Ricoeur Across The Disciplines - (6 Ricoeur and Political Theory Liberalism and Communitarianism)

Chapter 6
Ricoeur and Political Theory: Liberalism

and Communitarianism
Bernard P. Dauenhauer
Every intellectually and morally responsible political society aims to provide

as good a life for as many of its members as it can. This aim serves as the
ultimate norm for evaluating the society’s political institutions and prac-
tices. Among the generally agreed upon ingredients of a good life are
freedom to choose among a variety of opportunities for employment, edu-
cation, political participation, and so on, a fair distribution of the resources
needed to make one’s choices bear good fruit, and conditions of security
and stability that give members confidence in their society’s durability. The
task for political theoreticians is to determine how best to achieve this
overall political aim. What sorts of government, what laws, what sorts of
citizen involvement in political decision-making are likely to bring about
such a society? Answers to these and other important issues facing a politi-
cal society presuppose some more or less explicit conception of what it is to
be a person. As is well known, whether one adopts an Aristotelian, or a
Copyright © 2012. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.
Hobbesian, or a Rousseauian, or a Lockean conception of the person has

major consequences concerning what sorts of political institutions and
practices can be conducive to a good life for a society’s citizens.
At least since the 1971 publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice,
a staple of Anglo-American political thought has been the liberalism-
communitarianism debate.1 A crucial part of this debate concerns how one
ought to conceive of the person, the self who is the citizen, a self that is both
the agent and the patient of political life. There is little reason to believe
that anyone can develop and fully defend a definitive conception of the
self and its kind of identity. Nonetheless, all attempts to do so are not
“created equal,” that is, equally flawed. In this essay, I argue that Paul
Ricoeur’s conception of the self and its kind of identity is superior to those
that underpin liberalism, on the one hand, and communitarianism, on the
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Ricoeur and Political Theory 103
other. Ricoeur’s conception encompasses the strengths of each of these

alternatives without suffering from the defects that weaken them. Further-
more, his conception of the self has important implications for sound
political practice in the complex world we now inhabit.
To make my case, I will first recall some of the salient features of present-
day liberalism and communitarianism, paying particular attention to the
conceptions of the self operative in them and to the inherent weaknesses
each of them suffers from. Then I will take up Ricoeur’s view and point to
a few of its significant implications for responsible political practice.
Liberalism
The historical origin of liberalism, according to John Rawls, “is the

Reformation and its aftermath, with the long controversies over religious
toleration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Something like the
modern understanding of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought
began there.”2 This freedom of thought ushered in our era of pluralism
concerning both religious and non-religious doctrines. For liberalism plu-
ralism is not disastrous. Rather, it is the natural outcome of human reason
functioning in free societal institutions. The task for liberal political thought,
in Rawls’ view, is thus to answer the question: “How is it possible that there
may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens pro-
foundly divided by reasonable religious, political, and moral doctrines?”3
Whatever disagreements liberal political theorists may have with one
another, they are united in emphasizing the uniqueness of each person.
They agree that each person is an autonomous agent and that this auton-
omy carries with it entitlements that cannot justly be infringed upon. These
entitlements are at the base of all of our sound relationships with one
another, including our political relationships. Accordingly, the fundamen-
tal issue confronting citizens of modern political societies is how to devise a
just or fair system of stable institutions and practices that recognize and
protect these entitlements. We are obligated to work for political institu-
tions and practices that distribute to each person his or her fair share of
public goods. Put otherwise, we are obligated to make sure that no person
is made a scapegoat for the benefit of others.4 The appropriate liberal insti-
tutions aim to insure that each citizen has an equal opportunity to seek his
or her self-defined personal fulfillment.
As both Rawls and Ronald Dworkin make plain, modern liberal political
thought and the objectives it aims for rest upon a strongly individualistic
104 Ricoeur Across the Disciplines
conception of the person and its kind of identity. Consider first Rawls.
A person, he says, is “someone who can be a citizen, that is, a normal and
fully cooperating member of a society over a complete life.”5 By virtue of
the fundamental moral powers that all persons possess, namely, the power
to think and form judgments and the power arising from a sense of justice
and a conception of the good, every person can adopt and maintain or
revise a conception of the good life, a life that consists in “a more or less
determinate scheme of final ends, that is, ends we want to realize for their
own sake, as well as attachments to other persons and loyalties to various
groups and associations.”6
Rawls does not claim that his conception of the person has the status of
metaphysical or ontological truth. Rather, he presents it as the conception
that one ought to adopt for the purposes of constructing a theory of a just
pluralistic and democratic political society. Under a substantive conception
of the self, one might, for example, include the notion that we are all
children of a God who has given us a revelation about how we should live.
Such a person would have reason to give expression to this belief in several
ways. For example, people holding this belief might well be guided by it in
their religious affiliations or in how they educate their children. Rawls
would not object to their doing so. But he would call for them to confine
themselves to the Rawlsian conception of the person when they participate
in the political institutions and practices that govern their society.
Given his conception of the person, Rawls argues that each person is
equally entitled to legal protection of his or her fair share of public goods.
Likewise, each person is obligated to accept the obligations that this
sharing imposes. Because of the ineliminable differences in the health,
talents, and opportunities that distinguish persons from one another, a fair
distribution of benefits and burdens cannot reasonably aim for sheer arith-
metic equality. To do so would, for example, unfairly disadvantage those
who suffer from handicaps not of their own making. It would make them
scapegoats. To avoid this, the system for distributing public benefits and
burdens ought to insure that whatever social and economic inequalities
exist or are produced among individual members are so arranged that they
are “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”7
Rawls calls this distributional principle the “difference principle.”
Another important and prominent version of liberalism is the one
defended by Ronald Dworkin. Though Dworkin’s disagreements with Rawls
are by no means insignificant, for present purposes I want to call attention
to the affinities between their conceptions of the person and his or her
basic rights and responsibilities. No less than Rawls, Dworkin emphasizes
the uniqueness and autonomy of each person. And like Rawls, Dworkin
wants to insure against any form of scapegoating. But unlike Rawls, for his
version of liberalism Dworkin looks “not to principles that are distinctly
political or even moral but rather to principles that identify more abstract
value in the human situation.”8 In Dworkin’s view, there are two such prin-
ciples that, when taken together, “define the basis and conditions of human
dignity.”9
According to the first principle, each human life possesses a special kind
of intrinsic value. Once a human life has begun, it matters whether that life
successfully realizes its potential or fails to do so. To realize one’s potential
is an objective value not only for the person in question but also for the rest
of us. For Dworkin, “a human life’s success or failure is not only important
to the person whose life it is or only if and because that is what he wants.
The success or failure of any human life is important in itself, something we
all have reason to want or to deplore.”10 This first principle thus asserts
a fundamental equality among all people.
Dworkin’s second principle, the principle of personal responsibility,
requires each person to accept “a special responsibility for realizing the
success of his own life, a responsibility that includes exercising his judg-
ment about what kind of life would be successful for him.”11 Of course, each
of us can rightly seek advice about how we should live, but what each of us
ultimately decides is a matter of individual responsibility. This second
principle gives expression to the idea of liberty.12
For Dworkin, these two principles are formally individualistic. That is,
“they attach value to and impose responsibility on people one by one.”13
They do not deny that some community or tradition may be crucially impor-
tant to the success of some people. But the principles do demand that each
of us take individual responsibility for how we deal with the communities or

traditions that are relevant to our specific situations. These two principles
are of fundamental importance for democratic politics. Taken together, they
call for the recognition that all people “have political rights to whatever pro-
tection is necessary to respect the equal importance of their lives and their
sovereign responsibility to identify and create value in their own lives.”14
In sum, as the positions of both Rawls and Dworkin exemplify, political
liberalism rests on a strongly individualistic conception of the person, the
self. For this liberalism, the necessary condition for genuine justice, a jus-
tice that accords equality and liberty to each citizen, is the recognition of
individual autonomy.
Michael Walzer has drawn attention to what he calls the “dissociative
impulses” that are at play in liberalism. These impulses are exemplified by
liberalism’s emphasis on free choice and the individual’s rights against gov-
ernmental interference. For liberals, a good political society is one in which
individual people
choose among a maximum number of options. The autonomous individ-

ual confronting his, and now her, possibilities—this is much the best
thing to be. To live well . . . is to make personal choice. Not any particular
choices, for no choice is substantively best: it is the activity of choosing
that makes for autonomy . . . We can only choose when we have many
choices.15
Given this emphasis on free choice, liberalism demands great respect

for the impulses we have to dissociate ourselves from people or institutions
that interfere with our freedom to choose as we see fit. With its dissociative
tendencies, liberalism “seems continually to undercut itself, to disdain its
own traditions, and to produce in each generation renewed hopes for a
more absolute freedom from history and society alike.”16 And so, “associa-
tion is always at risk in a liberal society.”17 Liberalism’s dissociative impulses
mesh readily with the strongly individualistic conceptions of the self that
Rawls and Dworkin, like most liberal political theorists, adopt. Taken
together, these impulses and this conception pose constant threats to the
stability that any viable political society must possess. Hence, Walzer rightly
concludes: “Liberalism is a self-subverting doctrine; for that reason, it really
does require periodic communitarian correction.”18 In the end, though,
Walzer himself does not consider communitarianism to be a defensible
full-fledged alternative to liberalism in today’s world. Rather, it can serve to
protect liberalism against its own tendency to undercut itself.19
Walzer’s perceptive analysis of the liberalism-communitarianism debate is

of great value. But he has not sufficiently appreciated the importance for
political theory of a properly complex conception of the self. For him, “the
central issue for political theory is not the constitution of the self but the
connection of constituted selves, the pattern of social relations.”20 Commu-
nitarian thought concerning the self is of more importance for political
philosophy than Walzer allows.
Communitarianism
The term “communitarianism” is probably applicable to a more diverse

collection of positions than is the term “liberalism.” What unites this
collection of positions is at least as much their objections to liberalism as

any set of claims they happen to share with one another. That is, communi-
tarians share with one another the conviction that liberalism’s individual-
ism is deeply mistaken, but they disagree with one another concerning what
should replace it. For my present purpose of showing the strength of
Ricoeur’s conception of the self, I will focus here on the version of commu-
nitarianism that Charles Taylor espouses and the understanding of the
self to which he subscribes.
In Sources of the Self, Taylor argues that a self’s identity qua self is a moral
identity. It is the identity of a moral agent as opposed to the physical
identity that other sorts of entities possess.21 A self is one who unavoidably
makes sense of itself in terms of (a) some sense of respect for and obliga-
tions to other people, (b) some understanding of what makes a full and
good life, whether of one’s own life or that of others, and (c) some notion
of what human dignity is and requires.22 To be an adult self is necessarily to
interpret oneself in the light of these three questions.
More fully, every self is born into and comes to maturity within some
particular human community. And so,
I define who I am by defining where I speak from, in the family tree, in

social space, in the geography of social statuses and functions, in my inti-
mate relations to the ones I love, and also crucially in the space of moral
and spiritual orientation within which my most important defining
relations are lived out.23
Every human community is a linguistic community with its own distinctive

discourse in which it addresses the issues vital to its members. A person
comes to maturity only through living in such a community. And member-

ship in the community carries with it responsibilities not wholly of one’s
own choosing.
People can, of course, “convert” from the community into which they
were born and reared. They may develop an understanding of themselves
and of human life that is greatly at odds with the views and evaluations
that prevail in their “natal” communities. Nonetheless, whatever the depth
of such a conversion, it can only occur as a movement from one particular
social place to another particular place, another discursive community.
Thus, “one is only a self among other selves.”24 Or, “I am a self only in
relation to certain interlocutors . . . A self exists only within . . . ‘webs of
interlocution.’”25 And all such webs unavoidably impose obligations on
those who dwell within them.
Taylor explicitly draws the contrast between his conception of the self
and those found in individualistic liberalism. The liberal conceptions
“picture the human person as, at least potentially, finding his or her
own bearings within, declaring independence from the webs of interlocu-
tion which have originally formed him/her (sic), or at least neutralizing
them.”26 What these liberal conceptions fail to acknowledge is that however
original a person is, however far he or she goes beyond the confines of
thought and value that hold sway in his or her community, “the drive to
original vision will be hampered, will ultimately be lost in inner confusion,
unless it can be placed in some way in relation to the language and vision of
others.”27 In short, however original or autonomous I may be in the concep-
tions I hold about what counts as a worthwhile way to live my life, I must still
make sense of myself through interlocution with people who are somehow
fellow members of the discursive community I inhabit and to which I am
always somehow indebted.28
Taylor’s conception of the self fits well with the basic communitarian
claim that for a good life, we have to “experience our lives as bound up with
the good of communities out of which our identity has been constituted.”29
These communities are not like bridge clubs or square-dancing clubs,
membership in which has little to do with a normal person’s basic sense of
identity or well-being. Rather, the relevant communities are those based on
(a) some geographical location that we in some fashion regard as “home,”
or (b) some shared history that has moral significance for its members, or
(c) some sustained face-to-face interaction marked by sentiments of
cooperation, mutual trust, and altruism.30 Unlike liberal organizations,
whose members join or leave them at will, communitarian communities are
constituted by the durable commitments that their members have to one
another.
Communitarians take it that there are many different worthwhile forms
of communal life in today’s world. Many of these communities do not
compete against one another. Indeed, many people today would find that
having a full good life would require them to participate in more than
one of these communities. For example, one might find that a full good
life requires participation in an appropriate professional association,
a religious tradition, and some political party or organization. Accordingly,
“the distinctive communitarian political project is to identify valued forms
of community and to devise policies designed to protect and promote them,
without sacrificing too much freedom.”31
Walzer, as I have indicated, recognizes that the dissociative impulses
resident in individualistic liberalism threaten a political society’s stability.
Communitarian concerns, emphasizing as they do the political importance

of stable associations, serve as a salutary constraint on these impulses.
But these constraints, which Walzer calls communitarianism’s “associative
impulses,” pose political dangers of their own. Unbridled, they can pres-
sure some people into conduct they find to be abhorrent. These associative
impulses can produce scapegoats.
Walzer is led to conclude that individualistic liberalism by itself cannot
insure that its dissociative impulses will not induce the collapse of its
political society. Nor can any form of communitarianism guarantee that its
associative impulses will not produce scapegoats. Because today’s liberalism
tends to subvert its own achievements in establishing and maintaining a
habitable, stable, pluralistic society, it cannot do without periodic commu-
nitarian corrections. But, at least in today’s world, characterized as it is by so
much population mobility, communitarianism neither can nor ought to
replace liberalism and its distinctive practices and institutions.32
Given that neither individualistic liberalism nor communitarianism
have shown themselves to be capable of serving as the doctrinal basis for a
modern stable democratic society, it is reasonable to call into question the
sources that lead, on the one hand, to liberalism’s excessive dissociative
impulses and, on the other, to communitarianism’s excessive associative
impulses. At the forefront of these sources are the competing conceptions
of the self that figure in them. Liberalism’s conception of the self provides
grounds for its dissociative tendencies, while communitarianism’s concep-
tion provides grounds for its associative tendencies. Neither conception
would call for moderating these tendencies. Indeed, in practice these con-
ceptions have served to justify resistance to any moderation. Nonetheless,
as the historical record attests, sound democratic practice requires an ongo-
ing dialectical interplay between these two sorts of tendencies, and Ricoeur’s
alternative conception of the self reveals why this is the case.
Ricoeur: A “Communitarian Liberal”
For Ricoeur, both political thought and political practice presuppose

persons who can and do initiate actions and to whom these actions can be
imputed as good or bad, as sensible or foolish, and so on. Persons are
constituted as such by a set of powers or abilities to act, each of which is
fragile or vulnerable. These powers “achieve their full efficacy only under a
system of political existence.”33 Indeed, one can rightly say that the constitu-
tive capacity for action is the mode of being that distinguishes persons from
other kinds of entities.34 Properly understood, action encompasses not

only doing and making but also receiving and enduring. Likewise, it encom-
passes “saying inasmuch as it is doing, ordinary action, inasmuch as it is
intervention in the course of things, narration inasmuch as it is the narra-
tive reassembling of a life stretched out in time, and finally, the capacity
to impute to oneself or to others the responsibility for acting.”35 The self
constitutes its identity in the course of engaging in these four modes of
action, but this identity is both complex and never definitively fixed. Its
complexity springs from the self’s fundamental way of inhabiting the world.
On the one hand, by virtue of its embodiment, the identity of the self
depends upon its material and cultural situation. But, on the other, the
self’s identity also depends upon its ability to initiate, to inaugurate some-
thing new. Ricoeur refers to these two aspects of identity as idem-identity
and ipse-identity.
A person’s idem-identity is the identity by virtue of which he or she remains
spatiotemporally selfsame. This identity includes not only one’s distinctive
biological makeup (e.g., one’s distinctive DNA), but also one’s acquired
habits, dispositions, beliefs, and self-assumed roles. This idem-identity is
describable in empirical terms. By contrast, a person’s ipse-identity is not
empirically evident. It is, rather, discernible as a kind of self-constancy, an
ongoing capacity to make commitments and either keep or break them.
Self-consistency is that characteristic by virtue of which I am accountable to
other people for what I do.
The paradigm case that bears witness to the irreducibility of ipse-identity
to idem-identity is the promise. A promise commits its maker to a specific
action regardless of any inclinations arising from his or her idem-identity.
The promise maker’s conscience judges his or her own self-constancy in liv-
ing up to the promise. It either authorizes or denies authorizing its self to

claim the kind of self-constancy that makes one trustworthy.36 It is evident
that every agent achieves either idem-identity or ipse-identity only through
interaction with other agents. Furthermore, these agents live with and inter-
act as members of a society that antedates them and is expected to outlast
them. It is this society that makes it possible for agents to participate in
politics and thereby have a political identity.37
More generally, we find help in making sense of how these two modes of
temporally extended identity fit together by reflecting on how persons
appear as self-identical in both historical and fictional stories. This reflec-
tion shows that personal identity, constituted by the interplay of one’s
idem-identity and ipse-identity, is at bottom a narrative identity.38 Every
narrative recounts initiatives that some person or group of persons has
taken. These initiatives inaugurate something new. But they also have con-
sequences that last for some time and that form the context for subsequent
initiatives. Narratives tell of the dialectical relationship between these initia-
tives, which take place in some present moment, and some set of recollec-
tions and expectations or aspirations that constitute the past and future
horizons of every initiative.
Narratives give expression to the distinctive mode of time that Ricoeur
calls historical time. Historical time is in principle public time. It is the time
in which one can recognize sequences of generations and detect traces that
predecessors have left behind and learn of debts that one owes to them.
Without at least a latent sense of this indebtedness, Ricoeur claims, there
could be no meaningful history.39 Historical narratives, then, deal with the
interventions of the human power to act into the ordered processes of the
material and cultural worlds. They recount moments when agents, who
recognize their power to act, actually do so, and sufferers, who are subject
to being affected by actions, actually undergo them. Furthermore, they
report the outcomes, whether intended or not, of these interventions.
In doing so, such narratives are indispensable resources both for sound
political reflection and responsible political practice.
Ricoeur’s conception of personal identity as a narrative identity can
account for both the liberal emphasis on the self as a unique individual and
the communitarian emphasis on the self as a member of shared community
or society upon which he or she depends to lead a meaningful life. With the
liberals, Ricoeur argues that every action, even though it is always part of
some interaction, is imputable to a particular agent as his or her own
individual performance. There are, for Ricoeur, no higher order agents.40
To maintain its capacity to act and thereby express its ipse-identity the
Ricoeurian self must be able to dissociate itself when necessary from per-
sons or institutions that threaten to prevent it from exercising its ability to
initiate. Though the self can and often does coordinate its action with the
actions of others in order to perform a so-called group action, for example,
playing a game as a member of a team, each self’s action remains its own
and can be imputed uniquely to it.
With the communitarians, on the other hand, Ricoeur agrees that
a person can perform an action only if he or she has the benefit of some
resources that only a community or society can provide. For example, to make
a legally binding will, a will that insures that the testator’s wishes are honored,
there must be legal institutions that have the necessary power to enforce the
will. The agent’s recognition of the need for these enabling resources gives
rise to the associative impulses that communitarians emphasize. The self is
tied to the community, and the community’s resources are constitutive

features of its idem-identity.41
The Ricoeurian conception of the self provides the underpinnings for a
distinctive understanding of democratic politics and citizenship. Though
he himself, to my knowledge, did not do so, one could rightly say that
Ricoeur espouses a “communitarian liberalism.” On his understanding of
politics, individual citizens have obligations to their society that they have
not contracted for and that they themselves cannot cancel at will. Not only
are citizens to discharge these debts, they are also obligated to do what
they can to preserve their society and its institutions so that other people,
contemporaries and descendents, can benefit from membership therein.
These debts to one’s society have their basis in history, but are not a fate.
The responsible citizen is one who never forgets that no society or any
institutional component of it is perfect. Criticism and reform are never
entirely out of place. Accordingly, the communitarian liberal recognizes
the importance of refusing to give uncritical allegiance to any regime.
In some instances, exercising one’s capacity to dissociate oneself from some
project undertaken by one’s society may be a greater manifestation of
loyalty than simple acquiescence. But since the exercise of one’s ability to
act depends upon some institutionally supported association with other
people, dissociation is never free of risk. Hence, all citizens ought to do
what they can to insure that their political society accords to each of its
members the full-fledged esteem and respect that is due them and required
to live a fully human life.42 Such esteem and respect acknowledge each per-
son’s inherent capacities to honor the debts owed to his or her society as
well as to make his or her own unique contribution to the society’s ongoing
life in common.
Some Implications for Political Practice
Ricoeur himself, to my knowledge, never claims to have worked out

a comprehensive political philosophy. Nonetheless, he does offer a number
of important insights concerning responsible political practice. These
insights spring more or less directly from his conceptions of action and the
self who performs them. Here I will focus on only a few of these important
insights.
As I mentioned earlier, Ricoeur emphasizes that all action is, in various
ways, interaction. Each one of us is born into a world constituted in large
part by the actions of others. Their actions set the context for the sequence
of actions that I perform. My actions, in turn, contribute to the context in

which my contemporaries and successors will act. In short, every action is
part of a history of human interaction without which no individual action
could make sense.
Furthermore, because all action is interaction, every action unavoidably
runs the risk of inflicting some measure of harm on some other people.
That is, one person’s action can all too often impinge on others in such a
way that it interferes, at least for a while, with their own capacities for
acting. In these cases, whether intentionally or not, a person’s action causes
others to suffer, even to the point that they can feel that their personal
integrity has been violated.43 Of course, most actions do not harm anyone.
Quite often, we find that we are beneficiaries of what others do. Nonethe-
less, “the opportunity for doing violence lies within the very structure of
human action—to act is to act upon another who undergoes my action.”44
Among the consequences for politics of the interactive character of action
are (a) the fact that each action is part of a history of action that gives rise
to the unavoidable fragility of every actual political regime, and (b) the fact
that all action risks making other people suffer is at the heart of the ration-
ale for a society’s political and legal institutions.
Consider first the matter of political fragility. Political practice is unavoid-
ably paradoxical. On the one hand, it aims to organize the society’s
members in such a way that they can make decisions together and accom-
plish things that none of them could do alone. Ricoeur speaks of this aim
as the promotion of “power-in-common,” a power constituted by the coop-
eration of basically equal citizens. But, political life always involves the dom-
inance of some person or persons over others. As history shows, rulers are
always tempted both to prolong the duration of their rule and to make
their dominance more thoroughgoing. Ricoeur speaks of this political

dominance or domination as “power-over.”45 Responsible political practice
calls for making power-in-common prevail as much as possible over power-
over. But all too often, power-over wins out.
In my view, the political fragility that Ricoeur describes sheds important
light on the nature of democratic constitutions and on their inevitable limi-
tations. In democratic states, constitutions serve as one of the main deter-
rents to the pervasive tendencies of rulers to aggrandize their dominance.
One major way in which rulers do so is through enacting laws that expand
their own powers. Constitutions and the rights they confer upon citizens
are designed in large part to curtail this tendency. That is, the basic ration-
ale for constitutions and the rights they accord stems from the fact that, by
reason of interaction, every person’s capacity to act is always vulnerable,
always subject to being stifled by the actions of others, and the ineliminable
danger that, in the domain of politics, the ruler will abuse the state power
that he or she controls.
These constitutional rights are of two sorts. They reflect both the
“dissociative” and the “associative” relationships between the citizen and
the state. The person who is a citizen, on the one hand, is more than the
creature of the state. On the other hand, belonging to and participating in
a state is a necessary condition for a person to flourish.46 Constitutional
rights recognize both of these sorts of relationship. They give recognition
to the individual as well as the communal dimensions of a person’s relation-
ship to society and its members. In so doing, they reflect the kind of com-
plex self, with its narrative identity, that Ricoeur describes.
Even though the establishment of a regime of constitutional rights does
temper the risk that rulers will abuse the people they rule, it cannot make
them fully immune to such abuse. For one thing, constitutional rights are
worthless unless they are respected and enforced. But enforcing them
against violations, especially violations committed by government officials,
is no simple matter. As legal practice in the United States shows, govern-
mental officials often have immunity to punishment for violations of consti-
tutional rights that they commit in the course of discharging their official
functions. Giving such immunity may well be a practical necessity for recruit-
ing and maintaining a corps of competent officials, but it also weakens the
efficacy of the rights in question. The task, which by its very nature can
never be definitively accomplished, is to strike a balance that grants no more
immunity than is practically necessary to ensure effective governance.47
The difficulties involved in enforcing constitutional rights point to a
more fundamental issue concerning constitutions. Though constitutions
are designed to establish a permanent, stable framework for the laws that
make political life possible, they neither are nor can be made immutable.
They always display marks of the historical era in which they were adopted
and ratified. Furthermore, they are unavoidably open to interpretation.
In principle, they are always subject to additions, subtractions, and amend-
ments. And they can be wholly abrogated. In short, like the interactions
that initially established them and that subsequently interpret and apply
them, constitutions can never achieve a definitive, ahistorical validity.
These considerations provide evidence that Rawls has overstated the
degree of stability that one ought to aim for in a constitution. As part of his
ideal theory for a just, stable, pluralistic democratic society, Rawls calls for a
constitution that rests on a stable overlapping consensus among its reason-
able citizens. By definition, a pluralistic society is one in which its citizens
disagree among themselves concerning what sets of beliefs, what “compre-

hensive doctrines,” make for a good life. But if they are reasonable, they will
agree with one another that political power ought not be used to repress
any comprehensive doctrine that calls for the toleration of other compre-
hensive doctrines. That is, whatever the differences among these “tolerant”
comprehensive doctrines may be, there is an ”overlapping consensus”
among their adherents that political power ought not favor, or disfavor, any
particular one of these reasonable doctrines.48
The overlapping consensus that underpins a just democratic constitution,
Rawls contends, embodies the fundamental ideas concerning both political
society and the persons that can be citizens in it. Furthermore, the princi-
ples that this consensus upholds “also establish certain substantive rights
such as liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, as well as fair oppor-
tunity and principles covering certain essential needs.”49 In the process of
doing so, this consensus meets “the urgent political requirement to fix,
once and for all, the content of certain political basic rights and liberties,
and to assign them special priority.”50
In striving to fix these issues “once and for all,” Rawls makes it clear that
his aim is to remove them from the political agenda. He argues that, unless
such matters are protected against political deliberations and decisions
based on calculations of social utility or interest, they will remain subject to
the vagaries of ever-changing circumstances. Indeed, if these matters are
left unsettled, the stakes of political controversy are likely to rise. Insecurity
and hostility to public life are likely to grow to dangerous proportions.
In sum, “The refusal to take these matters off the agenda perpetuates the
deep divisions latent in society: it betrays a readiness to revive those antago-
nisms in the hope of gaining a more favorable position should later circum-
stances prove propitious.”51

I readily grant that a just political society needs the kind of stable legal
framework that a constitution provides. No sensible constitution is easy to
modify or replace. But it does not follow that a constitution ought to settle
“once and for all” any political issue. In fact, claiming that any political issue
is no longer open to discussion is likely to produce instability rather than
stability. Every constitution is in some respects backward-looking. It emerges
from a reflection on past political experience. But it is also prescriptive and
hence forward-looking. In this respect, there is always something experi-
mental about it. It amounts to a set of proposals concerning how people
can live together in a way that will be good for all of them.
There is, however, no way to guarantee that any particular constitution
will prove to be permanently successful. Rawls himself admits that a political
society always aims to perpetuate itself regardless of changing circum-

stances. What possible evidence in favor of any specific constitutional
provisions, even those concerning “political basic rights and liberties,”
could make them permanently immune to all reasonable challenges?
To be more concrete, let me point to the deep emerging challenges that
face every political society today. Among these challenges are those arising
from climate change, migrations of peoples, and threats of terrorism. The
size and scope of these emerging challenges is in many ways unprecedented.
Indeed, they threaten to be so severe that they will bring into question the
very sustainability of important parts of the way we have become accustomed
to live.52
Considerations of this sort support the conclusion that every political
constitution is, like everything brought about by human interaction, always
an artifact. It is a historical phenomenon and therefore subject to becom-
ing outmoded. Constitutions can reasonably aim to provide no more than
the framework for a well-considered, durable but mutable modus vivendi for
its citizens. No constitution can establish atemporal ideals against which
political practices and institutions are to be measured.53 By his stress on the
fragile and historical character of all action and by his conception of
the narrative identity of agents, Ricoeur sheds light on why constitutions
unavoidably have the limitations that they do.
Finally, consider Ricoeur’s conception of forgiveness and the importance
he places on the act of forgiving in political practice.54 For him, the kind of
self that each of us is and the kind of political identity that we have make
the giving and receiving of forgiveness not merely desirable but indeed a
practical necessity for any political practice that aspires to be responsible.55
In my view, what Ricoeur says about forgiveness is both as profound and as
practically demanding as anything else he says about politics.

We are all familiar with how regularly, in everyday life, what we do gives
some offense to others and how often what they do offends us to some
degree. Similarly, we know that forgiveness, asked for and given, works to
heal these hurts and harms. But we often fail to take into consideration
harms or evils that become embedded and institutionalized in our
political life and have ongoing repercussions both domestically and inter-
nationally. Following Karl Jaspers, Ricoeur draws special attention to those
moral evils that, by reason of the political offices held by their perpetrators,
constitute political evils.56 These are evils that establish laws or official
policies that unjustly favor or disfavor some members of the state. The ben-
eficiaries of these injustices, even if they were not perpetrators of them,
bear some responsibility for rectifying the damages that have been done.
Their responsibility arises “independently of their individual acts or their

degree of acquiescence in state policies. Whoever has taken advantage of
the public order must in some way answer for the evils created by the state
to which he or she belongs.”57
Even brief reflection shows how pervasive political evils are. Every politi-
cal society we know much about has perpetrated injustices of some sort,
either against some of its own members or against other people or both.
Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, it is beyond our power to eradicate all
of the political evils for which we bear some responsibility. At most, we can
do no more than to curtail some of the damages they inflict.58 The perva-
siveness and persistence of political evils leads Ricoeur to hold that the
most adequate response we can make to the array of moral and institutional
evils in which every normal adult is somehow entangled is to offer all other
people a radically unconditional forgiveness, a forgiveness that amounts to
a declaration to each person that, no matter what, “you are worth more
than whatever you do.”59
Ricoeurian forgiveness is always a gift that an individual or group of
individuals give. It cannot be made a component of any legal system. It is
neither incompatible with nor dependent upon any official action, such as
amnesties or pardons. Indeed, it does not preclude legal action that
punishes crimes.60 Properly constituted legal systems deal only with specific
actions. They do not directly address the personhood of those who perform
the actions in question. Ricoeurian forgiveness always has the person, rather
than specific actions, at the center of its focus. This radical forgiveness,
Ricoeur argues, is the crucial ingredient in any fitting practical response
that we, especially we Westerners, can make to our history. Ours is a history
replete with “wars of religion, wars of conquest, wars of extermination,
subjugation of ethnic minorities, expulsion or reduction of religious minor-

ities to slavery.”61
This history manifests the extravagant pride that peoples take in
their political or cultural identity. If there is to be any peace or reconcilia-
tion worthy of the name, the individual members of each society will have
to come to acknowledge the sufferings of other peoples, especially of the
peoples they regard as their enemies. Forgiving even the apparently unfor-
givable evils such as the Holocaust “has immense curative value, not only
for the guilty party but also for the victims.”62 One could hardly be faulted
for being deeply skeptical about how politically successful even very
widespread Ricoeurian forgiveness would turn out to be. At least at first
blush, Ricoeur’s claims for forgiveness may well look utopian, if not down-
right foolish.
Animosity of these sorts neither is nor has been rare. Indeed, such
animosity is so frequent that it gives plausibility to the Hobbesian view
that the natural state of relations among both individuals and states is one
of war.63 One could hardly be faulted for being skeptical about how politi-
cally successful even widespread Ricoeurian forgiveness would turn out
to be. At least at first blush, his claims for forgiveness seem utopian, if not
downright foolish.
The 2008 military conflict between Georgia and Russia has by no means
resolved the deeply rooted hostility between these two peoples. Relations
between China and Tibet likewise reflect a seemingly hopeless antagonism.
In war, the principal virtues are force and fraud or deception. Whatever
peace is to be established comes about through each of the competing
parties’ recognition that it is in its own best interests to refrain from seeking
competitive advantage by exercising the war virtues. From this “realist”
perspective, Ricoeurian forgiveness is at the least politically irrelevant and
perhaps even dangerously irresponsible.
The historical record certainly provides evidence in support of this
“realist” view. Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that the conditions
that gave “realism” its plausibility no longer obtain. The present threats to
the human habitability of substantial parts of the earth are now and for the
foreseeable future so severe and imminent that there is little reason to trust
that reliance on calculations of national self-interest can successfully deal
with them. Consider, for example, the multifaceted challenge of climate
change. Only concerted international cooperation has a chance to ward off
calamity. It would take blind faith to trust that the policies and practices
necessary to meet such a challenge will turn out to be in the national interest
of each of the states.
Faced with the need for global cooperation among peoples and states
that share a history so deeply marked by both physical and cultural aggres-
sion, one has reason to resist the temptation to dismiss Ricoeurian forgive-
ness as politically irrelevant. Perhaps such forgiveness would prove futile.
But, on the other hand, what alternative is there that shows more promise
for generating the kind of cooperation without which our recent situation
will lead to disaster?
In any event, both the capacity to forgive and the need to be forgiven
spring from the twofold identity that constitutes the Ricoeurian self. By
virtue of its ipse-identity, the self is able to offer forgiveness no matter what
it has suffered, while in virtue of its idem-identity it can appreciate what it
means to be a member of a suffering people. Unfortunately, of course, it is
also by virtue of its twofold identity that the self can also refuse to forgive.
Undoubtedly, it would be foolish to claim that Ricoeur has given the

definitive account of the self and its kind of identity. Ricoeur himself makes
no such claim. Nonetheless, his position does have the considerable merit
of illuminating central issues in political thought and practice. It not only
provides a basis for the respective convictions that give both liberalism and
communitarianism their appeal. More fundamentally, Ricoeur’s achieve-
ment is to have made clear why politics, even at its best, is, like the self,
always a work in progress.
Notes
1
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1971).
2
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xxiv.
3
Ibid., xxv.
4
See, e.g., Paul Ricoeur’s comments on Rawls in Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another,
trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 230.
5
Rawls, Political Liberalism, 19, 30.
6
Ibid., 19.
7
Ibid., 6; also 282–285.
8
Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006), 9.
9
Ibid., 10. In this context, Dworkin is explicitly focusing on American society, but
clearly he regards American society as paradigmatic for liberal democracy.
10
Ibid., 9–10; my emphasis on “any”; Dworkin’s emphasis on “reason.”
11
Ibid., 10.
12
For present purposes, I take it that the extension of Dworkin’s term “a human
life” covers only normal adult human beings and normal children. It does not
cover embryos or fetuses. Whether this extension is too restrictive is not directly
relevant to the issues at stake in this essay.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid., 32.
15
Michael Walzer, Thinking Politically (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007),
120.
16
Ibid., 105.
17
Ibid., 106.
18
Ibid., 105.
19
Ibid., 109–112.
20
Ibid., 111.
21
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1989), 23.
22
Ibid., 15.
23
Ibid., 35.
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid., 36.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 37.
28
Ibid., 37–39.
29
Daniel Bell, “Communitarianism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed.
Edward N. Zalta (online), 15.
30
Ibid., 15–17.
31
Ibid., 15.
32
Walzer, Thinking Politically, 110–112.
33
Paul Ricoeur, “Morale, éthique et politique,” in Pouvoirs, Révue française d’étudés
constitutionelles et politiques, (1993), 5.
34
Ricoeur’s conception of action corresponds to Martin Heidegger’s conception of
Care as the fundamental way in which persons exist and inhabit the world.
See Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 74–75.
35
Paul Ricoeur, “De l’Esprit,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 92: 2 (1994): 248. On
Ricoeur’s metaphysics of action, see François Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les sens d’une vie
(Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 651–652.
36
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 119–121, 165–168. See also, Paul Ricoeur, “From
Metaphysics to Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 39:4 (1996): 451–454.
37
See Paul Ricoeur, “Individu et identité personnelle,” in Sur l’individu, editor
unnamed (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 55–72. This volume contains the papers presented
at the Colloque de Royaumont in October 1985. See also Paul Ricoeur, “Ipséité/
Altérité/Socialité,” Archivio di Filosofia 1 (1986): 17–33. Ricoeur presented this
latter paper in January 1986, before his Gifford Lectures that later became Oneself
as Another.
38
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 165–166. Taylor also concludes that personal identity
is a narrative identity. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 47–48.
39
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David
Pellauer (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988), 108–118. The theme of
indebtedness to others figures prominently in Ricoeur’s later works. These are
debts that are in principle never fully repayable. Debts of this sort are of capital
importance in his ethical and political thought.
40
Paul Ricoeur, “Practical Reason?” in From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey
and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991),

204.
41
Paul Ricoeur, “Who is the Subject of Rights?” in The Just, trans. David Pellauer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 10. See also Paul Ricoeur, Lectures,
vol. 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 162–163.
42
On Ricoeur’s “communitarian liberalism,” see my “Ricoeur and the Tasks of
Citizenship,” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, eds. John Wall, Wil-
liam Schweiker, and W. David Hall (New York: Routledge, 2002), 238–239.
43
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 190.
44
Paul Ricoeur, “Entretien,” in Éthique et responsibilité: Paul Ricoeur, ed. Jean-Chris-
tophe Aeschliemann (Neuchatel: Baconniere, 1994), 16. Recall also Hannah
Arendt’s remarks on the transgressive character of action in The Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 240–241.
45
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 220. See also Paul Ricoeur, “The Political Paradox,” in
History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univer-
sity Press, 1965), 259–261.
46
Paul Ricoeur, “Who is the Subject of Rights?” 10.
47
For one study that sheds some light on the issue of enforcing constitutional
rights, see Bernard P. Dauenhauer and Michael L. Wells, “Corrective Justice and
Constitutional Torts,” Georgia Law Review 35:3 (2001): 903–929.
48
For Rawls’ own account of what counts as a reasonable comprehensive doctrine,
see his Political Liberalism, 58–61.
49
Ibid., 164.
50
Ibid., 161.
51
Ibid. Taking these matters off the political agenda amounts to Rawls’ effort to put
brakes on what Walzer has called liberalism’s dissociative impulses.
52
See, e.g., Daniel Callahan, “Unsustainable: Hard Truths about the ‘American
Way of Life,’” Commonweal 135:12 (June 2008): 12–14.
53
See in this connection, Bernard P. Dauenhauer, “A Good Word for a Modus
Vivendi,” in The Idea of a Political Liberalism: Essays on Rawls, eds. Victoria Davion
and Clark Wolf (Lanham, MD:. Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 204–220.
54
Ricoeur’s fullest account of forgiveness is in the epilogue “Difficult Forgiveness”
to Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 457–506. Also see Paul Ricoeur,
“Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 21:5
(1995), 3–11; and “Le pardon peut-il guérir?,” Esprit 2 (1995): 77–82.
55
See in this connection, Paul Ricoeur, “Responsibilité et fragilité,” Autres Temps,
76–77 (Spring 2003): 127–141.
56
Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 474–478. See also Karl Jaspers, The Question of
German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Dial Press, 1947).
57
Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 475; translation modified.
58
Bernard P. Dauenhauer, “Responding to Evil,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy
XLV:2 (2007): 207–222.
59
Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 493; translation modified.
60
Ibid., 472–474.
61
Ricoeur, “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” 9.
62
Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 125.
63
What I call here the “Hobbesian view” does not do full justice to Hobbes’
complete view. But it does point to the widespread belief that the only rational
justification for one state to cooperate with another is that its cooperation is
ultimately conducive to satisfying its own objectives. In the last analysis, how the
other state fares is irrelevant.

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Chapter 6

Ricoeur and Political Theory: Liberalism

Every intellectually and morally responsible political society aims to provide

Hobbesian, or a Rousseauian, or a Lockean conception of the person has

other. Ricoeur’s conception encompasses the strengths of each of these

The historical origin of liberalism, according to John Rawls, “is the

of us take individual responsibility for how we deal with the communities or

choose among a maximum number of options. The autonomous individ-

Given this emphasis on free choice, liberalism demands great respect

Walzer’s perceptive analysis of the liberalism-communitarianism debate is

The term “communitarianism” is probably applicable to a more diverse

collection of positions is at least as much their objections to liberalism as

I define who I am by defining where I speak from, in the family tree, in

Every human community is a linguistic community with its own distinctive

comes to maturity only through living in such a community. And member-

Communitarian concerns, emphasizing as they do the political importance

Ricoeur: A “Communitarian Liberal”

For Ricoeur, both political thought and political practice presuppose

other kinds of entities.34 Properly understood, action encompasses not

ing up to the promise. It either authorizes or denies authorizing its self to

tied to the community, and the community’s resources are constitutive

Some Implications for Political Practice

Ricoeur himself, to my knowledge, never claims to have worked out

of actions that I perform. My actions, in turn, contribute to the context in

their dominance more thoroughgoing. Ricoeur speaks of this political

disagree among themselves concerning what sets of beliefs, what “compre-

stances prove propitious.”51

society always aims to perpetuate itself regardless of changing circum-

practically demanding as anything else he says about politics.

Their responsibility arises “independently of their individual acts or their

subjugation of ethnic minorities, expulsion or reduction of religious minor-

Undoubtedly, it would be foolish to claim that Ricoeur has given the

and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991),

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