ABSTRACT
Liberal politics faces a number of foundational questions, many of which can be discussed in terms of the delimitations of the political realms and the justification of boundaries around them. Clearly, the question is not whether boundaries were needed in general. The political has never been, and probably cannot be, thought of without regard to limitations of its scope. But the question of where the boundaries should be set has been a crucial issue in the transformations of modernity. Three aspects may be distinguished: limits to the polity, that is the question of who should be eligible to participate politically; limits to the practice of politics, that is the organization of political representation; and limits to the scope of policy-making, that is the definition of the matters in which collective deliberation may and shall interfere.
