CONCEPT Annual Conference 2014
Republicanism and Secularism
15-16 December 2014
Highfield House
Monday 15 December
10.00-10.30 Coffee and registration
10.30-12.15 Session 1
Special but not special, public reason, exemptions and the dilemmas of the secular
republican
Ronan McCrea (University College London)
Between Partiality and Proliferation: the dilemma of religious accommodation
Jonathan Seglow (Royal Holloway)
12.15-1.15
Lunch
1.15-3.00
Session 2
The Republic and the sacred: Critical republicanism and the secularization of national
identity
Sophie Guérard de Latour (Université de Paris 1)
Multiculturalising Secularism, Multiculturalising State-Religion Connexions
Tariq Modood (University of Bristol)
3.00-3.30
Coffee
3.30-5.15
Session 3
Disaggregating Religion: Critical Republicanism, Secularism and Social Equality
Fabian Schuppert (Queen’s University Belfast)
Post-secularism, tragedy and the public sphere
Mark Wenman (University of Nottingham)
7.00
Conference dinner
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Tuesday 16 December
10.00-10.30 Coffee
10.30-12.15 Session 4
Burqa ban, freedom of religion and republican secularism
Sune Lægaard (Roskilde University)
Religion, Free Speech and Non-Domination
Matteo Bonotti (Queen’s University Belfast)
12.15-1.15
Lunch
1.15-3.30
Session 5
Is critical republicanism more critical than republican?
Naël Desaldeleer (Université de Poitiers)
Interference, Domination and Dependency: keeping the differences simple
Gulshan Khan (University of Nottingham)
‘Liberty is the mother of virtue’: Wollstonecraft’s republican balancing of selfgovernment and active citizenship
Ros Hague (Nottingham Trent University)
3.30-4.00
Coffee
4.00-5.45
Keynote Address
Secularism is not the answer, but what was the question?
Cécile Laborde (University College London)
Cécile Laborde is professor of Political Theory and Director of the Religion and Political Theory Centre at
University College London. The Centre houses ‘Is Religion Special? Secularism and Religion in
Contemporary Legal and Political Theory’, a 5 year project funded by the European Research Council
(2012-2017). Cécile has published four books including: Critical Republicanism. The Hijab Controversy
and Political Philosophy, with Oxford University Press (2008). She has also written articles in major
journals of political science and political theory, and is currently writing a book about the liberal
concept of religion for Harvard University Press.
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Session One
Ronan McCrea
University College London
Special but not special, public reason, exemptions and the dilemmas of the secular
republican
Many secular republicans are uneasy with religion-specific exemptions for generally-applicable rules on
the basis that such exemptions give greater weight to the rights of those whose beliefs are religious in
nature over those whose beliefs arise from other sources. Religion, they argue, is not special. On the
other hand, secular republicans are also keen to uphold that the state and its institutions be religiously
neutral and refrain from promoting or enforcing particular faiths. Religion, they argue here, is special.
This paper looks at how the law (and particularly human rights law) has dealt with this apparent
tension to shed light on whether "not special but special" approach can be justified and how it fits in
with broader theories of democracy and self-government.
Jonathan Seglow
Royal Holloway
Between Partiality and Proliferation: the dilemma of religious accommodation
In this paper I argue that arguments for legal accommodation of religion and other forms of protected
belief face a dilemma. Either, as suggested by the US First Amendment, they claim that religion is
uniquely special, and on that basis that religious, but not non-religious, beliefs are potential subjects of
accommodation. Or, as suggested by Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, they
allow that some non-religious beliefs may also be the basis of accommodation claims. This is a
dilemma because the first alternative is partialistic, arbitrarily privileging religious over other forms of
belief which may be just as sincerely and deeply held, while the second raises the spectre of
proliferation, with citizens claiming opt outs from laws on the basis of a wide variety of moral and
ideological convictions. In her recent article ‘Equal Liberty, NonEstablishment and Religious Freedom’,
Cécile Laborde examines the first horn of this dilemma through a discussion of Christopher Eisgruber
and Lawrence Sager’s book, Religious Freedom and the Constitution which seeks to defend religious
accommodation without resorting to contested claims about religion’s specialness. Laborde sees
Eisgruber and Sager’s theory as one instance of what she calls egalitarian theories of religious
freedom. According to Laborde, egalitarian theories of religious freedom seek to show that adherents
of religious and other forms of protected belief should be treated fairly compared with other citizens. I
argue, however, that the distinction between religious and more inclusive defences of legal
accommodation is separate from the question of whether non-accommodation is a comparative or a
non-comparative moral wrong. However, though a non-comparative inclusive theory is intellectually
coherent, I argue that it too is susceptible to the partiality v. proliferation dilemma. Towards the end
of her paper, Laborde suggests that the (comparative) liberal egalitarian theories of John Rawls and
Ronald Dworkin offer a more promising framework for defending legal accommodation than Eisgruber
and Sager’s account. I conclude by arguing that liberal egalitarianism too, however elaborated, is
likely to fall prey to the problem of proliferation.
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Session Two
Sophie Guérard de Latour
Université de Paris 1
The Republic and the sacred
Critical republicanism and the secularization of national identity
In her philosophical assessment of French laïcité, Cecile Laborde has argued that this principle does not
only refer to a model of religious equality, but that it also conveys a conception of freedom and one of
solidarity that are typical of the republican political philosophy. As such, republican laïcité differs from
liberal toleration: a laïque and republican state is not only a device of impartial regulation between
different religions, as the tolerant and liberal state should be; rather, the former should foster the
support and identification of its members to the same “community of citizens” and, in the republican
tradition, the mobilizing power of a civic religion has been exploited to achieve this objective of
integration.
However, grounding political solidarity on religious feelings is at risk of sacralising the national culture
and of fuelling xenophobia and racism. In Critical republicanism, Laborde rightly criticizes such defaults
in the “French model of integration” that has been upheld by political and intellectual elites since the
late 1980’s in the name of laïcité. Contra these French “official republicans”, she argues that their
communitarian understanding of integration encourages an ethnicized view of the French national
identity, thus depriving French citizens of immigrant descent of their civic standing. In this paper, I aim
to analyse how Laborde reworks the French model of integration in order to “secularize” the reference
the French national identity and to assess the merits and limits of her position.
Tariq Modood
University of Bristol
Multiculturalising Secularism, Multiculturalising State-Religion Connexions
West European states are currently highly exercised by the challenges posed by post-immigration
ethno-religious diversity. This forces new thinking, not only about questions of social integration but
also about the role of religion in relation to the state and citizenship. Accordingly, a fundamental theme
that many thought had long been settled re-emerges with new vitality and controversy, namely
political secularism, especially as it articulates with questions of tolerance, recognition, and
governance. My contribution to the climate of ‘re-thinking secularism’ has been to argue that what is
sometimes talked about as the ‘post-secular’ or a ‘crisis of secularism’ is, in Western Europe, quite
crucially to do with the reality of multiculturalism. By which I mean not just the fact of new ethnoreligious diversity but the presence of a multiculturalist approach to this diversity: the idea that
equality must be extended from uniformity of treatment to include respect for difference; recognition
of public/private interdependence rather than dichotomized as in classical liberalism; the public
recognition and institutional accommodation of minorities; the reversal of marginalisation and a
remaking of national citizenship so that all can have a sense of belonging to it. Hence my claim that
the source of post-secularism in W. Europe is in fact multiculturalism. The question I want to address is
whether contemporary European moderately secular state-religion arrangements can be effectively
adapted to meet the demands of multiculturalism.
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Session Three
Fabian Schuppert
Queen’s University Belfast
Disaggregating Religion: Critical Republicanism, Secularism and Social Equality
According to mainstream liberalism, states ideally should be both secular and neutral. Therefore,
champions of so-called egalitarian theories of religion freedom suggest that religion should be treated
no different than other conceptions of the good and that liberal states should not endorse religious
values in official policy. However, as Cécile Laborde has argued, such arguments rest on too quick an
equivocation of religion and conceptions of the good, meaning that liberal theories often fail to properly
disaggregate the concept of religion. This paper sets out to investigate what such a disaggregation of
religion could look like and how to implement within a society committed to the values of critical
republicanism, including secularism and social equality. The paper will offer an account of the
(im)permissibility of different justificatory uses of ideas of the good in public discourse, drawing on
both Laborde’s work on republicanism and secularism, and recent accounts of social egalitarianism.
Moreover, the paper will flag up some potentially far-reaching consequences of embracing the
proposed disaggregation of religion (and other conceptions of the good). Overall, the paper aims to
flesh out the idea of a critically republican reading of egalitarian theories of religious freedom.
Mark Wenman
University of Nottingham
Post-secularism, tragedy and the public sphere
In Chapter 3 of Critical Republicanism Cécile Laborde identifies two broad lines of critique that could, in
principle, be mobilised to draw into question the de facto religious neutrality of the French state. The
first highlights the ways in which the actually existing regime of laicite is more or less explicitly bias
towards the majority religion, for example in state subsides for private (mostly Catholic) schools, a
national calendar that includes holidays on Catholic dates etc. The second possible criticism would draw
attention instead to the ways in which, what we might call, the deeper grammar of French secular
republicanism is in fact predicated on a mimetic adaptation of the ideological structures of the Catholic
faith: for example in the presentation of the ‘sacred mission’ of state schools in their ‘unique path
towards the universal’ etc. Laborde acknowledges this second mode of criticism but largely dismisses
it. She focuses instead on the former line of critique. Her critical republicanism is, in essence, a
defence of an ideal of religious impartially (of the non-confessional nature of the secular state, and of
the principle of religious freedom etc., coupled with a stress on the importance of social solidarity), and
this is held up as an evaluative yardstick by which to measure not only the limitations of actually
existing ‘secular’ institutions, but also to differentiate the legitimate from the illegitimate demands that
can be made by religious minorities such as Muslims.
However, this paper picks up and elaborates the second line of critique acknowledged (but dismissed)
by Laborde. What if the deeper ideological structures of French secular republicanism remain inherently
marked by their Christian derivation? In fact, what if this is true more generally of modern liberal and
republican defences of the (supposedly) neutral, ‘secular’, and ‘rational’ public sphere. To explore this
idea, I first situate the present debate about the rights and duties of secular citizenship, and the
boundaries of the public and private in matters of religion, within a wider set of reflections about
modernity as a process of secularisation. Drawing primarily on Karl Lowith and Max Weber, I then
explore the claim that the modern European secularisation of state and society should be understood
more as a morphing and adaptation of the deep grammar of the Christian heritage, rather than a
decisive break; and that this is especially evident in modern conceptions of individualism, time, and of
moral progress, all of which are intrinsic to liberal and republican defences of secularism (including
Laborde’s). The implication of this analysis is that we have never really been all that secular, and in the
final part of the paper I gesture towards a post-secular defence of the public sphere; one that is
suspicious of claims to reasoned neutrality, and is closer to a tragic view of morality, and of time as
cyclical and recurrent rather than progressive.
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Session Four
Sune Lægaard
Roskilde University
Burqa ban, freedom of religion and republican secularism
The French 2010 law banning face-covering clothing in public spaces, the so-called ‘burqa ban’, was
from the outset criticized for being a violation of freedom of religion. In the summer of 2014, the
European Court of Human Rights ruled that this was not the case. Due to the ‘wide margin of
appreciation’ employed by the court in cases involving religion, the Court had a duty to exercise a
degree of restraint in its review of Convention compliance and accordingly ruled that the ban could
therefore be regarded as proportionate to the French state’s avowed aim with the ban, namely that of
preservation the conditions of ‘living together’.
In the paper I discuss such types of prohibitions in relation to the value of freedom of religion. I first
note how the Court’s ruling seems to contradict itself, since the Court both claims to be under a duty of
restraint from making judgment and simultaneously engages in a judgment about the proportionality
of the ban. I then note how the aim justifying the ban according to the French state (and the Court),
namely the aim of securing the conditions for social cohesion, is an expression of a specific republican
conception of secularism. This case accordingly involves several of the themes about secularism and
Muslim headscarves which Cécile Laborde has discussed in her earlier work. In the paper I use the
Court’s ruling to tie several of Laborde’s earlier discussions together and I engage in a critical
discussion of the burqa ban on this basis.
Matteo Bonotti
Queen’s University Belfast
Religion, Free Speech and Non-Domination
The relationship and the tension between religion and free speech are central to three main areas of
debate in contemporary political theory. The first concerns blasphemy and hate speech directed at
religious people. The second relates to the display of religious symbols in public places. The third
involves the use of religious arguments in public deliberation. While these issues are in many ways
connected, they are rarely discussed together. This can have paradoxical implications. For example,
defending the display of religious symbols in public places or the use of religious arguments in public
deliberation on the basis of existing theories of free speech (e.g. the argument from truth or the one
from democracy) may also implicitly justify the permissibility of hateful speech directed at religious
people. This is a conclusion that many if not most religious people would probably not be happy to
subscribe to and, I claim, it results from the limits of conceptual and normative accounts of free speech
which unduly rely on either ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ conceptions of freedom. Neither of these kinds of
accounts, I argue, can reconcile religion and free speech in a coherent way. I therefore draw on Cécile
Laborde and Philip Pettit’s work and defend a conception of free speech grounded in the republican
idea of freedom as ‘non-domination’. This conception, I claim, provides a rationale for coherently
justifying restrictions on hate speech directed at religious people and on the use of religious arguments
in public deliberation while at the same time allowing the display of religious symbols in public places.
Moreover, I argue, it offers a novel perspective on contemporary debates on free speech more
generally.
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Session Five
Naël Desaldeleer
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Is critical republicanism more critical than republican?
C. Laborde’s critical thought particularly drew interest in recent years. It is particularly striking in the
French context, where she dismantled the concept of “laïcité” and proved that it is used to ensure the
domination of the cultural majority. Reformulating it as a “catho-laïcité”, C. Laborde unveils the values
that were hidden behind a fraudulent use of the republican thought, and postponed contemporary
debates about actual religious practice.
C. Laborde describes her method as the result of the articulation of two great influences: the
neorepublican philosophy – as formulated by P. Pettit – and the critical theory as a powerful tool to
transform the perspective. This “critical republicanism” leads her to take seriously the phenomenons of
religious belief. For instance, she severely criticized the French Rapport Stasi, which reduces the
practising Muslim woman, wearing the hijab, to a dominated wife or daughter of a practising man.
Unlike the official approach from French legislators – the “official” or “conservative republicans” in C.
Laborde’s words – she tends to consider firstly religious practice as an individual choice. If so, it means
that religious practice must be protected by the republican law, as the effect of a free choice. But
considering that in the monotheists traditions religious belief is a form of submission to a higher being,
it also implies that this critical republicanism could open the door to the recognition of phenomenons of
voluntary servitude. In other terms, C. Laborde rejects the idea that religious practice is the effect of a
domination exercised by men. But it also implies that republican state has to respect those who
consider that submitting ourself to a divine dominating power can be desirable.
Through this prism, it becomes necessary to question C. Laborde’s relationship to republican
perfectionism. One can even wonder about the distinctive features of her republicanism which she
explicitly presents as a legacy from P. Pettit, considering that he seems to believe that the desire for
liberty – meaning for non-domination – is coextensive to humanity itself. This paper will be dedicated
to the exploration of the following hypothesis. Starting from an analysis of C. Laborde’s republican
features, it is possible to observe that P. Pettit’s theoretical concerns and C. Laborde’s practical
considerations are leading to the same central point: what concretely means, in a republican state, to
take into account each one’s interests as they express it? Is it possible to clarify even more the
relationship between republicanism and religion, using the strength of critical thinking not only on
official republicanism, but on critical republicanism as well?
Gulshan Khan
University of Nottingham
Interference, Domination and Dependency: keeping the differences simple
Cécile Laborde has rightly stressed the limitations of Philip Pettit’s account of domination, because
Pettit focuses exclusively on intentional acts of power, whereas a genuinely critical mode of civic
republicanism needs also to grasp the ways in which arbitrary modes of power are embedded in the
dominant social norms and institutions. Building on this insight, in this paper I explore the differences
between the notions of domination and dependency, and I make the case the later notion is crucial for
understanding the way in which asymmetrical and entrenched power relations are reproduced
systemically in contemporary societies. I first evaluate Quentin Skinner’s account of dependency as
the antonym of freedom, and I show that this notion is underdeveloped and then immobilized by
Pettit’s critique. Skinner (too hastily) concedes that his account of dependency is better brought under
the notion of domination, thus agreeing with Pettit that domination is the antonym of freedom.
Nevertheless, Skinner intimates to the importance of analyzing the ways in which asymmetrical power
relations and modes of dependency are reproduced systemically, and here I draw on a combination of
Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Foucault to explore the complex ways in which entrenched power relations
are materialized in contemporary societies; not only in intentional actions, but also in unintentional
networks, processes, and discourses. However, I also note Laborde’s resistance to post-structuralist
analyses, and I question the extent to which she would be prepared to go in accepting the framework
of this critical evaluation of systemic modes of dependency.
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Ros Hague
Nottingham Trent University
‘Liberty is the mother of virtue’: Wollstonecraft’s republican balancing of self-government
and active citizenship
The development of republican values found across Wollstonecraft’s work and her emphasis on
education to achieve this can, it will be argued, provide an important addition to the contemporary
literature on republicanism coming as it does from an important feminist writer. Wollstonecraft’s
feminism was directed not only against patriarchy but also against the aristocracy, two dangerous and
corrupting forms of power. The strong civic community she envisioned depended on these two forms of
power being subverted by the development of a body politic which thrived through active citizenship
and an end to the moral corruption wrought by the domination of the poor by the rich and of women
by men. Wollstonecraft’s arguments were developed in a context of intellectual and political radicalism.
She was part of a movement which aimed to change the way citizens saw themselves, enabling them
to take control of their lives and to be empowered. Her writing provides a nuanced understanding of
the problem of domination and she develops a number of interlocking arguments in order to combat
this in the form of self-government, active citizenship and the potential of education. Wollstonecraft
wanted citizens to participate actively in political and civic life but also to retain the self-direction
necessary to know their own minds. This paper will focus on how Wollstonecraft envisioned equality by
promoting both active citizenship and an individual sense of self-government – a balance much needed
in addressing a number of contemporary issues such as pluralism, dwindling civic engagement and
citizen participation in creating a sustainable society. It will be argued that Wollstonecraft’s arguments
complement the critical republicanism of Cécile Laborde and indeed add to some of the ways in which
Laborde frames the problem of domination. In Critical Republicanism, Laborde highlights the
significance of autonomy as a means of resistance to domination through socialization and the
formation of adaptive preferences. Such resistance requires, according to Laborde, autonomypromoting education and Wollstonecraft highlights a number of ways in which domination can be
resisted through the enhancement of autonomy but also through the promotion of two interlinked
attitudes: one of equality and the other of non-domination to others.
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