In order to avoid the danger of such a closure, what must be
relinquished is the very idea that there could be such a thing as a
'rational' political consensus, if that means a consensus 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. The fact that, like any
other regime, modem pluralist democracy constitutes a system of
relations of power, is denied and the democratic challenging of those
forms of power becomes illegitimate.