Democracy and Reason - Essay Example

Though the liberal democratic philosophy has always been supported from a wide assortment of philosophical quarters, realizing liberal democracy in terms of joint rational practice of community in politics has various attractive features. One attractive feature is being a perspective that comes across with the hunch so extensively introduced at the parturition of liberalism i.e. the intuition that the belief in the morals of liberal democracy and reason are not simply historically related but are linked logically in some cardinal ways.

Moreover, the philosophy of logical or rational practice appears sufficiently capacious and complex to institute the whole array of values and norms present in liberalism such as equality, liberty, toleration, participation, community and rights instead of singling out and raising one of these values at the cost of rest of others. Thus there lies a possibility that liberal democratic theory can be grounded on a philosophically practicable construct of rational practice, thereby accommodating the interests of the communitarians with the best part of skeptical utilitarian as well as deontological variants of liberalism.

The inclination of neo-Platonist to logically explain rationality has endured with full force in the twentieth century. It manifested not only by the widespread utilization of the term logical as a synonym for rational, but also in the propensity to interpret scientific question as applied logic and to construe languages as fallible logical calculi. This excessively idealized and constrained explanation of rationality has gained individuals by inducing the tremendously productive and significant mathematical constituents of science and by prodding all disciplines towards superior clarity and rigor.

However it had various unfortunate consequences. It has impaired individuals with polarized lenses in our percepts of language and science, sorting the elements of linguist and scientific rationality that fail to fit in the confines of rationality. And this application of excessively strict criteria for inclusion has lead to an ever-shrinking band of reason that has pushed progressively extensive domains of human practice and cognition into an unstructured slag heap of purportedly irrational phenomena.

Most profound consequences are the distortion of any passable understanding of the significant and genuine function of rationality in Politics. That’s why it is quite essential for present-day political philosophy to discern that the last few decades have messed substantial improvements and alterations in the domains of philosophy that have straight impact upon the discernment of human reason. These modern philosophies were based on such assumptions that seemed to bring forth a pattern of vibrations among the neo-Kantian and utilitarian theories as each of them were not able to tackle the circumstances and situation in an adequate manner.

Thus the deadlock existed in the discernment of practical reason seemed to converge with the ethical quandary of liberal democratic theory converge at this point. The authority of the conniving model of reason has constructed a theory of combined prudence unmanageable if not inconceivable. But the most plausible and attractive way of justifying and understanding the liberal democratic exercises is to interpret them as an effort to substantiate the norms of joint prudence so as to consider liberal democracy in terms of a community of individuals who