Public Reason in and out of the Well-Ordered Society
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13044490 |
|---|---|
| Authors | C M Melenovsky (0000-0003-4662-8234, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-23 |
| Publication date | 2026-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Political Thought (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2161-1580 • E-ISSN: 2161-1599 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/738968 |
| OpenAlex | W7127628646 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 14 |
The later work of John Rawls remains the most common foil in the literature on public reason, but an ostensible conflict between core ideas has caused significant misinterpretations. Specifically, a “well-ordered society” requires that citizens act on the basis of a shared conception of political justice, whereas “the ideal of public reason” involves people acting according to differing conceptions of justice. Instead of representing two different periods in his thought, I argue that Rawls intended to offer two different accounts of public reason: one for within the well-ordered society, and one for outside it. This interpretation matches the text and withstands recent criticisms better than alternatives
Core (optical fiber · Ideal (ethics · Interpretation (philosophy · Politics · Public reason · Work (physics · Climate Change and Geoengineering · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Political Philosophy and Ethics
Convention
Liberalism without Perfection
Consensus on What? Convergence for What? Four Models of Political Liberalism
Autonomy and Disagreement about Justice in Political Liberalism
Justification, coercion, and the place of public reason
Justice and the Social Contract
Against Public Reason Liberalism's Accessibility Requirement
The Value of a Non-Ideal
Why Political Liberalism
The Order of Public Reason
Public Reason and Reciprocity
Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World
Political Stability in the Open Society
The Idea of Public Reason Revisited
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |