This, of course, is akin to the theory from which President Clinton drew back when reconsidering his nomination of Lani Guinier for Attorney General, and with this theory Young makes common cause with John Calhoun's advocacy of concurrent majorities, an irony that indicates how deep is the crisis in our understanding of citizenship. When Carens pressed universality too far, it became difficult to explain what it might mean to belong to a civic community. One wonders, however, whether that might not be helpful. We want to be fully ourselves, fully particular, yet united with others in a good no one need fear to share, a common good in which one need not fear to have colleagues. Desiring that so intensely, we too readily create idols.
Liberal democracy is, by contrast, chastened.
It offers less-only a kind of generic justice. If that is not everything we desire, as Iris Marion Young rightly sees, it is still a considerable achievement. To ask more of politics, to ask it to overcome the barriers that divide us, join the Many into One, and unify life, is to ask that politics be redemptive. That it cannot be. Liberal democracy, accepting reluctantly the gap between public and private, attaches a kind of eschatological reservation to our desire to belong.