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Religion, Liberal Democracy, and Citizenship Chantal Mouffe Contrary to what many liberals had predicted, instead of becoming obsolete thanks to the development of ‘‘postconventional identities’’ and the increasing role of rationality in human behavior, religious forms of identification currently play a growing role in many societies. Yet the question of what should be the place of the church in a liberal democracy is a burning issue in several of the new Eastern European democracies . It seems, therefore, that the old controversy about the relationship between religion and politics, far from being on the wane, is again on the agenda. My aim in this paper is to examine some of the issues related to this debate from the point of view of the model of agonistic pluralism that I am currently elaborating. I hope to be able to show that this model provides a better framework than many versions of deliberative democracy for acknowledging the role played by religion in the formation of personal identity and the consequences that this entails for politics. Liberal Democracy as Agonistic Pluralism In order to situate my reflection and to avoid misunderstandings, a few general remarks concerning liberal democracy are needed at the outset. First, I consider it important to distinguish liberal democracy from democratic capitalism and to envisage it in terms of classic political philosophy as a regime, a political form of society that needs to be de- fined exclusively at the level of the political, leaving aside its possible articulation within an economic system. Understood in those terms, liberal democracy is much more than merely a form of government, since it concerns the symbolic ordering of social relations. It refers to a 3 18 RELIGION, DEMOCRAC Y, AND C ITIZENSHIP specific form of politically organized human coexistence, which results from the articulation between two different traditions: on one side, political liberalism (rule of law, separation 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 a political form of society and not to the ‘‘really existing liberal democratic societies’’ in their complexity. Envisaged from that angle, liberal democracy —in its various appellations: constitutional democracy, representative democracy , 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 of size but of nature. The crucial difference resides in the acceptance of pluralism that 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 certainty .’’ 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 fact of 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 the symbolic level. 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 disputed 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...

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