Résumé Cet article soutient que le libéralisme politique se réfute lui-même en tant que cadre de justification. L’argument procède en deux étapes. Premièrement, on affirme que le critère auto-imposé d’acceptabilité par tous les êtres raisonnables du libéralisme politique aboutit à une logique régressive dans le contenu substantiel du consensus par recoupement. Deuxièmement, on considère que la recherche du consensus est intrinsèquement controversée en raison de son inspiration par le projet inacceptablement contesté de la réconciliation rationnelle de Friedrich Hegel. À l’aide de lectures croisées de Martha Nussbaum, John Rawls et Michael Oakeshott, on conclut que le libéralisme politique est d’emblée miné par son critère auto-imposé de détachement d’engagements controversés.

The commons have emerged as a key notion and underlying experience of many efforts around the world to promote justice and democracy. A central question for political theories of the commons is whether the visions of social order and regimes of political economy they propose are complementary or opposed to public goods that are backed up by governmental coordination and compulsion. This essay argues that the post-Marxist view, which posits an inherent opposition between the commons as a sphere of inappropriable usage and statist public infrastructure, is mistaken, because justice and democracy are not necessarily furthered by the institution of inappropriability. I articulate an alternative pluralist view based on James Tully’s work, which discloses the dynamic interplay between public and common modes of provision and enjoyment, and their civil and civic orientations respectively. Finally, the essay points to the Janus-faced character of the commons and stresses the co-constitutive role of public goods and social services for just and orderly social life while remaining attentive to the dialectic of empowerment and tutelage that marks provision by government.

Michael Oakeshott’s account of political economy is claimed to have found its ‘apotheosis under Thatcherism’. Against critics who align him with a preference for small government, this article points to Oakeshott’s stress on the indispensability of an infrastructure of government-provided public goods, in which individual agency and associative freedom can flourish. I argue that Oakeshott’s account of political economy invites a contestatory politics over three types of public goods, which epitomize the unresolvable tension he diagnosed between nomocratic and teleocratic conceptions of the modern state. These three types are the system of civil law, the by-products of the operation of civil law and public goods which result from policies. The article concludes that Oakeshott offers an important corrective to political theories which favour either market mediation or radical democratic governance of the commons as self-sustaining modes of providing and enjoying goods.

In light of multiple and existential crises, longstanding concerns about the European Union’s (EU) quest for democratic legitimacy are ever more acute. Many think such concerns can be best addressed if European institutions would become better problem-solvers and more effective crisis-managers. Stronger performance by European institutions would supposedly reinforce the EU’s democratic credentials. In this article, we reject such ‘output’ oriented accounts as specious for any assessment of the EU’s democratic legitimacy. Drawing on Michael Oakeshott’s political theory, the article argues that stronger performance addresses the desirability of governing activities in the EU rather than its democratic legitimacy. Moreover, we argue that the distinction between ‘input’ and ‘throughput’ conditions of democratic legitimacy is problematic since these conditions are inextricably linked. Finally, we show that many proposals to reduce the democratic deficit in the EU merely shift the site of the alleged deficit.