The political liberalism of Rawls and Larmore, far from being
conducive to a pluralistic society, manifests a strong tendency toward
homogeneity and leaves little space for dissent and contestation in the
sphere of politics. By postulating that it is possible to reach a free moral
consensus on political fundamentals through rational procedures and
that such a consensus is provided by liberal institutions, it ends up
endowing a historically specific set of arrangements with the character
of universality and rationality. This is contrary to the indetermination
that is constitutive of modem democracy. In the end, the rationalist
defence of liberalism, by searching for an argument that is beyond
argumentation and by wanting to define the meaning of the universal,
makes the same mistake for which it criticizes totalitarianism: it rejects
democratic indeterminacy and identifies the universal with a given
particular.