Abstract

In this essay I deal with two conceptions of the political—one that entails a clash of civilizations associated with an Schmittian critique of liberalism, and a second that envisions the political as an emerging domain in relationship to the idea of overlapping consensus. The discovery of the emerging domain of the political in the later work of John Rawls separates the comprehensive from the political in a way that breaks the link between modernization and secularization. In so doing Rawls accommodates the rise of religion that has become a major issue in the twenty-first century. I follow Rawls's development from…