Citizenship democratic: ethics, politics and religion. XIX Aranguren Lectures

Abstract

This article is comprised of two parts, bound together by the concept of democratic citizenship. The first part attempts to design the lines of deliberative democracy as the most appropriate model to embody the actual substance of democracy. That is why it presents the sense of deliberative democracy, its traits, its advantages compared with other models, the conditions for its start-up, its limits and the specific type of deliberative democracy that would be more adequate, and which receives the name of «communicative democracy»; all of this by way of dialogues with its main representatives. The second part addresses the specific questions of the place of religion in societies that understand themselves as deliberative democracies; societies that can be understood as secular, post-secular, or better still, pluralist. Entering into the debate between the defenders of a public-political space and those of a polyphonic public sphere, between the partisans of a secular public reason or simply a public reason, this article proposes a public-social space model as a discovery place, where the diversity of voices guarantees respect for complex citizenship and facilitates positive-sum games.