Pope Francis’s call in Fratelli tutti for a “culture of encounter” marked by respectful engagement across difference has received little attention outside Catholic circles. Political theorists have taken up similar ideas, insisting on the need for civil discourse and constructive disagreement if we are to address our deep democratic divides.

This past February, with the support of the Henry Luce Foundation, the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University and the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California brought together a diverse set of scholars to explore the relationship between democracy and encounter. This symposium features reflections by four eminent democratic theorists on Francis’s culture of encounter and its significance for democracy in the United States and around the world.

Thomas Banchoff, Georgetown University
Richard L. Wood, University of Southern California

Democracy Needs a ‘Demos’

Melissa S. Williams

The concept of democracy contains within it the idea of “the people,” the demos that collectively exercises powers of self-government. From the standpoint of democratic theory, then, one of the most fascinating features of Pope Francis’s “culture of encounter” is his statement in Fratelli tutti that “the people” are “the subject of this culture.” But what does he mean by “the people”? 

Francis’s teacher, Juan Carlos Scanonne, SJ, tells us that Francis’s “concept of ‘people’ just doesn’t work in English.” This concept, he explains, is rooted in the Spanish word pueblo, which can mean “nation” but equally “village” and “the poor.” Francis seems quite intentionally to blend all these meanings in his use of the term pueblo and its translation into English as “people.” He explicitly distinguishes this concept from the one invoked by populist nationalists, who take the people to be something primordial, prior to and independent of human agency. “‘People’ is not a logical category, nor is it a mystical category…. Rather, it is a mythic category…. To be part of a people is to be part of a shared identity arising from social and cultural bonds. And that is not something automatic, but rather a slow, difficult process … of advancing toward a common project.” 

Francis’s language of “people-building” indicates that a people is something made, a product of creative human agency. He saw popular movements of the poor and marginalized as exemplars of this agency, which he celebrated by convening four World Meetings of Popular Movements. Forging bonds of social and cultural identity through collective action, these movements solve shared problems, resist injustice, and envision a common future. He cast them as “social poets”; through their craft—their poiesis—they generate new peoples. Within this practice of people-building, the culture of encounter is both means and end. “What is important,” he tells us, “is to create processes of encounter, processes that build a people that can accept differences.”   

The profound insight of Francis’s account of people-building is that democracy needs a demos, and we cannot take the existence of the demos for granted. Peoples are constituted by ongoing practices of communication and joint action aimed at solving common problems. Through this interaction, we discover both what we have in common and what distinguishes us from each other. As the twentieth-century political theorist Hannah Arendt might have put it, “We, the people” exists when—and to the extent that—we act in concert as equal individuals while retaining our essential plurality. From this point of view, the most elemental democratic practice is joining with others, at whatever scale of political relationship, to name and respond to the problems we jointly confront. Whenever we do so in the spirit of encounter—of openness to one another’s differences—we have already begun a process of people-building.  

Melissa S. Williams is professor of political science at the University of Toronto, where she also served as founding director of the Centre for Ethics. A democratic theorist, her work has focused on questions of egalitarian inclusion and democratic representation in societies marked by historical injustice.

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Encounter, Non-Encounter, and Faux-Encounter

Robert B. Talisse

I see two crucial insights in Pope Francis’s idea of a culture of encounter. First, democracy is not simply a form of government; it’s the aspiration to build a society of self-governing equals. Aligning with the idiom of John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and Jane Addams, Francis sees democracy as a way of life, a “culture.”

Second, Francis’s idea expands our conception of the modes of interaction that are democratically essential. Theorists who agree that democracy needs citizens to join together in activities beyond voting nevertheless tend to fixate on engagements that primarily involve politics. Deliberative democrats, for example, emphasize practices of communication designed to navigate political disagreements, whereas participatory democrats foreground processes of building and sustaining political coalitions. To be sure, citizens must both manage their political divisions and collaborate with their allies. Yet, as I understand Francis, encounter transcends that. It involves relating to one’s fellow citizens on territory that is not already colonized by politics, because our vital differences can’t always be stated in a political vernacular.

Francis is proposing that democracy’s flourishing is partly a matter of containing politics, of ensuring that democracy doesn’t overwhelm everything else. Yes, democracy requires us to engage our differences and cooperate across them. But democracy flourishes only when we also enact relations where politics is beside the point—not suppressed, but irrelevant.

The upshot is that when politics is all we ever do together, democracy suffers; to do democracy well, we must keep politics in its place. I realize that this stance might seem paradoxical. I attempted to make it less so in my 2019 book, Overdoing Democracy, and I happily enlist Francis as an ally.

Now, the way forward might seem obvious. Our culture encourages competition, contest, and “live and let live” toleration; at its worst, these transmogrify into norms of antagonism, obstinacy, and domination. Either way, we do not inhabit a culture of encounter. Our task, then, is to cultivate habits of encounter where the prevailing tendencies favor a kind of estranged social separation into partisan tribes.

That would be a daunting undertaking. Sadly, it’s not quite where we are. Our culture is not one of non-encounter, where we are strangers to one another, but rather of faux-encounter, where we mistakenly take ourselves to know our fellow citizens all too well. Though we understand little about others’ perspectives, values, and aspirations, we nonetheless take ourselves to be adequately informed about them. This is because media are perpetually projecting them to us. In political contexts, these projections distort our conceptions of our political rivals, casting them as ignorant, deranged, treacherous, and disinvested from democracy itself. Accordingly, our challenge is not that of replacing dispositions of non-encounter with those of encounter. Instead, we must find ways to dispel entrenched misperceptions that prevail among democratic citizens. We must cultivate habits of encounter where there are already well-established tendencies of faux-encounter. And that is a far more demanding task.

Robert B. Talisse is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author of over one hundred scholarly articles and fifteen books, including most recently Civic Solitude (Oxford University Press, 2024).

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Deliberative Democratic Theory and Encounter

Mark E. Warren

The democratic project today needs all the friends it can get, and all the strategies it can devise, to keep from losing the political systems that have done more for human dignity, well-being, rights, peace, prosperity, freedom, and creativity than any others. It is with this in mind that I read with great interest Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli tutti. My reading of it is secular rather than theological, and my interests are in the overlapping features of Francis’s thought with contemporary democratic theory. 

There’s much to like about Francis’s conception of a culture of encounter from a democratic-theory perspective, especially deliberative democratic theory. For Francis, encounter is the pathway into dialogue, and dialogue is the best way of conducting politics in a pluralistic and conflicted world. “Authentic social dialogue,” Francis writes, “involves the ability to respect the other’s point of view and to admit that it may include legitimate convictions and concerns, and it is desirable that they should articulate their positions for the sake of a more fruitful public debate.” A culture of encounter consists of the habits, motives, and orientations that make dialogue possible. 

Francis’s thoughts about cultures of encounter are suggestive, but incomplete. The overlap of his thinking with democratic theory may help to fill out the ideal of cultures of encounter at three levels: intersubjective moral psychology, universal moral psychology, and institutions. 

First, intersubjective encounters, especially with people we do not know or with whom we disagree, can generate moral commitments that provide the bases for deliberation and dialogue. This is because basic morality (such as the Golden Rule) is probably written into the social features of the human condition. As children develop, they learn to see things from the perspective of others, which enables them to cooperate and benefit from cooperation. The psychological pathways for this kind of development are empathies and sympathies—theorized by David Hume and Adam Smith as “moral sentiments.” Children who fail to make this leap have difficulty socializing and finding pleasure in others, and are therefore unable to benefit from support and solidarity. Thus, we find moral sentiments already inscribed into social being and see that “encounters” are intrinsically morally productive. 

The more difficult problem is that of generalizing moral sentiments in the context of the conflict, injury, and oppression that undermine them. Social life does not automatically challenge moral sentiments, but the political dimensions of social life do. Here, we find conceptual help from a number of contemporary democratic theorists—Rawls and Habermas, for example. I’ll also mention Hannah Arendt, who conceptualizes political thought as “representative thinking,” which occurs when one holds in one’s mind the standpoints of others. She writes: 

The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking, and the more valid my final conclusions, my orientation…. No opinion is self-evident. In matters of opinion, but not in matters of truth, our thinking is truly discursive, running, as it were, from place to place, from one part of the world to another, through all kinds of conflicting views, until it finally ascends from these particularities to some impartial generality. 

While this is the form that political thinking should take—and while discourse is the pathway to “political thinking” (not unlike Francis’s views)—note that Arendt’s leap from moral sentiments supported by empathy and sympathy toward representative, discursive thinking is not clearly motivated, at least for contexts that are truly political. This is why we need democratic political systems.

In using the term “political systems,” I mean to indicate that democracy is a whole host of institutions that are, ideally, mutually reinforcing. Together, they should drive political conflict away from violence and oppression and toward talking and voting. Some features of democratic systems, like rights and welfare supports, provide protections from unequal power. Some rights, such as the rights to vote and protest, help generate countervailing powers that are necessary to prevent unequal power relationships from swamping discourse. When unequal power relations are blunted, other features of democratic systems provide places for conflicts to be resolved through talk, like protected public spheres and legislatures. In theory, then, cultures of encounter and democracy are mutually necessary and mutually reinforcing. 

As democratic political systems evolve, they often are not driven by morality—though moral forces and ideals can be potent tools for organizing. Democratic institutions usually evolve out of power stalemates, the resolutions to which are rules, rights, negotiations, and, ideally, deliberation and dialogue. Democratic morality—including respect for human dignity, capacities for representative thinking, and even adherence to the Golden Rule—emerges as people experience the institutions, which come to be undergirded by the morality. Democracy can be generative of political morality, and cultures of encounter follow from institutions that support and protect encounter. 

The challenge here, one I think would have been appreciated by Francis, is to go beyond our familiar democratic institutions to structure and protect spaces of dialogue and deliberation—institutions like “minipublics.” These new institutions are representative and deliberative, drawing into encounter people who would not otherwise meet—many of whom are underrepresented in elected and self-selected bodies—to work through an issue and provide recommendations. Such institutions can structure and motivate encounter, and encounter can generate its own supporting culture—and perhaps push back against cultures and institutions that polarize. 

In short, there appears to be an overlapping and productive consensus between Francis’s thought and deliberative democratic theory that we should value, respect, and interrogate. That work is urgent, as we have pressing questions to consider: how to underwrite human well-being socially and politically, and how to address the collective problems Francis spoke about so often: war, violence, hunger, and environmental degradation. 

Mark E. Warren is professor emeritus at the Department of Political Science University, of British Columbia, and Emeritus Merilees Chair for the Study of Democracy. He served as president of the American Political Science Association in 2023–4.

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A Living Program

Nadia Urbinati

In Italian, the word incontro combines two prepositions, “in” and “contro,” which can mean either “toward” or “against.” The word indicates a movement toward something, but it can also mean “in front of.” Hence, incontro refers to both motion and spatial positioning (“I’m coming toward you as you walk from the station, and I’ll meet you at the church that meets that house”).  

In everyday language, incontro could refer to bumping into a friend unexpectedly or meeting someone by mutual agreement. Running into friends by coincidence involves a feeling of joyful surprise (“if I hadn’t happened to pass by this street, I wouldn’t have run into you!”). But encountering someone by chance may come with uncertainty—we can’t always know what will happen. Thus, incontro can involve choice or chance, with the good and bad that come with either.

I have always been moved by the idea of encounter because of that challenge. Meeting others is something we do every day, out of necessity or choice: we go to the supermarket, play music together, or see a movie. This is often easy and pleasant. But when we meet people we never expected to, that’s the moment we learn what kind of society we live in. Montesquieu defined political freedom as particular to societies in which citizens interact with one another in tranquility, without fear. Democracies should be low-fear societies: we shouldn’t be afraid to encounter people, whether we know them or not. Fear makes interactions difficult because we anticipate the worst; we might become preemptively defensive, which may lead to a clash. We lose the “in” and retain the “contro.” But if we can encounter other people without fear—if we can act as if the people we meet are already friends—then they can do the same with us. That is the hardest thing to accomplish: to build a society with laws, institutions, and norms that allow us to encounter each other. But when it exists, it feels natural. 

Democracy is ambitious. It aims to enable different people to encounter one another, build on those encounters, and live together for mutual benefit. We don’t have to agree with everyone on everything, and no one can ask us to. But that’s not the point. The point is to live within the plurality of possibilities that have been given to us as human beings, as brothers and sisters of the same human family. Our democracy suffers from a lack of hospitality because it nurtures a mentality of anxiety around encountering others. Our political and social leaders sometimes want us to feel that anxiety and fear in order to justify their own power or exclusionary policies. 

Democracy can be unpleasant and lead to decisions that cause suffering. Yet we abide by the rules because we know that democracy also allows us to change decisions, and nobody has the final word. The key, as Pope Francis has said, is knowing that we’re in the same boat, even as we discuss, deliberate, and sometimes conflict. Pope Francis did not use the word “encounter” lightly; he predicted it would require skill and effort to practice it well. He anticipated that, like “incontro,” “democracy” refers to two things: both a form of government and a way of living in community with others. That way of life involves the permanent possibility of encounter.

Nadia Urbinati teaches political theory at Columbia University. Among her most recent books are Me The People: How Populism Transforms Democracy (2019) and, with Cristina Lafont, The Lottocratic Mentality: Defending Democracy Against Lottocracy (2025).

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