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This chapter scrutinises a variety of nuanced liberal and post-liberal approaches to pluralism. Their common feature is that they refuse a facile endorsement of liberal universalism or a surrender to some form of relativistic particularism that denies engagement with the other. These approaches are symptomatic of how even "hard" cases that seek either to defend the liberal values of tolerance, pluralism and the recognition of difference from a variety of ontological perspectives or suggest a post-liberal ontology for the recognition of difference fail to move beyond the foundationalist implications of their respective ontologies. Eventually, the logic of an ultimate ground that permeates their normative justifications is responsible for the unresolved tension between universality and particularity in their accounts of world order. Two strategies are employed here: on the one hand, Rawls, Walzer and Nussbaum subscribe to an abstract notion of universality that threatens to expose their difference-sensitive proposals as another exclusionary hegemonic universalism. On the other hand, Rorty's "ironic liberalism" and McIntyre's retrieval of Aristotelian virtue rely on unargued assumptions that reveal their open defence of particularism to be an equally exclusionary gesture of universalism.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-57069-7_2

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