The Universal in the Particular or: Community without Unity?

Taking up the charge that contemporary theories of democracy and justice lack the normative resources to transcend their particular cultural context, most notably the works of Habermas and Rawls respectively, I develop a disagreement model of democracy which rejects both justice and (ideal and/or actual) consensus as a standard of legitimacy of a political order and reinstates disagreement at the center of democratic politics. This greater descriptive-analytical adequacy, however, brings into question the possibility of normative claims within the model developed. Explicating the normative dimension of the model, I subsequently argue that a theory of democracy needs to accord normative weight to the disagreement about conceptions of the common good itself and construct a conception of equality on this basis (which, I claim, in turn underlies any plausible theory of democracy which aims to transcend the analytical level). I then argue that while the so understood procedural disagreement model of democracy can provide a response to the charge of cultural particularism, it can only do so by invoking substantive normative claims at the foundational theoretical level which underlie the normative significance of disagreement. These substantive claims, however, can only be defended if the disagreement about them is normatively void. This constitutes a self-immunization of the liberal doctrine and points to a certain paradoxical foundational structure of liberal universalism qua universalism. Consequently, I claim that liberal approaches face a dilemma between the self-immunization of the liberal doctrine which moves it into the direction of ideology and the renunciation of universalistic ambitions.