Relativism and Religion: Why Democratic Societies Do Not Need Moral Absolutes

RELATIVISM AND RELIGION

RELIGION, CULTURE, AND PUBLIC LIFE

RELIGION, CULTURE, AND PUBLIC LIFE

Series Editor: Karen Barkey

The resurgence of religion calls for careful analysis and constructive criticism of new forms of intolerance, as well as new approaches to tolerance, respect, mutual understanding, and accommodation. In order to promote serious scholarship and informed debate, the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life and Columbia University Press are sponsoring a book series devoted to the investigation of the role of religion in society and culture today. This series includes works by scholars in religious studies, political science, history, cultural anthropology, economics, social psychology, and other allied fields whose work sustains multidisciplinary and comparative as well as transnational analyses of historical and contemporary issues. The series focuses on issues related to questions of difference, identity, and practice within local, national, and international contexts. Special attention is paid to the ways in which religious traditions encourage conflict, violence, and intolerance and also support human rights, ecumenical values, and mutual understanding. By mediating alternative methodologies and different religious, social, and cultural traditions, books published in this series will open channels of communication that facilitate critical analysis.

After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, edited by Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen

Religion and International Relations Theory, edited by Jack Snyder

Religion in America: A Political History, Denis Lacorne

Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, edited by Ahmet T. Kuru and Alfred Stepan

Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, Mark C. Taylor

Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal, edited by Mamadou Diouf

Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo, Mark C. Taylor

Democracy and Islam in Indonesia, edited by Mirjam Künkler and Alfred Stepan

Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference, edited by Linell E. Cady and Tracy Fessenden

Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill, Mark C. Taylor

Boundaries of Toleration, edited by Alfred Stepan and Charles Taylor

Choreographies of Sharing at Sacred Sites: Religion, Politics, and Conflict Resolution, edited by Elazar Barkan and Karen Barkey

Beyond Individualism: The Challenge of Inclusive Communities, George Rupp

Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World, edited by Hent de Vries and Nils F. Schott

RELATIVISM AND RELIGION

WHY DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES DO NOT NEED MORAL ABSOLUTES

CARLO INVERNIZZI ACCETTI

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHERS SINCE 1893

NEW YORK   CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Accetti, Carlo Invernizzi, 1983–

Relativism and religion : why democratic societies do not need moral absolutes / Carlo Invernizzi Accetti.

pages   cm.—(Religion, culture, and public life)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-17078-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-54037-7 (e-book)

1. Political theology.   2. Democracy—Moral and ethical aspects.   3. Democracy—Religious aspects—Catholic Church.   4. Relativity. I. Title.

BT83.59.A224      2015

322' .1—dc23

2015009760

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

COVER DESIGN: JAMES VICTORE

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To recognize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly.

—Joseph Schumpeter

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Discourse of Anti-Relativism in the Political Thought of the Catholic Church

2. Elements for a Public Critique of the Catholic Discourse of Anti-Relativism

3. Rationalism: Between Relativism and Religion

4. Defense of a Relativist Conception of Democracy

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing this book I accumulated more debts and received help from more people than it may be possible to acknowledge in a short note. I would like to thank first of all Nadia Urbinati, whose unfailing guidance and mentorship has been both formative and inspirational. I am indebted to her for most of the ideas contained in this book. I would also like to thank Jean L. Cohen for her support throughout the writing process and for her insightful comments on several earlier drafts of the manuscript. During my years at Columbia University, I also received extremely helpful comments from Andrew Arato, Akeel Bilgrami, Andreas Kalyvas, Ira Katznelson, Allan Silver, and Melissa Schwartzberg. In addition, I would like to express my special gratitude to Patrick Weil for his advice and support before, during, and after the writing process.

An early version of the manuscript was presented and discussed at the Sciences Po Political Theory seminar in Paris, for which I thank in particular Jean-Marie Donegani and Astrid Von Busekist. Several chapters of the book were also presented, at different stages of completion, in workshops and conferences organized at the Columbia Global Center in Paris, Princeton University, Humboldt University in Berlin, the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. I would like to thank Justine Lacroix, Jan-Werner Muller, Cécile Laborde, Samuel Moyn, Maria-Pia Lara, and Jean-Yves Pranchère for the helpful and insightful comments offered on these occasions. Finally, during the last phases of writing I spent a semester in residence at the Italian Academy of Columbia University. I would like to thank David Freedberg for offering me this opportunity and Barbara Carnevali, Mattia Gallotti, and Gloria Origgi for the useful and pleasant discussions during my time there.

Although academic convention has it that personal friends and peers should be thanked last in this context, without the innumerable discussions I had with them throughout the writing process, and indeed their friendship and loyalty, this book could never have been written. In particular, I want to express my gratitude to Chris Bickerton, Pablo Bustinduy, Joshua Craze, Sandipto Dasgupta, James Fontanella, Alex Gourevitch, Giulia Oskian, Tom Theuns, and Ian Zuckerman. How could I even begin to say how much I owe each one of you?

I would also like to thank my father, Emanuele Invernizzi, for all his guidance and advice, and my mother, Consuelo Accetti, for her affection and support. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers from Columbia University Press as well as Wendy Lochner and Christine Dunbar for their help and collaboration during the editorial process.

INTRODUCTION

A DICTATORSHIP OF RELATIVISM?

A specter is haunting Western societies: the specter of relativism. Once only thought to constitute a relatively marginal philosophical or meta-ethical position, it is now treated as a social and political problem, and it is primarily as an antidote against this supposed problem that the reference to a set of absolute—and in particular religious—moral values is increasingly defended. Consider, for example, what Cardinal Josef Ratzinger asserted in the last homily he gave before the assembled conclave, the day before being elected pope:

Today, having a clear faith based on the creed of the Church is often labeled fundamentalism. Whereas relativism; that is, letting oneself be tossed here and there by every wind of doctrine, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely in satisfying one’s ego and desires.¹

In the years that have elapsed since Benedict XVI’s election, this opposition between relativism and a clear faith based on the creed of the Catholic Church has been made into the backbone of the Vatican’s pontifical message. Neither of the popes that has been in office since then nor any other official spokesperson of the Catholic Church has missed an occasion to denounce the poisonous effects that relativism is supposedly having on modern societies and to present Christianity as the only available antidote against it. This has led to the constitution of a whole body of discourse that certain commentators have not hesitated to describe as amounting to an intellectual crusade against relativism.²

Nor is this discourse restricted exclusively to the Catholic Church. The concern with relativism cuts across denominational distinctions. In the sermons preached in many contemporary evangelical churches in the United States, for instance, relativism is often treated—along with liberalism and secularism—as part of a sort of unholy trinity that is supposed to be corroding the moral foundations of contemporary societies.³ Indeed, a recent poll conducted among evangelical preachers in the United States found that, after abortion, moral relativism was indicated by most respondents as the most pressing moral issue faced by America today.⁴

For anybody familiar with the language used in contemporary evangelical churches in the United States, this is unlikely to come as a surprise. In a lecture delivered at the National Ligonier Conference in 2007, for instance, John Piper, pastor at the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, summed up the objections made by evangelical Christians against relativism:

Relativism is an invisible gas, odorless, deadly, that is now polluting every free society on earth. It is a gas that attacks the central nervous system of moral striving. The most perilous threat to the free society today is, therefore, neither political nor economic. It is the poisonous, corrupting culture of relativism. . . . Here is a list of seven amongst the most evil and destructive effects of relativism: 1) Relativism commits treason against God. 2) Relativism cultivates duplicity. 3) Relativism conceals doctrinal defection. 4) Relativism cloaks greed with flattery. 5) Relativism cloaks pride with the guise of humility. 6) Relativism enslaves people. 7) Relativism leads to brutal totalitarianism.⁵

Finally, by way of further illustration, consider also the following passage from the book titled Milestones by Sayyid Qutb—which is considered by many one of the principal intellectual reference points for the contemporary strands of political Islamism that denounce the moral corruption of modern and in particular liberal-democratic societies: Mankind today is on the brink of abyss, not because of the danger of complete annihilation, which is hanging over its head (this being just a symptom and not the real disease) but because humanity is devoid of those vital values which are necessary not only for its healthy development but also for its real progress.⁶

Although the term relativism itself is not explicitly mentioned in this passage, the key idea it advances is analogous to the ones contained in the other passages mentioned, namely, that modern societies are under threat of being destroyed because they are supposedly in the process of losing their commitment to a set of absolute moral values. The implicit message—which Qutb goes on to articulate very incisively in his book—is that modern societies need to make reference to a set of ultimately religious moral values in order to avoid annihilation.

THE CRITIQUE OF RELATIVISM AS A CRITIQUE OF DEMOCRACY

The political overtones implicit in the notion of a dictatorship of relativism and in the idea that relativism leads to brutal totalitarianism are by no means coincidental. For the key claim that is being advanced in the passages quoted above is not simply that relativism constitutes a problem for the spiritual lives of individuals, but also that it constitutes a danger for the survival of modern societies. There is thus a political dimension to the contemporary religious discourse of anti-relativism, which translates into a project of reasserting the importance of a reference to the notion of absolute truth, not only in the private domain of individual morality, but also in the public domain of contemporary politics.

It is this political dimension of the religious discourse of anti-relativism that I intend to discuss over the course of this book. Specifically, what I am interested in discussing is the bearing of this discourse on the domain of democratic theory. My contention is that the call for a reassertion of a reference to a notion of absolute truth within contemporary politics constitutes one of the last remaining grounds upon which the democratic principle of self-government can be—or at least still is—criticized. To show this requires a brief foray into the history of anti-democratic rhetoric.

As is well known, this form of government did not always enjoy the near-universal favor it is invested with today. On the contrary, throughout most of the history of Western political thought, democracy was generally assumed to constitute one of the degenerate forms of government.⁷ The arguments sustaining this consensus can mostly be traced back to a Platonic heritage, which in fact proves to have several elements in common with the contemporary discourse of anti-relativism.

In the famous book 8 of The Republic, for instance, Plato argues that democracy leads to a degeneration of the moral and political standards of society, since individuals are led into believing that they can do whatever they want because of the absence of a common authority. Chaos and disorder are assumed to ensue, and the only way in which peace can be reasserted is said to be through a form of tyranny keeping society under control with an iron fist.⁸

For centuries, this—or some set of views akin to it—constituted the political common sense on democracy. Opinions only gradually began to shift over the course of the past two centuries, during which democracy was progressively posited as the bedrock of all forms of political legitimacy. Today, the process has reached such a point that it appears very difficult to find anybody explicitly declaring him- or herself against the democratic principle itself: even those who might secretly harbor other sympathies usually say they are democrats, and couch their arguments in democratic terms.

This does not mean that the previous critiques of democracy have simply been forgotten. Rather, they have been incorporated within a democratic framework by being transformed into arguments for limiting democracy from within. The political struggle today is therefore largely fought in terms of different conceptions of democracy and in particular of the limits that should be imposed on them. Within this struggle, critiques of the democratic principle still have an important role to play because they serve as the basis for different views as to whether, and in what way, democracy should be limited for its own sake.

The political significance of the contemporary religious discourse of anti-relativism emerges from this context. For, from the point of view of contemporary political common sense, the claim that relativism leads to dictatorship, tyranny, or even totalitarianism can be interpreted as a way of stating that it represents a threat to the survival of existing democratic regimes. The political consequence is that, in order to be sustainable as a form of government, democracy needs to be complemented with reference to a notion of absolute truth, both limiting and guiding the democratic exercise of political power, and therefore keeping it within the bounds of moral legitimacy.

This link between the issue of relativism and that of democracy was, for example, drawn explicitly by Pope John Paul II in a document that can be in many ways considered the intellectual foundation for the rise to prominence of the religious discourse of anti-relativism in the aftermath of the Cold War—the encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor:

Today when many countries have seen the fall of ideologies which bound politics to a totalitarian conception of the world, there is no less grave a danger that the fundamental rights of the human person will be denied. . . . This is the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism, which would remove any sure moral reference point from political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgement of truth impossible. Indeed, if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.⁹

The central argument that John Paul II seems to be making here is that a conception of democracy founded on relativism would ultimately be self-defeating. The reason he alludes to is that relativism is incapable of specifying any determinate principles to guide and direct political activity. This is taken to make a relativist conception of democracy vulnerable to the paradox whereby democracy may be overthrown by democratic means because it implies that there can be no limits on what a sovereign people may legitimately do to itself. Relativism is therefore accused of providing no guarantee that democracy will not transform itself into a form of totalitarianism.

From this, John Paul II goes on to deduce that democratic regimes need to make reference to some notion of absolute truth in order to remain politically sustainable, because by imposing a set of external limits on the power exercised by the people over themselves, the reference to a notion of truth offers the only available guarantee that democracy will not overthrow itself. Moreover, since Christianity is implicitly assumed to constitute the natural foundation for such a notion of absolute truth, faith in Jesus Christ is ultimately posited as a necessary complement to the good functioning of democracy.

Although he does not mention democracy explicitly, a very similar argument is also made by John Piper in the lecture I already quoted above:

The formula is simple: when relativism holds sway long enough in a society, everyone begins to do what is right in his or her own eyes, without any regard for submission to truth. In this atmosphere, a society begins to break down. . . . When the chaos of relativism reaches a certain point, the people will welcome any ruler who can bring some semblance of order and security. So a dictator steps forward and crushes the chaos with absolute control. Ironically, relativism, the great lover of unfettered freedom, destroys freedom in the end.¹⁰

The Platonic heritage is still clearly visible in both formulations of this argument, since the key claim they make is that a political system founded on relativism leads to the dissolution of the moral fabric of society and ultimately to the emergence of a kind of political regime that radically negates the essential principles of freedom and democracy. Indeed, even the antidote recommended against this danger can be seen as a Christianization of the Platonic idea that the political order must be founded on a set of absolute truths standing above and beyond the human order of things.

The key difference with Plato, however, is that the contemporary critics of relativism do not present their arguments as critiques of democracy as such, but rather as analyses of the conditions for its survival. In this sense, it is possible to say that the critique of democracy has become internal: instead of opposing democracy from outside, the point advanced is that democracy needs to be complemented by a religious criterion of legitimacy for its own sake—that is, in order to guide and limit its own exercise of political power.

A POLITICAL RESPONSE

My goal over the course of this book is to examine the body of discourse making this claim in order to assess its cogency. More specifically, what I am interested in exploring is the challenge represented for democratic theory by the idea that democratic regimes need to be complemented by the reference to a set of absolute moral or political truths in order to avoid degenerating into a form of tyranny or totalitarianism.

From the point of view of what has been stated, this can be interpreted as a way of intervening in the contemporary political debate over the meaning of democracy and the conditions of its legitimacy. In this respect, it should however be made clear from the start that I will not be adopting the position of a neutral or disengaged observer. On the contrary, it is precisely because I consider myself both a philosophical relativist and a committed democrat that I am interested in examining the challenge posed for democratic theory by the contemporary discourse of anti-relativism.

In this sense, there is a polemical dimension to this book, which consists in the project of first assessing the critique of democracy implicit in the idea that democracy needs to make reference to a set of absolute moral or political values in order to avoid degenerating into a form of tyranny or totalitarianism, and then attempting to provide a response to it by testing both the coherence and the political sustainability of a conception of democracy founded on a form of philosophical relativism.

That said, since I remain convinced that a necessary preliminary for a convincing critique is an adequate understanding of one’s opponent’s position, a significant portion of this book will be devoted to the project of reconstructing the intellectual grounds for the contemporary discourse of anti-relativism. In other words, it is precisely because I want to take a stand against the contemporary religious discourse of anti-relativism that I will first have to bring into relief the challenge it represents for democratic theory in the fairest possible way.

In so doing it will also be possible to address a number of broader theoretical and political issues, which are at the heart of contemporary democratic theory. Before moving on to outline these broader theoretical stakes of the present discussion, it is, however, worth highlighting a further important aspect of my approach, which circumscribes the set of issues under consideration.

THE FOCUS ON THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

For the purposes of the present discussion, I have decided to restrict the domain of analysis to the formulations of the religious discourse of anti-relativism offered by the Catholic Church, and in particular by Vatican doctrine as it is contained in the body of papal encyclicals promulgated over the course of the past two centuries. The principal reason for this is one of focus: the discourse of anti-relativism has recently been employed by a variety of both religious and non-religious advocates for the purpose of substantiating a wide array of political projects. It would simply be unmanageable to try to discuss all the various strands of this discourse in one book.¹¹

At the same time, however, I also think that the decision to focus on the Vatican’s formulations of the religious discourse of anti-relativism can be justified positively, on the basis of a number of concurring observations. First of all, as we will see in more detail, the contemporary discourse of anti-relativism originates from within official Catholic doctrine. The first recorded usage of the term to refer to a social and political problem, rather than simply a philosophical position, for instance, occurs in a papal encyclical of 1884.¹²

Since then, official Catholic doctrine has continued to elaborate and refine this original intuition, so that today it is within this body of texts that one finds the most sophisticated formulations of the religious discourse of anti-relativism. When the Catholic formulations are compared to others one might encounter in the discourse produced by other religious organizations, the differences are in fact often striking, simply because the Catholic Church has a much more established tradition of scholarly apologetics.

Indeed, it has already been pointed out by several observers of religious trends—especially in the United States—that the Catholic Church is progressively assuming a position of intellectual leadership within a broader faith-based political front.¹³ From this point of view, the well-known theological and political disputes between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism appear largely a thing of the past, and what is increasingly replacing them is a sort of inter-denominational division of labor whereby Catholic apologists provide the intellectual foundations, while Protestant organizations supply the grassroots support, for a set of essentially convergent positions. Thus the Vatican’s formulations of the discourse of anti-relativism can be considered exemplary of a much broader range of arguments raised from a variety of religious standpoints.

Last but not least, a further reason for focusing on the Vatican’s formulations of the religious discourse of anti-relativism is its degree of political influence. Even in the United States, this is not something to underestimate. Catholicism is currently both the largest single denominational affiliation in this country and the fastest growing, largely due to the influx of immigrants from Latin America. What the Church’s authorities think and stand for is therefore going to be a very important determinant of the political life of this country in the future.¹⁴

Outside the United States, the political influence of the Catholic Church is so well established as to require little demonstration. Every time a pope makes a public statement, millions of people listen all over the world, and the resonance of these messages in the political life of individual countries is enormous. No other religious organization has the same degree of capillary diffusion, bolstered by a highly centralized organizational structure and an availability of economic and political resources comparable to those of a sizeable state.¹⁵

To examine and discuss the discourse advanced by this institution therefore constitutes an intellectually and politically worthwhile task in its own right. Even if this will not exhaust the range of different formulations of the discourse of anti-relativism advanced in the contemporary public sphere, it is certainly a necessary step in that direction. The analysis conducted in this book can therefore be seen as laying the foundations for a larger project to be continued and expanded in the future, while at the same time engaging with an interlocutor that is both sufficiently interesting and important to be confronted on its own terms.

THE QUESTION OF THE ABSOLUTE

As I have already pointed out, beyond the strictly political interest of engaging with the Vatican’s discourse of anti-relativism in a debate on the conditions for the stability and viability of existing democratic regimes, such an endeavor also has a bearing on a number of more theoretical debates that are central to the contemporary discipline of political theory. Before moving on to outline my main argument, I will therefore spell out some of these issues in order to illustrate what is at stake theoretically, as well as politically, in this book.

The first major theoretical debate that is at stake in a discussion of the relation between relativism, religion, and democracy concerns the philosophical foundation for the legitimacy of democratic regimes, and in particular whether any attempt to address this issue supposes a reference to a notion of the absolute. This question has been both posed and contextualized in a compelling manner by Hannah Arendt in her book On Revolution.¹⁶

Her starting point is the claim that, before modernity, the question concerning the foundations for the legitimacy of the political order did not really emerge, because it was in a sense already resolved in advance. A hierarchical order of authority was assumed to be implicit in the natural order of things, and this prevented the question concerning the foundations for its legitimacy from being raised in a politically meaningful manner.

At the beginning of modernity, Arendt contends, this assumption began to be called into question. Indeed, for her, the theory of the divine rights of monarchs already constituted a response to this problem, which consisted in making explicit something that had previously been assumed to be implicit: that the foundation for the legitimacy of the political order ultimately lay in the sanction received by the transcendent will of God. A conceptual absolute was therefore posited as the foundation for early modern theories of absolute monarchy.

To be sure, modern revolutions emerged out of the rejection of divine right theories. However, precisely for this reason, Arendt suggests that they posed the question of the foundation for the legitimacy of the political order even more acutely. The solution that was initially adopted—especially in France, but also to some extent in the United States—was to posit a new absolute, as a substitute for the one that had been rejected: the collective will of the people in the place of the transcendent will of God.

Arendt’s claim, however, is that this solution posed more problems than it actually solved, because the people proved to be an abstract entity, incapable of solving the concrete political question of who is to formulate publicly binding legislation. As a result, the idea of popular sovereignty opens up the dangerous possibility that a new and even more oppressive form of tyranny may be exercised against the people, in the name of the people itself. Arendt takes this to be at least part of the explanation for the failure of the French Revolution to achieve the stated goal of instituting the conditions for political freedom.

Having identified the root of the problem in the attempt to substitute the old (transcendent) absolute with a new (immanent) version of it, she therefore poses the question of whether it is possible to found a political order without making reference to a notion of the absolute at all. The proposal she puts forward to address this challenge draws from a specific interpretation of the experience of the American Revolution, which she reads as having succeeded precisely where the French Revolution failed. Its core lies in a combination of the contractualist idea of a political order founded on reciprocal agreements among its members and the republican idea of a quasi-religious attachment to the founding moment itself.

I will return to the details of this theory, as well as to its complex relation with the notion of democracy, in the course of the substantive discussion carried out in the ensuing chapters of this book. For the time being, what I am interested in extracting from Arendt is the specific problem she poses through her discussion of the vicissitudes of the notion of the absolute. This ultimately boils down to a question over whether a political regime can be founded without making reference to the idea of something that does not depend on anything else: in other words, whether political legitimacy requires an absolute foundation, or whether it is possible to do without it.

This has been a central question in political theory at least since the beginning of the democratic age, and Arendt’s is by no means the only available answer. Indeed, contemporary democratic theories can be classified on the basis of the way in which they attempt to address this question. On the one hand, what I will be calling rationalist theories of democracy attempt to overcome the problems generated by the voluntaristic conception of the people implicit in early theories of popular sovereignty by employing the category of rationality to provide an autonomous set of foundations for the legitimacy of democratic regimes.¹⁷ What could perhaps be called post-foundationalist theories of democracy, on the other hand, attempt to circumvent the need for an absolute by questioning the assumption that a democratic order requires a philosophical foundation in the first place.¹⁸

The Catholic discourse of anti-relativism constitutes an alternative to both these strands of contemporary democratic theory. As we have seen, it is neither anti-absolutist nor post-foundational but resolutely affirms that democracies can only succeed in establishing a stable political order if they make reference to a set of absolute moral or political values, assumed to be derived from a transcendent source. From the point of view of the question under consideration, this can be seen as a way of challenging the very premise of most contemporary democratic theory by reasserting the need for the reference to a notion of the absolute from within a democratic framework.

Examining this discourse and attempting to respond to it therefore offer the opportunity for addressing one of the central questions of contemporary democratic theory from a different perspective. By comparing the way in which rationalist and post-foundational theories of democracy can succeed in responding to a challenge that is raised for both by the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism, I hope to shed new light on the question of whether democracy can do without the reference to some notion of the absolute. A large part of this book will therefore be devoted to a comparative analysis of existing democratic theories from the point of view of their capacity to address this question.

THE PARADOX OF DEMOCRACY OVERTHROWING ITSELF

The second substantive theoretical issue I intend to address through an engagement with the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism concerns a paradox that emerges from within the framework of democratic theory itself: that democracy may be overthrown by democratic means. As we have seen, the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism pivots essentially around this possibility, because the argument made against a relativistic conception of democracy is that it would not be capable of preventing such an outcome. If, for example, a majority of the people were to be convinced that they ought to relinquish their democratic rights, a relativist would seem to have no grounds for urging a defense of the democratic order against this expression of the people’s will.

It is on these grounds that the Catholic Church claims it is necessary to complement the democratic principle with reference to a set of absolute moral or political values, by suggesting that this is the only way to immunize it against its potentially suicidal tendencies. As we have also seen, however, from a longer-term perspective,