No political consensus could exist free of exclusion

Evidence

By bringing to light the potential consequences of Rawls’s project, my aim was to reveal the danger of postulating that there could be a rational definite solution to the question of justice in a democratic society. Such an idea leads to the dosing of the gap betWeen justice and law that is a constitutive space of modern democracy. To avoid such a closure, we should relinquish the very idea that there could be such a thing as a ‘rational’ political consensus; namely, one that would not be based on any form of exclusion. To present the institutions of liberal democracy as the outcome of a pure deliberative rationality is to reify them and make them impossible to transform. It is to deny the fact that, like any other regime, modern pluralist democracy constitutes a system of relations of power, and to render the democratic challenging of those forms of power illegitimate. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 139

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Mouffe’s core negative thesis laid bare: every consensus is built on a constitutive exclusion, so rationality cannot ground legitimacy. Directly serves the reader’s test of whether a non-exclusionary ‘we’ is conceivable.
• QUESTION: If every consensus is unavoidably exclusionary, does Mouffe’s own agonistic alternative merely displace rather than dissolve the Enemy?
• XREF: Connects to the justice/law gap as constitutive of democracy — resonates with Schmitt’s concept of the political and with how democracy’s ‘dosing’ (closure) of that gap maps onto liberal constitutionalism debates. — connects to: No permanent human social group has ever been fully egalitarian — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 56; No politically neutral premises exist from which liberal democracy can be justified to all — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 300; Every democratic consensus is a provisional hegemony that entails exclusion — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 467 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Democratic equality cannot exist without a correlate of inequality and exclusion #expands (0.95) — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 173
• The moral consensus itself can silence those excluded from the start #exemplifies (0.92) — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 351
• No subject occupies a neutral position in the social order #expands (0.88)
• Polities cannot function without shared consensus, even autocratic ones #qualifies (0.85) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1158
• Undecidability, not consensus, is the condition of democratic freedom #complicates (0.80) — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 150