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List of contents
List of illustrations. Acknowledgements. Introduction.
Part I: Escaping modus vivendi 1. The model: debating friends. 2. Rawls: property-owning democracy. 3. Gutmann and Thompson: deliberative democracy. 4. Buchanan: the neoliberal state. 5. Escaping modus vivendi: summary.
Part II: How to make use of diversity? 6. Diversity: nuisance or asset? 7. Deliberation and the gains of diversity. 8. Polycentric paradigm.
Part III: Polycentric democracy 9. A polycentric political order. 10.The argument for polycentric democracy. 11. Concluding remarks.
References. Index.
About the author
Julian F. Müller is a Research Associate at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He works at the intersection between political philosophy, social epistemology and political economy. His research into political disagreement has won several research awards.
Summary
This book poses the question, how can we organize society in such a way that our disagreement works to the benefit of everyone? In response, it makes the argument for polycentric democracy, a political arrangement consisting of various political units that enjoy different degrees of independence.
Additional text
Political Pluralism, Disagreement and Justice is a powerful and original defense of a polycentric political order. And it is an important contribution to a fresh approach to political philosophy, “New Diversity Theory,” according to which moral diversity is not moral reasoning gone awry, or a feature of free societies to be managed, but a fundamental moral phenomenon that can be a resource to discover better ways of living together. This book shows Julian Müller to be one of the young, innovative, thinkers who may well change the face of political philosophy. Gerald Gaus, University of Arizona, USAJulian Müller’s book is not only one of the best introductions and accounts of the increasingly influential literature on polycentric governance systems but also it is an important contribution to it, advancing in significant ways the frontier of our understanding of polycentric democracy in both the analytical-explanatory and the normative-applied directions. Paul Dragos Aligica, George Mason University, USAThis essay brings together problems from political theory with tools from epistemology and economics to provide a very astute tour de horizon of a great deal of scholarship whose individual elements often remain out of touch with one another. One of the themes of the work is that diversity of judgment is a tool and not merely a problem. Müller shows how bringing together a diversity of ideas and approaches can help us understand problems about diversity itself. FredD’Agostino, The University of Queensland, Australia
