Towards Justifying and Actualising the Political Conception of Justice: Rawlsian Lacunae of Democratic Design and the Path of Plebeian Assemblies

Polarisation, a desertion of common political ground broadly held to be deleterious, presently afflicts nigh on all democracies as an existential illness. John Rawls recognised such clashes of irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines as the perennial product of a free society, and prescribed his famous political conception of justice as a resolution to the 'problem of pluralism' underlying polarisation. This thesis starts by identifying lacunae of political design in Rawls's account of actualising his political conception of justice – specifically his eschewal to specify a requisitely radically inclusive and radically efficient political system proffering adequate opportunity for participation. This dearth of democratic design leaves Rawls's political conception of justice unjustified according to his own standards. Part Two advances plebeian assemblies, as theorised in Camila Vergara's Systemic Corruption, as a remedy to Rawls's blueprint-reticence, insofar as they fill his lacunae of political design. Immediate objections – e.g. that plebeian assemblies comprise insufficiently reasonable deliberative environments to instantiate inter alia the public reason component of Rawls's political conception of justice – are rebuffed, in part via a Rawlsian fundamental comparison with the 'minipublics' theorised in Hélène Landemore's Open Democracy. The thesis's third and final part elucidates, via the phenomenology of Jacques Rancière's Disagreement, why plebeian assemblies might instantiate the exceptionally egalitarian politics required to ensure mass participation in plebeian assemblies, and to ensure they would actualise Rawls's exceptionally egalitarian political conception of justice. In summary, I advance a plebeian political liberalism capable of actualising, thereby justifying, an eminent resolution for today's polarisation and its undergirding 'problem of pluralism': Rawls's political conception of justice.