Publication details
Juggling grammars, translating common-place: justifying an anti-liberal referendum to a liberal public
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | The rise of anti-liberal movements across Western democracies highlights the need to better grasp the ways agents of public controversies make their agendas intelligible, meaningful, and justified. While the pragmatic notion of multiple grammars of commonality (Thévenot, 2014) is useful here, real life situations are profoundly entangled and complex: conventional arguments endowed with civic or industrial worth often appear in symbiosis with emotional stimuli or with a liberal embrace of free choice. Based on the analysis of a high-profile debate preceding the 2015 Slovak referendum on same-sex rights, this paper examines the interplay of different grammars employed by referendum proponents and opponents and shows how personal attachments are formatted for public dispute. Discussing the difficulties in grasping religiously grounded standpoints with the pragmatic conceptual toolkit, we argue that religion should be put on the agenda of pragmatic sociology to make it more equipped to capture developments in the civil sphere. |