In this final chapter, we return to the abstracted arguments developed in the first part of the book. The several applications examined in Chapters 6 through 13 of the text should have been sufficient to demonstrate the normative relevance of the generality principle in the turn-of-the-century politics that we now experience. Policy arguments in support of free, open, and nondiscriminatory trade; flatter and more uniform taxation; nonparticularized standards for environmental regulation and public goods provision; devolution of political authority to more adequately defined areas of special benefits and against means testing for transfers – indeed, against discriminatory treatment of any sort – these arguments find common philosophical grounding in the rule or norm for political generality.

There is a categorical distinction to be drawn between arguments for depoliticization, per se, and the application of the generality principle over those sectors of interaction that are politicized, although there are relationships that stem from feedbacks between prospects for discriminatory exploitation and the range of politicization itself, some of which will be discussed later in this chapter.

Specifically, this book is about the constitutional structure of those sectors of social interaction that are politicized; it is not directly about drawing some borderline between these (public) sectors and the private (market) sectors. We recognize, of course, that arguments in support of many of the same policy thrusts noted (e.g., free trade and nondiscriminatory taxation) may be derived from the classical liberal precept of minimal coercion, or its obverse, maximal individual liberty from collective intrusion. This second normative impulse has been much more central in modern discourse than the normative inferences from generalization that we have stressed here.