Whose Justice? Which Modernity? Taylor and Habermas on European versus American Exceptionalism

Abstract

While Taylor and Habermas respectively follow communitarian versus cosmopolitan lines in their political theories, trends in each of their writings on religion in a global context have taken surprising turns toward convergence. However, what both views lack would be a further analytical and normative classification that better captures the pluralistic dimensions of this shared turn. I consider Taylor’s critique of Habermas’s appeals to constitutional patriotism that lead to recanting the exceptionalist thesis attributed to the US in order to own up to the exceptionalism of European secularity. I then take up the more pragmatic concern of the religion in a global public, using their writings on Islam in the US and in the EU as a litmus test for the epistemic scope of our respective degrees of Jamesian openness. By using Islam, we have an instance of an attempt on both sides of the Atlantic to widen the scope of moral and political solidarity from what Jaspers has termed Biblical religion stemming from common Abrahamic roots. Assessing the inherent potentials for the integration of immigrants and minorities offers a practical test for the more encompassing inter-Axial communicative ethic characteristic of cosmoipolitan justice as a viable alternative to political cosmopolitanism. As a proposed mediation between Habermas and Taylor, I agree with Casanova that the unique framing conditions for secularity become, in a postsecular age, the very means of re-enchanting global public spaces, overcoming the injustices of Western colonialism, and conceding the presence (within Europe and globally) of multiple modernities.