Enacting Democracy: Deliberation, Agonism, and the Empty Place of Political Action
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Neoliberal and Militarised Post-Politics: Four Social Regimes, Four Affects and Radical Politics Today Ali Rıza Taşkale Thesis
Neoliberal and Militarised Post-Politics: Four Social Regimes, Four Affects and Radical Politics Today Ali Rıza Taşkale Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Geography, The University of Sheffield February 2013 ii Abstract This dissertation theorises the depoliticised conditions of late capitalism through what I call a ‘neoliberal and militarised post-politics.’ It argues that ours is a neoliberal and militarised post-political society that cannot imagine disruptive revolutionary events. The dissertation addresses key debates on governmental social regimes of neoliberal post-politics, the inseparability of neoliberalism and war/militarism, and the historical/geographical unevenness of global capitalism. In so doing, it offers an original topological analysis that makes the following critical interventions: an exploration of how the much-discussed social regimes of sovereignty, discipline and control relate to each other in the production of neoliberal governmentality; an analysis of the affective logic each regime entails and how they inter-relate; a proposal for a fourth regime, ‘terrorism’, and a theorisation of its associated affect, ‘spite.’ Finally, radical critique as divine violence is set against neoliberal and militarised post-politics. iii iv Acknowledgements Special thanks are due here to Eric Olund, my primary supervisor, for his patience and guidance as well as constant encouragement and support through the travails of writing and completing the dissertation. Thanks are also due to Jessica Dubow, my second supervisor, for her exemplary readings and invaluable comments on the chapters which now make up this dissertation. The support I have received from Benjamin Hennig and Lukáš Makovický throughout the dissertation has, of course, been inestimable. -
Agonism Contra Liberalism
Agonistic Critiques of Liberalism: Perfection and Emancipation Thomas Fossen1 Utrecht University Published in Contemporary Political Theory, 2008, 7, (376–394) http://www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/journal/v7/n4/abs/cpt200815a.html Abstract: Agonism is a political theory that places contestation at the heart of politics. Agonistic theorists charge liberal theory with a depoliticization of pluralism through an excessive focus on consensus. This paper examines the agonistic critiques of liberalism from a normative perspective. I argue that by itself the argument from pluralism is not sufficient to support an agonistic account of politics, but points to further normative commitments. Analyzing the work of Mouffe, Honig, Connolly, and Owen, I identify two normative currents of agonistic theory: emancipatory agonism, aimed at challenging violence and exclusion, and perfectionist agonism, aimed at the cultivation of nobility. From a normative perspective the former presents an internal challenge to liberalism, while the latter constitutes an external challenge to liberalism by providing a competing account of the ends of politics. Recognition of the distinction between emancipatory and perfectionist agonism is crucial in assessing the purchase of agonistic critiques of liberalism. Furthermore, this analysis draws us beyond the simple opposition between contestation and consensus. It is not simply a question of valuing genuine pluralism and therefore criticizing consensus; rather the question comes to be: what are the ends of politics? Introduction Agonism can be defined as a political theory that does not place any institutions, procedures, principles, or values beyond political contestation; that precludes final closure on any question. In doing so, it challenges some of the fundamental commitments of the liberal paradigm as embodied in political liberalism and deliberative democracy, most fundamentally the idea that the legitimacy of a political regime relies on a consensus among rational or reasonable citizens. -
Habermas: Testing the Political Estelle Ferrarese
Habermas: Testing the Political Estelle Ferrarese To cite this version: Estelle Ferrarese. Habermas: Testing the Political. Thesis Eleven, SAGE Publications, 2015. halshs- 01251486 HAL Id: halshs-01251486 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01251486 Submitted on 16 Jan 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Page Proof Instructions and Queries Journal Title: THE Article Number: 602176 No. Query Please confirm that all author information, including names, affiliations, sequence, and contact details, is correct. Please review the entire document for typographical errors, mathematical errors, and any other necessary corrections; check headings, tables, and figures. Please ensure that you have obtained and enclosed all necessary permissions for the reproduction of artistic works, (e.g. illustrations, photographs, charts, maps, other visual material, etc.) not owned by yourself. Please refer to your publishing agreement for further information. Please note that this proof represents your final opportunity to review your article prior -
DEMOPOLIS Democracy Before Liberalism in Theory and Practice
Trim: 228mm 152mm Top: 11.774mm Gutter: 18.98mm × CUUK3282-FM CUUK3282/Ober ISBN: 978 1 316 51036 0 April 18, 2017 12:53 DEMOPOLIS Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice JOSIAH OBER Stanford University, California v Trim: 228mm 152mm Top: 11.774mm Gutter: 18.98mm × CUUK3282-FM CUUK3282/Ober ISBN: 978 1 316 51036 0 April 18, 2017 12:53 Contents List of Figures page xi List of Tables xii Preface: Democracy before Liberalism xiii Acknowledgments xvii Note on the Text xix 1 Basic Democracy 1 1.1 Political Theory 1 1.2 Why before Liberalism? 5 1.3 Normative Theory, Positive Theory, History 11 1.4 Sketch of the Argument 14 2 The Meaning of Democracy in Classical Athens 18 2.1 Athenian Political History 19 2.2 Original Greek Defnition 22 2.3 Mature Greek Defnition 29 3 Founding Demopolis 34 3.1 Founders and the Ends of the State 36 3.2 Authority and Citizenship 44 3.3 Participation 48 3.4 Legislation 50 3.5 Entrenchment 52 3.6 Exit, Entrance, Assent 54 3.7 Naming the Regime 57 4 Legitimacy and Civic Education 59 4.1 Material Goods and Democratic Goods 60 4.2 Limited-Access States 63 4.3 Hobbes’s Challenge 64 4.4 Civic Education 71 ix Trim: 228mm 152mm Top: 11.774mm Gutter: 18.98mm × CUUK3282-FM CUUK3282/Ober ISBN: 978 1 316 51036 0 April 18, 2017 12:53 x Contents 5 Human Capacities and Civic Participation 77 5.1 Sociability 79 5.2 Rationality 83 5.3 Communication 87 5.4 Exercise of Capacities as a Democratic Good 88 5.5 Free Exercise and Participatory Citizenship 93 5.6 From Capacities to Security and Prosperity 98 6 Civic Dignity -
A Focus on Chantal Mouffe's “Agonistic Democracy”
Educational Studies in Japan: International Yearbook No. 13, March, 2019. pp. 111-121 Rethinking of the Signifi cance of Passions in Political Education: A Focus on Chantal Mouff e’s “Agonistic Democracy” Sho Yamanaka* This paper discusses the significance of passions in political education through the consideration of Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic democracy. Mouffe points out the role of the passions that facilitate organizing political identities, and presents the risks of eliminating passions. The liberal interpretation of de- mocracy intends to eliminate passions that prevent people achieving a rational consensus. On the other hand, the emphasis on rationality makes it easy for right-wing populism to mobilize people’s passions. In other words, the elimina- tion of passions creates a situation in which dialogue with other political iden- tities is diffi cult: this is the contradiction of the liberal interpretation of democ- racy. To avoid this, Mouff e suggests channels that express collective passions as democratic designs to disarm antagonistic passions. Mouffe’s democratic theory indicates the risk of a too optimistic understanding of the passions in political education which takes deliberative approaches. Also, this result sug- gests the necessity of reconsidering the position of passions in the political ed- ucation. From the perspective of Mouff e’s agonistic democracy, the role of po- litical education should be regarded as not elimination of passions but sublimation of antagonistic passions. To achieve this sublimation, we should fa- cilitate participation in democratic practices. However, sublimation of antago- nistic passions through democratic institutions is not always successful. If an- tagonistic passions are expressed in destructive forms, what should we do? This paper touches only briefl y on this point. -
Democratic Theory
Democratic Theory Government 6645 (Spring 2016) Professor Jason Frank Cornell University White Hall 307 W 4:30-6:30 [email protected] White Hall 114 Office Hours: W 1:30-3:30 Course description Democracy, once commonly derided as the worst of all regimes, is now just as often proclaimed the universal source of modern political legitimacy. There is little agreement, however, over what democracy means or how it is best embodied in state institutions and law. This seminar will attempt to bring these disagreements into conceptual focus by introducing students to select debates in contemporary democratic theory over the meaning of democracy and the normative scope and limitations of contemporary democratic practice. Beginning with the early modern history of popular sovereignty and ending with contemporary debates over democracy and neoliberalism, we will explore (but not limit ourselves to) the following questions: How do democratic theorists and democratic actors negotiate the paradoxes of collective self-rule? Is democratic theory an empirical or normative inquiry, or does it destabilize this very opposition? Who is the agent of democratic politics? How should we understand the interaction between formal democratic institutions and political culture? What is the relationship between liberalism and democracy? Do rights (as protections of individual liberty not subject to revision by majority rule) suspend democracy or establish its necessary preconditions? Is democracy premised on a unitary political identity and, if so, how does it accommodate or recognize difference? Is democracy best understood as a form of government or a practice of resistance to domination? What do we expect from democratic theory and how should we understand the relationship between democratic theory and democratic practice? Course Requirements This is a political theory graduate seminar. -
Laclau and Mouffe's Radical Democracy in School
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by PhilPapers ETHICS AND EDUCATION, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2017.1356680 Education and articulation: Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democracy in school Itay Snir The Open University of Israel and Minerva Humanities Center, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This paper outlines a theory of radical democratic education Democratic education; by addressing a key concept in Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony articulation; intellectuals; and Socialist Strategy: articulation. Through their concept of Ernesto Laclau; Chantal articulation, Laclau and Mouffe attempt to liberate Gramsci’s Mouffe theory of hegemony from Marxist economism, and adapt it to a political sphere inhabited by a plurality of struggles and agents none of which is predominant. However, while for Gramsci the political process of hegemony formation has an explicit educational dimension, Laclau and Mouffe ignore this dimension altogether. My discussion starts with elaborating the concept of articulation and analysing it in terms of three dimensions: performance, connection and transformation. I then address the role of education in Gramsci’s politics, in which the figure of the intellectual is central, and argue that radical democratic education requires renouncing that figure. In the final section, I offer a theory of such education, in which both teacher and students articulate their political differences and identities. Introduction Democratic education, like democracy in general, seems to have fallen into a deep crisis in both theory and practice. The foundation upon which classical democracy is presumed to rest is torn by tensions between the principles of equality and individual rights, between the nation-state and indigenous and migrant cultures, between identities and differences. -
The Agony of the Democratic Paradox
The Agony of the Democratic Paradox Andrew Schaap (Political Science, Melbourne) [email protected] Paper prepared for ‘Social and Political Agon’ workshop European University Institute in Florence 24-25 November 2006 Against Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe insists that there is no necessary conceptual relation between democracy and human rights but only a contingent historical relation. Moreover, these principles are fundamentally irreconcilable: while democracy presupposes an historical act of exclusion in the political constitution of a demos, human rights presupposes a universally inclusive moral community. Yet, Mouffe argues, the accommodation of these conflicting legitimating principles within a liberal-democratic regime is productive. Although irreconcilable, their paradoxical articulation keeps the limits that enable democratic deliberation and decision-making in view for being political and, therefore, contestable. Radical democracy, she argues, is premised on the recognition and affirmation of this ‘democratic paradox’. In this paper I want to examine whether a commitment to radical democracy requires that we affirm Mouffe’s account of the democratic paradox. Might one be a radical democrat and yet understand human rights and popular sovereignty to be co-original as Habermas does? Specifically, I want to consider what is at stake politically in conceptualising the relation between these two legitimating principles of modern regimes. I will suggest that what is at stake is the representation of political claims. To understand human rights and democracy as ‘co-original’ in the way that Habermas proposes is to peremptorily exclude radical political speech and action that would fundamentally contest the terms of political association. For it diminishes the representational space in which a claim could be articulated 1 that would contest the particular determination of the “we” that authorises that order in the first place. -
DEMOCRATIC POLITICS and AGONISTIC PLURALISM Chantal Mouffe
SEMINARIO INTERDISCIPLINAR O( S) SENTIDO (S) DA (S) CULTURA (S) COORDINADO POR RAMÓN MAIZ DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND AGONISTIC PLURALISM Chantal Mouffe Venres, 18 de decembro de 2009 17:00 horas Consello da Cultura Galega 1 Chantal Mouffe Politóloga formada en Louvain, París e Essex, Chantal Mouffe (Bélxica, 1943) é Profesora de Teoría Política na Universidade de Westminster, Londres. Nos últimos anos, impartiu aulas en diferentes universidades de Europa, Norte América e Sul América e realizou estancias de investigación en Harvard, Cornell, Universidade de California, Instituto de Estudos Avanzados de Princeton e Centro Nacional de Investigación Científica de París. Entre 1989 e 1995, foi Directora de Programa no Colexio Internacional de Filosofía de París. Chantal Mouffe é unha das pensadoras máis influíntes no eido da filosofía política actual. Compiladora de obras como Gramsci and Marxist Theory , Dimensions of Radical Democracy , Deconstruction and Pragmatism , ou The Challenge of Carl Schmitt ; é tamén coautora (con Ernesto Laclau) de Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985). Asemade, ten publicadas The Return of the Political (1993), The Democratic Paradox (2000) ou On the Political (2005), ademais de numerosos artigos sobre pensamento político (Carl Scmitt) e teoría política (Paixóns e política). Na actualidade, Mouffe está a elaborar unha aproximación non racionalista á teoría política, fundamentada na súa formulación do concepto de ‘democracia agónica’, e participa en diferentes proxectos de -
Democratic Agonism: Conflict and Contestation in Divided Societies Written by Kathryn Harvey
Democratic Agonism: Conflict and Contestation in Divided Societies Written by Kathryn Harvey This PDF is auto-generated for reference only. As such, it may contain some conversion errors and/or missing information. For all formal use please refer to the official version on the website, as linked below. Democratic Agonism: Conflict and Contestation in Divided Societies https://www.e-ir.info/2012/10/20/democratic-agonism-conflict-and-contestation-in-divided-societies/ KATHRYN HARVEY, OCT 20 2012 Democratic Agonism: Conflict and Contestation in Divided Societies Applying the Theoretical Assumptions of Chantal Mouffe and William Connolly to the Case of Turkey Introduction The last twenty years have seen an unprecedented attempt to revitalise democracy. Populist anxieties, along with the dominance of corporate and media elites, the lack of real political alternatives, the limitations of most models of democratic representation and the political distortions produced by vast inequalities in wealth all point to an urgent need to rethink democracy (Newman, 2008: 228). Democratic theory is now rich in trends and models, offering different ways of reading what a democratic order should entail. The divergences within and between these theories tend to be based on a constitutive tension within democracy itself, and can be said to reflect the debate between the modernist and post-modernist political discourses. The antagonism is embodied in the articulation of democracy as a type of political regime with distinct institutions, and as a form of politics which embodies its own indeterminacy, which is contingent on and open to new and unpredictable articulations. The latter of these perspectives is articulated by the post-modernist thinkers Chantal Mouffe and William Connolly, and can be said to constitute what is variously referred to as “democratic agonism”, “agonistic democracy” and “political agonism”. -
Does Antagonism Precede Agonism in Challenging Neoliberalism? the Gezi Resistance in Turkey
www.acpo.cz INTERNETOVÝ RECENZOVANÝ ČASOPIS 2014 | Vol. 6 | No. 3 | ISSN 1803–8220 MUSIL, Pelin Ayan (2014). Does Antagonism Precede Ago- nism in Challenging Neoliberalism? The Gezi Resistance in Turkey. Acta Politologica 6, 3, 326-342. ISSN 1803-8220. Tento článek podléhá autorským právům, kopírování a vyu- žívání jeho obsahu bez řádného odkazování na něj je pova- žováno za plagiátorství a podléhá sankcím dle platné legislativy. KatedraInternetový politologie recenzovaný Institutu politologických časopis vydává studií Fakulta sociálních věd Univerzity Karlovy v Praze, Does Antagonism Precede Agonism in Challenging Neoliberalism? The Gezi Resistance in Turkey Pelin Ayan Musil1 Abstract: Mouffe argues that the effective way of challenging the power relations in liberal -demo cratic capitalism is to embrace agonism, not antagonism. That is, the left should acknowl- edge the contingent character of the hegemonic configurations in liberal democracies, and in order to put liberty and equality into practice, it should similarly adopt hegemonic tac- tics. Such tactics include the disarticulation of existing practices as well as creation of new discourses and institutions. Yet, by stating that ‘the task of democracy is to transform the antagonism into agonism,’ Mouffe also implies that antagonism should precede agonism and thus contradicts her very position of how to challenge the neoliberal order. Indeed, the anti-neoliberal movements that occurred in Latin American countries in 1990s as well as in New York, Greece, Spain, and elsewhere during -
Chantal Mouffe's Agonistic Project: Passions and Participation Matthew
Chantal Mouffe’s Agonistic Project: Passions and Participation Matthew Jones: [email protected] This is an Author’s Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Parallax April 9th 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13534645.2014.896546 Full Citation: M Jones, “Chantal Mouffe’s Agonistic Project: Passions and Participation,” Parallax 20, no. 2 (2014), 14-30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.896546 Note: if you do not have access to Parallax and wish to view this article, contact me via email and I will forward to you a link allowing full access. It is Chantal Mouffe’s contention that the central weakness of consensus-driven forms of liberalism, such as John Rawls’ political liberalism and Jürgen Habermas’ deliberative democracy, is that they refuse to acknowledge conflict and pluralism, especially at the level of the ontological. Their defence for doing so is that conflict and pluralism are the result of attempts to incorporate unreasonable and irrational claims into the public political sphere. In this context, unreasonable and irrational claims are those that cannot be translated into universalizable terms. However, for Mouffe, it is this intentional exclusionary act itself that is detrimental to a well-functioning democratic polity. It is only through the inclusion of a diverse body of subject positions that a democratic polity can be said to be truly representative of the polity, and therefore constitute a functioning and inclusive democracy. This paper will examine Mouffe’s account of agonistic pluralism. In doing so, it will demonstrate that instead of being a source of instability within the democratic discourse and therefore relegated into the private non-political sphere, passions and values that are constitutive of these subject positions ought to be incorporated into the public political sphere.