ABSTRACT
Modern democracies are marked by pervasive disagreement. Reasonable people disagree about the content of the core values of the political realm, such as justice, legitimacy, liberty, equality, authority and autonomy. In the political realm, disagreement leads to friction and friction leads to conflict. A new approach for solving the problem of modus vivendi is constructed and presented. This concept is called ‘polycentric democracy.’ In contrast to the traditional approaches, polycentric democracy is based on utilizing rather than hedging existing instrumental and evaluative diversity. Since institutional competition is a discovery process, a political polycentric system should constantly find new and better ‘ways of living together’ or simply better ‘modus vivendi arrangements.’ Much disagreement in political philosophy is most likely due to our disagreement on non-normative facts. In a polycentric system, a larger number of socio-economic claims can be tested than is possible in our current democratic systems; this should reduce disagreement.
