Rawls’s well-ordered society erases the adversary and expels legitimate opposition from the public sphere

Evidence

I see the category of the ‘adversary’ as the key to envisage the specificity of modern pluralist democratic politics, and it is at the very centre of my understanding of democracy as ‘agonistic pluralism’. Besides allowing me to counter Schmitt’s argument about the inconsistency of the idea of pluralist democracy, it helps me to bring to the fore the limitations both of the theorists of ‘deliberative democracy’ and of the politics of the so-called ‘radical centre’. In Chapter 1, for instance. I examine the more recent version of Rawls’s political liberalism and show the problematic implications for a pluralist approach of his conception of a ‘weU-ordered society’ I submit that one of its main shortcomings is precisely that it tends to erase the very place of the adversary, thereby expelling any legitimate opposition from the democratic public sphere. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 69

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in whether consensus-based liberalism (Rawls, deliberative democracy) inadvertently displaces rather than dissolves the friend/enemy boundary — relevant to assessing any ‘we’ without an enemy. — connects to: Rawls’s well-ordered society erases the adversary from democratic politics. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 69; Rawls’s well-ordered society eliminates politics and requires coercion of dissenters — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 129; Rawls’s well-ordered society eliminates politics by relegating conflict to private life. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 129 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Rawls’s well-ordered society erases the adversary from democratic politics. #corroborates (1.00) — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 69
• Rawls’s model erases the legitimate struggle among adversaries over liberal values. #corroborates (0.95) — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 131
• Rawls’s well-ordered society eliminates politics and requires coercion of dissenters #expands (0.92) — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 129
• Rawls’s well-ordered society eliminates politics by relegating conflict to private life. #expands (0.90) — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 129
• Rawls’s political consensus is positioned as beyond legitimate contestation once reached #corroborates (0.85) — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 126
• Liberties lose their critical force once institutionalized #expands (0.78) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 106
• Rawls frames political liberalism as securing stability among reasonable pluralists #qualifies (0.75) — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 107