quasi-anarchistic may be the correct liberal answer, but it is a radical one, to say the least. Another possibility is to imagine a social contract that gives complete freedom to all forms of religious practices in exchange for complete freedom for others to criticize them.[3] The question is however how this social contract could be enforced.

The second objection is less serious, at first sight at least, but it is nonetheless based on a fear that is part of the collective imagination, as witnessed by the fact that it has served as the background for a novel by the French author Michel Houellbecq.[4] Is there not a risk that if we let unreasonable beliefs and practices develop in our society, they become so widespread they grant political power to “unreasonable” (religious) individuals in the capacity to alter the constitutional design? This may be pure fantasy and in itself an unreasonable view. But this is precisely the kind of unreasonable view that should be tolerated in a liberal society that is not too much elitist and sectarian. Then, the question is: how do you deal with people who hold it?

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[1] I should point out that this is by the way not the argument from critics of laïcité at the left (i.e., the NUPES block). They rather emphasize that banning the scarf or the abaya is impeding women’s freedom. That may be true (and this is actually a liberal criticism) but this is not obvious as we are mostly talking of teenagers who may not have anyway the choice due to family pressures.

[2] This applies at least to Gaus, definitely.

[3] This has been proposed by the French philosopher Pierre Manent. See in particular Pierre Manent, Situation de la France (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 2015).

[4] Michel Houellebecq, Soumission (J’AI LU, 2017).