If you look at society as a set of discourses, then you have specialist discourses (e.g., expertise of various kinds) organized according to a general discourse that relates them all together. Liberal ‘pluralism’ is a general discourse of ‘neutrality‘, but this is contradictory.
The obvious form a general discourse would take is that it sees all discourses as being in service of a good, and values them functionally, as contributing to (or detracting from) that good. This can be done in various different ways but the pattern is familiar.
If liberal ’pluralism’ cannot be simply ‘neutral‘ with regard to discourses as it claims (the absence of a common good), then what is it? It can only be defined in contrast to a general discourse that has a common good. That is, liberal ‘pluralism’ is anti-common-good.
That is, liberal ’pluralism’, contrary to its own claims, does order discourses, but it orders them for political purposes, that purpose being to DISRUPT the formation of a general discourse that has a common good. Thus, liberalism doesn’t merely accept pluralism it wields it.
This is quite openly expressed in liberal theory. To have a common good is considered ‘authoritarian’ or ‘totalitarian’. Liberal theorists worry about the degree to which liberal pluralism is itself a ‘comprehensive doctrine’ (general discourse) that inevitably excludes others.
General discourses that organize other discourses according to a common good are, then, what liberalism opposes (’authoritarianism’, ‘totalitarianism’). A general discourse that actively disrupts the formation of a common good is then liberalism’s (paradoxical) common good.
This explains liberalism’s constant need for ‘progress’ and renewal. It constantly needs to disrupt its own consensus. It is ever hungry for new sources of disruption that will undermine the formation of a clear common good. It is nothing else but this disruption.
This is obvious from observing liberalism in practice. It is not mere ‘tolerance of difference’, it is a constant churn of movements, trends, fads, with one symbol of ’pluralism’ promoted one moment, to be forgotten the next. This is the consequence of the paradox of neutrality.
To make yourself politically useful to liberal society, to create a discourse that will be useful in the continued onslaught against the common good and thereby gain patronage, you need to provide disruption, divisiveness, conflict, seemingly irreducible difference, etc.
Correction: It’s not so much that liberalism needs to ‘disrupt consensus’, ‘stop a common good from forming’, etc, as I said above, as that it needs to constantly stage and/or spin events to fit its narrative. The former way of putting things makes the ‘conflict’ sound too real.
