ABSTRACT
Dealing with groups or individuals who make absolute truth claims for their particular values is already a notoriously difficult practical and philosophical problem for democratic practice. Postmodern conditions make explicit the difficulty always present in the democratic project: the requirement to acknowledge, for the purposes of political activity, the limited applicability of even the most strongly held beliefs, even one’s own. Theoretically no person or group in a democratic society can exempt itself from such acknowledgment; but in postmodern conditions not even democratic societies can exempt themselves from such acknowledgment. Neither democracy nor postmodernity place any limits on personal commitments, but both withhold the possibility of any absolute authorization. The importance of negotiation within democratic systems is generalized in postmodern condition to include differences between democracy and other systems. The limited applicability of democratic values does not translate in to a requirement for limited commitment to those values; but it does mean that, like any other systemic set, democracy cannot be imposed by fiat or force. Thomas Vargish addresses this difference in his definition of ‘self-qualifying systems’, that is, systems that do not naturalize (universalize) their terms and bases. Self-qualifying systems provide for negotiation of political and other differences even where absolute views inform the agenda. The concept of self-qualifying systems puts in terms of political negotiation the postmodern insights based on linguistic systems that make difference constitutive.
