Pluralism, Deliberation, and Multiple Democracies

In his most recent book, The Democratic Horizon, Alessando Ferrara discusses three ways in which contemporary political philosophy addresses pluralism in the “hyper-pluralist” context of contemporary societies. More specifically, he analyses Rawls’ political liberalism, the agonistic view of democracy of radical deliberative approaches, and a “conjectural” strategy that aims at including non-liberal comprehensive doctrines in the democratic process. The problem is that the justification of democracy in a “hyper-pluralistic” society differs greatly from that of classical liberalism.