49 - Culture, political vs. background

Summary

Rawls’s distinction between political culture and background culture is important for understanding his conception of public reason; for being “attentive to where we are and whence we speak”; for the articulation and justiication of politically liberal conceptions of justice; and for understanding the ways such conceptions can inluence democratic societies (PL 382).

The public political culture of a constitutional democracy encompasses the society’s political institutions along with its commonly recognized interpretive traditions (especially those of a supreme court) and commonly known political texts of enduring or historical signiicance (PL 13–14; JF 6). These components of the public political culture are understood as a “fund of implicitly shared ideas and principles” that “may play a fundamental role in society’s political thought and in how its institutions are interpreted” (PL 14; JF 6). The public political culture thus incorporates a general tradition of democratic, political thought whose content and fundamental, intuitive ideas are relatively familiar and comprehensible to “the educated common sense of citizens generally” (PL 14; JF 5–6). These fundamental ideas and democratic principles can be used as the basic building-blocks of a political conception of justice (JF 27, 34–35; PL 8). A political conception of justice attempts to combine and organize these ideas in an innovative and insightful way so as to harmonize with our most firmly held, considered convictions at all levels of relective scrutiny and thus seeks to provide us a basis for resolving deep disagreements (such as those regarding the proper understanding of freedom and equality) within the very political culture from which its basic ideas were sourced (P, 8–9; CP 393–394; JF 25–26).