Aligica & Boettke argue the crisis of liberal democracy cannot be solved by rebuilding cultural or ideological consensus. Instead, classical liberals should return to the tradition's founding insight: liberalism emerged as a response to deep pluralism after the Wars of Religion, and the answer then — as now — lies in institutional arrangements (modus vivendi, catallaxy, polycentricity) that allow people with irreconcilable values to coexist, not in agreement on ends.
This is a summary of "Social and values heterogeneity, and the crisis of liberal democracy: classical liberal diagnostic and modus vivendi governance solutions" by Aligica and Boettke in Constitutional Political Economy (2026).
The rival diagnosis (and why it fails)
A popular diagnosis (Deneen, Kalb, etc.) holds that the crisis is fundamentally cultural and ideological: our "models of man" are broken, and the cure is a renewed consensus around a corrected vision of human nature and social order. This view has three parts: (1) beliefs/culture are the key variable; (2) convergence around shared beliefs is necessary (though not sufficient); (3) the content of beliefs matters — dysfunctional (liberal) beliefs must be replaced.
Aligica and Boettke object on two grounds:
- It is not a path open to classical liberals. Hopes of engineering mass adoption of a rejuvenated "liberal" anthropology are implausible.
- It reproduces the very problem liberalism was invented to escape. Liberalism arose after the Reformation destroyed the unified Catholic worldview; the Westphalian settlement deliberately abandoned the search for a shared substantive vision. Today's crisis is structurally similar: normative fragmentation, conflict over ultimate commitments, temptations of forced reintegration (now via surveillance, nudging, technocratic control), and the demonstrated instability of imposed uniformity.
Incommensurability and pluralism
Drawing on Raz, Williams, Kekes, and Galston: value pluralism is an ontological fact, not a failure of understanding. Incommensurable values generate "tragic dilemmas" with no morally clean solution. Twenty-first-century forces — digital media, globalization, echo chambers — have intensified heterogeneity and polarization, making common ground for deliberation ever harder. Any adequate response must take irreducible diversity as a starting condition, not a problem to be eliminated.
The limits of overarching consensus solutions
No single overarching normative principle or "model of man" can regulate governance when principles conflict endemically. Re-examining beliefs and philosophical anthropology is necessary but far from sufficient. Following Stuart Hampshire, the real work is building the machinery of conflict management: institutions for adversarial argument, negotiation, arbitration, and adjudication. Institutions are the only effective "solution space."
Modus vivendi
The core governance principle for deeply divided societies (Bernard Williams, McCabe, Horton):
- A "live and let live" bet: citizens tolerate others' freedoms in exchange for protection of their own and a guarantee the state won't impose any particular moral framework.
- Normatively grounded in consent, but consent attaches to rules and procedures, not to substantive goods or worldviews — agreement on rules of conduct is far easier than agreement on the good life.
- Requires equal treatment/impartiality; without it, rules become instruments of domination.
- Participants' reasons for accepting the arrangement are secondary and may differ (self-interest, prudence, morality).
- It is an ongoing process of mutual adjustment, and explicitly a second-best arrangement — not an ideal to be achieved once and for all.
Catallaxy and polycentricity
Two institutional principles operationalize modus vivendi:
- Catallaxy (Hayek): a decentralized order with no supreme value or shared hierarchy of ends. Abstract rules of conduct about means replace mandatory agreement on ends, letting people with divergent purposes cooperate through voluntary exchange. Where shared-purpose organizations turn people with different aims into adversaries, catallaxy turns difference into mutual benefit.
- Polycentricity (E. & V. Ostrom): multiple overlapping, competing, and cooperating centers of decision-making under an overarching set of norms, organized by subsidiarity. Decentralized, locally tailored rules (à la Tiebout) avoid one-size-fits-all impositions and provide the infrastructure in which catallactic, modus vivendi relations can operate.
Acknowledged limits: risks of fragmentation and isolation; watering down of core principles; catallaxy's indifference to shared values; limits of toleration; the strategic problem that tolerant actors can be exploited by rigid ones, eroding reciprocity; and no guarantee that such arrangements yield democratically robust or liberal outcomes.
From principles to applications
This is not invention ex nihilo but institutional recomposition: federalism and subsidiarity are historical embodiments of these principles.
Twenty-first-century technology (digital infrastructure, monitoring, shared data platforms) expands the feasible set of modular, reconfigurable governance arrangements and changes the properties of goods (public, club, commons), allowing finer institutional tailoring.
Polycentric climate governance (Ostrom, Keohane & Victor) is the paradigm case: actors with divergent values pursue partially overlapping goals at multiple levels without needing substantive value convergence. The realistic aim is stress reduction, not harmony — Hayek's "pretense of knowledge" and Ostrom's critique of institutional "panaceas" apply.
Conclusion
The task is one of Constitutional Political Economy (Buchanan): belief-system reconstruction must be complemented by institutional redesign. There may be no formula that solves the problem; we may be permanently confined to the realm of the second-best, "tinkering and improvising our way around the elusive principles of modus vivendi."
Key concepts
- Deep/value pluralism — irreducible diversity of values, worldviews, lifestyles
- Incommensurability — no common benchmark exists for ordering some values (Raz)
- Modus vivendi — consent-based coexistence on rules, not ends (Williams)
- Catallaxy — order through exchange without shared purposes (Hayek)
- Polycentricity — overlapping, multi-level decision centers with subsidiarity (Ostroms)
- Second-best governance — feasible accommodation over ideal consensus