Interview with Alessandro Ferrara: Political Liberalism and Democracy as a Global Horizon

Abstract

Alessandro Ferrara is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome Tor Vergata (Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata), and former President of the Italian Association for Political Philosophy. He is the founder and Director of the Colloquium Philosophy & Society in Rome and the Director of the Center for the Study of Religions and Political Institutions in Post-Secular Society at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Since 1991 Alessandro Ferrara has been a Director of the Yearly Conference on Philosophy and Social Science in Prague (formerly held at the Interuniversity Centre of Dubrovnik), and since 2007 he is on the Executive Committee of the Istanbul Seminars on Religion and Politics, held under the auspices of the Association Reset - Dialogues of Civilizations. He has lectured in a number of universities and institutions, including Harvard University, Columbia University, Yale University, New School for Social Research, University College London (UCL), Oxford University, the Chinese Academy of Social Science and many others. Alessandro Ferrara's work revolves around the formulation of an authenticity- and judgment-based account of normative validity, which by way of incorporating a post-metaphysically reconstructed version of the normativity of Kant's 'reflective judgment', could be immune to antifoundationalist objections and yet represent a viable alternative to the formalism of standard proceduralist accounts of normative validity. He is the author of Modernity and Authenticity. A Study of the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1993 (transl. into Italian); Reflective Authenticity. Rethinking the Project of Modernity, 1998 (transl. into Italian and Spanish); Justice and Judgment. The Rise and the Prospect of the Judgment Model in Contemporary Political Philosophy, 1999 (transl. into Italian); The Force of the Example. Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, 2008 (transl. into Italian and Spanish) and The Democratic Horizon. Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism, 2014 (transl. into Spanish). The Democratic Horizon, Ferrara's latest work, presents his particular elaboration of the 'political liberalism' articulated in the later works of John Rawls, which Ferrara proposes as an 'adaptive countermeasure' to what he sees as the ever more inhospitable global conditions for contemporary democracy. This interview addresses some implications of Ferrara's insightful and multifaceted theoretical perspective. .