Profane Illuminations

Focusing upon the continuity between ancient Rome and modern Western democracy, this article will set out to show that the religiosity at work in liberal democracy has always been present, notwithstanding the Church/State divide and the secularization of modern Western cultures. Thus the ‘return' to religion that has marked the twenty-first century is not a return at all, but rather a sign that the universalizing Protestantism understood here as a hidden motor of capitalistic globalization is being contested by traditions that place the good over the right, community over individual reason. To the extent that the ‘return' we are witnessing is against the secular State, and its universalizing economic model, it represents at the same time a questioning of the values that found the politico-religious messianism of Western liberal democracy. In this article, after showing how a certain messianic faith is constitutive of liberal democracy, the relevance of this messianism will be demonstrated with a study of its central role in the political philosophies of John Rawls and Jacques Derrida. Though these thinkers are rarely studied together, and are understood as presenting opposing sides of the political spectrum, this article sets out to show that they share more than is commonly assumed, and indeed, that there is an ‘overlapping consensus' regarding their need to defer democracy to a messianic future

Democracy · Faith · Messianism · Political science · Politics · Secularization · Sociology · Theology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies