The Scandal of Reason

Book excerpt: Theories of justice struggle to balance vision and practicality. As with Habermas, the more demanding the ideal of justice, the less connected the theory is to political reality; as with Rawls, the more politically realistic the theory, the weaker its normative criteria, rendering the theory unreliable. Brokering a resolution to the?judgment paradox," Albena Azmanova advances a?critical consensus" model of judgment, which serves the normative ideals of a just society without resorting to ideal theory. Tracing the evolution of two major traditions in political philosophy?critical.