Liberalism

[dave dorkin]

This is true; given enough like-minded persons. There
is a difference between saying all is indetereminate
and saying that as long as you have general tacit
agreement (or acceptance) on certain underlying issues
(ie homogeneous populations in a broad sense) then the
problems are "managable" When this is not the case, as
is quite often the case with inflows of immigrants and
different ideologies, there are impositions with which
we may both sympathize but can not ground except on
pragmatic bases. By the way, this:

 "clear enough to be predictable, fairly uniformly
applied, and more or less democratically decided"

can be true in the sense I take you to mean and quite
consistant with what I am saying. I would not have
thought it necessary to go to the crits for this at
any rate nor do I deny the difference between the US
and Russia-that's why I cited EP Thompson on the law. 


> Actually my experience is that most casesa re less
> hard in practice than  they are in theory.

In the future looking backward, a great many of those
"easy" cases just may "seem" more complicated-perhaps
even "wrongly" argued and decided. Perhaps you take
much for granted, not unlike Walzer/Rorty for whom our
pragmatist conceptions today just happen to accord
with late 20th century liberal/democratic capitalist
social relations (and usually only in the US).

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