Chant Down Babylon: Freedom of Religion and the Rastafarian Challenge to Majoritarianism
‘ … to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality.’The accommodation afforded to religious differences within the legal systems of the common law world is as much a political as a legal concern. As such it is part of a much wider debate about...
| Authors: | ; |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
2002
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| In: |
Journal of law and religion
Year: 2002, Volume: 18, Issue: 1, Pages: 219-248 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | ‘ … to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality.’The accommodation afforded to religious differences within the legal systems of the common law world is as much a political as a legal concern. As such it is part of a much wider debate about the nature of democratic government within a pluralist society. The concern is that in so far as democracy is dominated by a majoritarian concept it may not be compatible with pluralism. Majoritarianism is predicated on the assumption that the will of the majority is absolute and is the final authority when defining the limits of individual rights and freedoms and how they are best respected and enforced. A pluralist conception of society, by contrast, requires that the rights of minorities must, on occasion, be allowed to take precedence over the wishes of the majority in order to encourage diversity, whether religious, racial or sexual, to flourish. The challenge for modern democracies is, therefore, to reconcile the demands imposed by majoritarianism within a pluralist framework. |
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| ISSN: | 2163-3088 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of law and religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/1051499 |