ABSTRACT
Above, I defined political pluralization as the emergence of ‘polities’ other than the state, where polity stands for any form of social organization within which (among other things) politics takes place, specifically the attribution of rights within that organized form of life. In this chapter, I shall give a more detailed description of political pluralization. In the course of the chapter, it will become clear that political pluralization has ‘consequences’ for the way in which politics is performed, the way in which it delivers its goods, as well as for the goods it can deliver in the first place. Consequences are just that: consequences. They are not in themselves interesting, challenging or problematic, let alone good or bad, desirable or undesirable. They only become interesting if something already recognized as valuable is at stake; the ‘thing that is at stake’ in turn colours the selection and description of the ‘consequences’. It is only fair that I inform the reader in advance about my colour, my particular ‘thing at stake’: liberal political theory. Virtually all of recent, mainstream political theory is predicated on the
existence of a sovereign nation-state (cf. Levi 2002). It assumes the existence of a socially, economically and culturally more or less autarchic polity, which is endowed with a monolithic organization called ‘state’ that provides certain public goods (in a non-economic sense) to the polity. Schools within political theory focus on very different questions, and approach them from very different perspectives. Sometimes the topic of debate is the kinds of public goods the state should provide: those of the libertarian or ‘night watchmanstate’ (rules for exchange, protection of those rules, retribution for violations), of the welfare state (redistribution for undeserved advantages and disadvantages in capabilities and opportunities), or more – feminists, for instance, argued that the state also has responsibilities in the private sphere of family life, and ultimately convinced many a liberal. Sometimes the topic of debate is the choice of principles that are to guide the dispersal of public goods, sometimes the method of choice of such principles, sometimes (as for Marxism) the degree to which all of these debates make sense, i.e. the degree to which states can actually choose to deliver any goods. The debates and
schools within modern political theory can be described as variations on a theme: different answers to the questions what the machinery of state should and can do, how it should do it, and why. The point, however, is the shared theme, the shared assumption that there is a machinery of state. Thus, we can take John Rawls’ words to describe not only his own political theory but also communitarianism, republicanism, Marxism, feminism, libertarianism, and so on:
I shall be satisfied if it is possible to formulate a reasonable conception of justice for the basic structure of society conceived for the time being as a closed system isolated from other societies. ( … ) It is natural to conjecture that once we have a sound theory for this case, the remaining problems of justice will prove more tractable in the light of it. With suitable modifications such a theory should provide the key for some of these other questions.
