ABSTRACT
My objectives thus far have been primarily critical. I have argued that liberal theory is internally conflicted, and consequently, provides insufficient resources to sustain democratic practices under conditions of social pluralism. If we continue to conduct our political thinking within a liberal framework, we should expect increasing nonparticipation, separateness, alienation, intolerance, and distrust among citizens of the sort lamented in much of the current social-scientific literature. I have also argued that antiliberal proposals are insufficient, as well, insofar as they simply react against liberalism; they merely replace the liberal autonomous individual and her fixed preferences with a static community of similarly fixed traditions and a predetermined identity. In both cases, political theory is insufficiently attentive to the existing conditions of political practice. Whereas the dislocated self of the liberals has no motive to participate democratically in politics, the encumbered self of the antiliberals is already so thoroughly ensconced in political relations, that acts of democratic self-government are impossible.
