86

This essay offers a critical presentation of the liberalism of public reason developed by the American political philosopher Gerald Gaus (1952-2020). More specifically, it discusses his treatment of the problem of moral reconciliation within diverse, pluralistic societies. The reconciliation problem is grasped through the “open society model”, preferred to the Rawlsian model of the “well-ordered society”. Our aim is to assess the extent to which Gaus succeeds in addressing the problem of reconciliation as he characterizes it, according to his own criteria. We argue that the open society model fails to demonstrate the possibility of moral reconciliation in diverse societies, for reasons that are nonetheless instructive. There are two possible conclusions: either Gaus’s social philosophy must be significantly amended, or it must be retained at the cost of a certain pessimism about the possibility of public justification in liberal society.