Enlarging Political Imagination: Ideal Types of Social Systems and a Pluralistic Distributive Approach

Abstract

The background position of this paper is that an excessive economic inequality between the most and the least advantaged citizens in a liberal democracy has a relevant effect on exposing the latter to the risk of material domination. In this respect, this paper argues that even the most sophisticated and ambitious version of the so-called “insulation strategy” recently proposed by Julia Cagé is an insufficient remedy for the influence of money on politics. Moreover, it sustains that we have strong reasons to maintain a noncommittal view about the choice of ideal types of social systems. Being committed in principle to only one specific ideal social system restricts our political imagination and democratic autonomy of political societies. By contrast, this paper suggests coupling the noncommittal view with a “pluralistic distributive approach”, the main purpose of which is to focus on a set of distributive proposals concerning the most crucial areas of socioeconomic structures in liberal democracies.