Cristina Lafont

Work

Lafont's current research focuses on normative questions in political philosophy concerning democracy and citizen participation, global governance, human rights, religion and politics. She works in a framework of deliberative democratic theory, where she defends a participatory construal of the democratic ideal against proposals to insulate political decision making from the influence of the citizenry. This conception requires the citizens to respect the priority of public reason over religious or otherwise comprehensive views in their political deliberations in the public sphere. At the level of global governance, she argues against the current state-centric understanding of human rights obligations because of the protection gaps it leaves open. Instead, she advocates a more ambitious construal of the responsibility to protect (R2P) human rights, which she interprets as a provisional duty of the international community as a whole until appropriate institutions are in place to close these gaps.

The most elaborate and detailed account of her participatory conception of deliberative democracy is presented in her 2020 book Democracy Without Shortcuts. A participatory conception of deliberative democracy. In this book, she develops her position in critique of deep pluralist, recent elite or democratic epistocratic, and lootocratic approaches in democratic theory by demonstrating how each of them requires blind deference of those subject to decision-making to a group of decision-makers. The concept of "blind deference" is one of the key innovations of the book and refers to a kind of obedience that is not driven by reasons to accept or make decisions one's own and thus a form of subjection to others [cf. pp.127–134]. Lafont argues that any theory requiring civic blind deference must therefore fall short of construing democracy as political self-government of the people. The book also proposes a new genuinely deliberative conception of the potential contribution of institutionalized mini-publics to improved democratic legitimation by helping to effectively produce a well-informed considered public opinion on complex political matters [ch. 5].

Lafont's work in critical theory elaborates on themes in the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas. Cristina Lafont's earlier philosophical work in the philosophy of language of Heidegger's hermeneutics issues in her identification of a specific form of "linguistic turn" (centered on the "world-disclosing" function of conceptual structures in language) in post-Kantian German philosophy between Hamann and Habermas. The upshot is that the systematic idealistic and constructivist tendency of this tradition is owed to a specific set of assumptions in its linguistic philosophy. In this work, she applies select tools from the theory of meaning developed in analytic philosophy of language to foundational issues from German Continental philosophy. This approach enables fruitful and precise comparisons between Robert Brandom's inferentialist framework and Habermas' theory of communicative action.