Liberal Democracy and the Event of Existence, Seen from a not-so-Rickety Bridge Between Rawls and Merleau-Ponty. Reply to my Critics

Abstract

The discussants of my book The Concept of Liberal Democratic Law (CLDL) in this issue of Ethics & Politics raise many important and challenging questions about key aspects of the book to which I respond as carefully as I can. My responses to all the questions raised ultimately converge, I believe, on the question of liberal democracy’s relation to its own historicity, a historicity to which I eventually come to refer as “the event of existence.” This question emerges from an engagement with the thoughts of especially John Rawls and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Rawls and Merleau-Ponty are of course not often discussed together, but the combination of questions raised by several of the discussants expressly invite me to do so. In the endeavour to respond to these questions coherently (the endeavour to bring these questions together), I believe I managed to construct an elementary but “not-so-rickety bridge” between Rawls and Merleau-Ponty that offers one a unique point of access to the question of liberal democracy’s relation to its own historicity.