Public reason has been a constant theme in western political philosophy since the time of Hobbes, even if it has perhaps garnered focused attention only since John Rawls's Political Liberalism (1993). Explicit analyses of public reason can be found in the great social contract t…
"When people of good faith and sound mind disagree deeply about moral, religious, and other philosophical matters, how can we justify political institutions to all of them? The idea of public reason--of a shared public standard, despite disagreement--arose in the seventeenth and…