G. Gaus and I. Berlin: origins of justificatory liberalism and adjudicative democracy

Broad debates on I. Berlin’s concept of pluralism took the form of discussions about the correlation of liberalism and pluralism in modern political philosophy. Value pluralism is a basic assumption and difficulty of G. Gaus’s (I. Berlin’s interpreter) theory of public justification liberalism. In response to the challenge of pluralism, Gaus develops the theory of ‘justificatory liberalism’, which considers objective justification as its main principle. The article argues that the ‘objective justification’ serves as a 'minimal universal principle', a kind of Berlin’s 'objective horizon of values'.