Responding to the post-9/11 challenges facing ‘post secular societies’: Critical reflections on Habermas’s dialogic solutions

Abstract

There is much to be commended in Habermas’s suggestions for the relaxation of the constraints on public liberalism and the idealized norms of deliberative democratic debate in his proposals for the introduction of new institutional spaces that will facilitate the engagement between what he calls ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ citizens in his writings on ‘post-secular’ societies. The article examines the parallels between Habermas’s proposed democratic innovations, which will facilitate the introduction of ‘situated knowledges’ through proposing what I.M. Young would call ‘communicative leveling’, within the context of criticisms of secularism, public realism and the critiques of the idealized norms of deliberative democracy. However, it will be suggested here that there is also a certain convergence between Habermas’s theoretical interventions and the ‘instrumental engagement’ of governments with minority religious communities in the post-9/11 context.