This paper examines the resources provided by Habermas’s and Rawls’s own political theories for revising their Kantian visions of cosmopolitan politics in postsecular ways. Rather than considering their much-discussed attempts to accommodate religions within secular state frameworks, the paper will show how the neglected notions of ‘translation’ in Habermas and ‘conjecture’ in Rawls imply radical revisions to these frameworks and to the cosmopolitan claims that Habermas and Rawls base on them. Crucially, both notions attribute to citizens of modern liberal societies the peculiar task of transforming religious into shareable terms of political justification, a task that – in contrast with Habermas’s and Rawls’s claims elsewhere – treats religions as forms of political reasoning that can engage with other, non-religious forms. The paper argues that this task not only implies a more substantial role for religions in political deliberations than Habermas’s and Rawls’s secular frameworks allow, but also introduces significant tensions into their Kantian senses of political justification – most notably, regarding the ‘religious’ character of any political deliberation. By analyzing and developing these ‘postsecular’ implications, then, the paper will show how they can be used to formulate a ‘postsecular’ cosmopolitanism distinct from the Kantian – secular, formal and circumscribed – cosmopolitanism systems that Habermas and Rawls propose. In particular, Habermas’s sense of trans- and supra-national deliberations and Rawls’s account of ‘peoples’ as the units of global politics will be interrogated in the light of the distinctively open-ended and material engagement with religions that their notions of ‘translation’ and ‘conjecture’ imply. The paper will thus suggest that Habermas and Rawls themselves provide novel and rich resources for superseding their secular Kantian cosmopolitanisms.
