A Structural Critique of Political Liberalism under Conditions of Ontological Suspension

Political liberalism, as articulated in the theory of justice as fairness, seeks to stabilize modern pluralistic societies by relocating the foundation of political legitimacy from comprehensive truths to the domain of public reason and reasonableness. This transition appears, at first glance, to be a pragmatic solution to the problem of deep moral disagreement. However, from the standpoint of a structural ontology of subjectivity, this relocation is not a resolution of crisis but a displacement of it to a more superficial level of analysis.

The liberal model presupposes that citizens are capable of distinguishing between their comprehensive doctrines and their public reasoning capacities, thereby enabling them to participate as rational agents in a shared discursive space. Yet this presupposition rests on a more fundamental assumption: that the subject possesses a relatively coherent, transparent, and stable structure of selfhood capable of generating publicly articulable reasons. This assumption is not merely epistemological; it is ontological. It defines what counts as a political subject in the first place.