Until now, there has been no direct and extensive engagement with the category of religion from liberal political philosophy. Over the last thirty years or so, liberals have tended to analyze religion under proximate categories such as 'conceptions of the good' (in debates about neutrality) or 'culture' (in debates about multiculturalism). US constitutional lawyers and French political theorists both tackled the category of religion head-on (under First Amendment jurisprudence and the political tradition of laïcité, respectively) but neither of these specialized national discourses found their way into mainstream liberal political philosophy.
This is somewhat paradoxical because key liberal notions (state sovereignty, toleration, individual freedom, the rights of conscience, public reason) were elaborated as a response to 17th Century European Wars of Religion, and the fundamental structure of liberalism is rooted in the western experience of politico-religious conflict. So a reappraisal of this tradition - and of its validity in the light of contemporary challenges - is well overdue. This book offers the first extensive engagement with religion from liberal political philosophers. The volume analyzes, from within the liberal philosophical tradition itself, the key notions of conscience, public reason, non-establishment, and neutrality. Insofar as the contemporary religious revival is seen as posing a challenge to liberalism, it seems more crucial than ever to explore the specific resources that the liberal tradition has to answer it.
Cécile Laborde and Aurélia Bardon: Introduction Part I - The Special Status of Religion in the Law 1: Micah Schwartzman: Religion, Equality, and Anarchy 2: Andrew Koppelman: A Rawlsian Defense of Special Treatment for Religion 3: George Letsas: The Irrelevance of Religion to Law 4: Enzo Rossi: Understanding Religion, Governing Religion: A Realist Perspective 5: Ronan McCrea: The Consequences of Disaggregation and the Impossibility of a Third Way Part II - Sovereignty, Non-Establishment, Neutrality 6: Jean L. Cohen: Sovereignty, the Corporate Religious, and Jurisdictional/Political Pluralism 7: Kevin Vallier: Religious Establishment and Public Justification 8: Sune Laegaard: What's the Problem with Symbolic Religious Establishment? The Alienation and Symbolic Equality Accounts 9: Matthew Clayton: Is Ethical Independence Enough? 10: Saladin Meckled-Garcia: On the Scope and Object of Neutrality: Policies, Principles, and 'Burdens of Conscience' Part III - Accommodation and Religious Freedom 11: Peter Jones: Religious Exemption and Distributive Justice 12: Jonathan Seglow: Religious Accommodation: Responsibility, Integrity, and Self-Respect 13: Simon Cabulea May: Exemptions for Conscience 14: Alan Patten: Religious Exemptions and Fairness 15: Daniel M. Weinstock: How the Interests of Children Limit the Religious Freedom of Parents 16: Annabelle Lever: Equality and Conscience: Ethics and the Provision of Public Services Part IV - Toleration, Conscience, Identity 17: Rainer Forst: Religion, Reason, and Toleration: Bayle, Kant - and Us 18: Chandran Kukathas: Toleration Without Limits: A Reconstruction and Defence of Pierre Bayle's Philosophical Commentary 19: Akeel Bilgrami: Liberalism and Identity 20: Maeve Cooke: Conscience in Public Life 21: Kimberley Brownlee: Is Religious Conviction Special? 22: Emanuela Ceva: How Should We Respect Conscience?
Cécile Laborde holds the Nuffield Chair in Political Theory at the University of Oxford. Previously, she was the Director of the Religion and Political Theory Centre at University College London. Aurélia Bardon is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Liverpool. Her research focuses on public justification, especially on the implications of public justification for religion and religious reasons, as well as on secularism and bioethics.
