Introduction: beyond public reason

Abstract

This introduction situates the special issue within longstanding debates on liberal public reason, tracing its Enlightenment roots through Habermas and Rawls to contemporary political dilemmas. It highlights how anthropology has revealed the exclusions embedded in public reason’s universalist claims, particularly for those marginalized by culture, race, gender, class, or religion. We argue that liberal public reason has become both a hegemonic philosophy and a globalized pedagogical tool of governance, yet its assumptions about rationality, abstraction, and secularism often obscure or delegitimize alternative modes of political communication and ethical life. This introduction outlines how the essays collected here explore immanent social projects that do not merely critique liberalism from its margins but enact alternative public reasoning grounded in vernacular, embodied, and relational practices. These projects arise both within and beyond liberal institutions, offering political horizons not overdetermined by liberal assumptions. The authors advocate moving beyond frameworks that juxtapose liberalism with its ‘illiberal’ others, emphasizing anthropology’s potential to illuminate diverse forms of public deliberation that exceed these binaries. Finally, the introduction argues that by attending ethnographically to these alternative practices, from community organizing to legal reasoning, from embodied solidarity to spiritual claims, we can rethink public reason as plural, situated, and capable of addressing deep difference without demanding assimilation to liberal norms.

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