Contemporary political disagreement is extensive and persistent, and occurs at different levels of abstraction. At a practical level we are confronted by disagreement over what kinds of policies the state should pursue: for instance, whether it should enforce a sharply progressive income tax. That issue often provokes disagreement at a more theoretical level, in the form of a controversy over whether social justice requires priority to be given to the worst off through re-distributive taxation. Although many political theorists do not explicitly take a stand on the question of why political disagreement in its different forms resists resolution, their writings generally provide some clues as to how they would answer it were they to address it directly. The central purpose of this study is to evaluate a variety of explanations for why political disagreement is so extensive and persistent, some of which are advocated explicitly whilst others lie beneath the surface of arguments, and to develop my own account in opposition to them.

Some might doubt whether contemporary political disagreement is an important phenomenon, worthy of explanation. One strand of Marxist thought takes the view that it is insignificant on the grounds that it occurs mainly within the framework of a dominant ideology: for example, those who argue over the merits of a sharply progressive system of taxation, and over the question of whether the state should operate a redistributive taxation policy that gives priority to the needs of the worst off, generally share a commitment to a market economy in which most of the means of production are privately owned.