On the Co-originality of Liberalism and Democracy: Rationalist vs. Paradoxicalist Perspectives

Abstract

When the commitment to liberal rights conflicts with the commitment to democratic procedures, which side ought to prevail? Whereas rights foundationalists hold that rights trump procedures and democratic positivists hold that procedures trump rights, theorists of co-originality affirm both rights and procedures as coeval, equally valid commitments within a liberal democracy. But the notion of co-originality itself can be interpreted in two different ways: either in a rationalist form (as the idea that rights and procedures can be reconciled, so that those rights which limit democratic majorities are understood as being required by the very meaning of democracy itself) or in a paradoxicalist form (as the idea that rights and procedures do inescapably conflict, with neither side having primacy, but such conflicts are understood as conducive to salutary democratic goods like diversity and ongoing activism). Taking Corey Brettschneider and Chantal Mouffe as key exponents of the rationalist and paradoxicalist forms of co-originality, respectively, this article examines how these two renderings of co-originality ought to be understood in relation to each other. After elaborating the implicit critique each account makes of the other, my ultimate point is that one should understand Brettschneider and Mouffe’s alternate forms of co-originality as themselves being co-original. On the one hand, I demonstrate how Brettschneider’s rationalism and Mouffe’s paradoxicalism remain in permanent tension, with each side opposed to – yet nonetheless unable to dispense with – the other. On the other hand, I show how their two divergent notions of co-originality, when viewed not in abstract terms as rival political epistemologies but as practical guides for how actual citizens ought to operate within liberal democracies, can work in tandem with each other without necessarily involving direct conflict.