Pluralist justice and liberal constitutionalism: A reply to critics

Abstract

In my book, A Pluralist Theory of Constitutional Justice: Assessing Liberal Democracy in Times of Rising Populism and Illiberalism (OUP 2022) I advance the thesis that liberal constitutionalism must satisfy a minimum of distributive justice in its three dimensions of material welfare, identitarian recognition, and democratic representation. I label this minimum the “justice essentials” drawing on Rawls’s concept of “constitutional essentials”, and defend it within the ambit of my theory of comprehensive pluralism. In this writing, I reply to the comments and criticisms of five scholars and further clarify and elaborate my theory. Specifically, I clarify how my theory impacts on the dichotomy between constituent and constituted powero and on that between political and constitutional theology. I defend the justice essentials as not amounting to one competing conception of justice against others. I stress that the dialectical dimension of comprehensive pluralism clearly distinguishes my theory from that of Rawls’s in his Political Liberalism. I respond to the claim that my theory does not properly account for constitutionalism in the Global South. And finally, I grapple with the way my theory is suited to handle the inherently inclusionary and exclusionary dimensions of all universals