Rawls indirectly points to this fact when he explains that 'a liberal
view removes from the political agenda the most divisive issues/
40
What is this, if not the drawing of a frontier between what is negotiable
in a liberal society and what is not negotiable? What is this, if not a
decision that establishes a distinction between the private and public
spheres? No wonder that this process is experienced as coercion by
those who do not accept such a separation. The advent of liberal
pluralism as well as its continuance must be envisaged as a form of
political intervention in a conflictual field, an intervention that implies
the repression of other alternatives. Those other alternatives might be
displaced and marginalized by the apparently irresistible march of
liberal democracy, but they will never disappear completely and some
of them can be reactivated. Our values, our institutions and way of life
constitute one form of political order among a plurality of possible
ones, and the consensus they command cannot exist without an
'outside' that will forever leave our liberal democratic values and our
conception of justice open to challenge. For those who oppose these
values - those who are disqualified as 'unreasonable' by our rationalist
liberals and who do not participate in their overlapping consensus -
the conditions imposed by the 'rational' dialogue are unacceptable
because they deny some of the defining features of their identity. They
might be forced to accept a modus vivendi but it is not one that will
necessarily develop into a stable and enduring overlapping consensus
as Rawls hopes. According to him, the liberal regime is a modus vivendi
made necessary by the fact of pluralism. Yet it is a modus vivendi that he
wants us to value and accept for moral not prudential reasons. But
what about those who oppose the very idea of such a modus vivendi?
There is obviously no place for their demands inside a liberal modus
vivendi, even one whose scope would have been widened. Liberalism,
for them, is a modus vivendi that they are forced to accept at the same
time that it rejects their values.