Democracy as horizon: conjectural argumentation and public reason beyond the state

Abstract

Alessandro Ferrara’s conception of Democratic Horizon provides an innovative normative framework to address the challenge of hyperpluralism for an updated political liberalism. This project however, takes the fact of hyperpluralism as a given, disconnected from the global political context that leads to the emergence of this phenomenon. In particular, (1) the paper asks if liberal democracies have a duty to enlarge their polities through new constituent assembles and supranational organizations, or if accession of new polities should be conceived as a matter of national interest among interested parties. Paradoxically, (2) the paper defends the thesis that resort to conjectural argumentation that helps accommodate internal cultural diversity cannot justify supranational integration in normative terms or a transnational fusion of horizons. As an alternative, (3) the paper explores the notion of “conjectural space” for fair bargaining formation among interested parties. Additionally, (4) it also argues that the “ethos of openness” that supports the Democratic Horizon is unnecessarily constrained by a statist model of global governance. This model is still unjustifiably tied to the representation of national interests irrespective of population size or competing transnational interests.