The Crisis of Anticrisis (original) (raw)
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Thesis work at the Università Degli Studi di Pavia, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, 2020
The aim of this work is to challenge the concept of radical, agonistic democracy brought forward by Chantal Mouffe and to show why her positions, while being of high original value, are for the most part not compatible with the demands that an egalitarian and liberal democracy places on its citizens. It is argued that, while Mouffe’s warnings about a potential depoliticisation of society in favour of neo-liberal policies and the rise of right-populism which she attributes to the political parties’ failing in generating meaningful political identities are justified, she does not pay sufficient attention to democracy’s need for responsible human individuality and some of the limitations to how democracy can and must be understood. By showing just how much Mouffe draws on the ideas of Carl Schmitt and Sigmund Freud, the incompatibility of her theory with a contemporary understanding of the individual as one whose value in society is recognised by his dignity and his ability to come to terms with his individual character in a democratic setting. The highly influential work of Carl Schmitt on the political, with a focus on its critique of liberalism, as well as Ulrich Beck’s theory of cosmopolitanism are explored in an attempt to fathom their attempts to explain conflict in society and to make sense of the anti-liberal mind set which dominates much of the political discourse today. Democracy, as it is shown, cannot function on grounds of hegemonic struggle since its fundamental ethos rests on the assumption that citizens can feel responsible for their actions and build towards establishing a common framework of values, norms and goals. Establishing contingency as the central democratic feature cannot substitute for the need for deliberative decision making processes. Collective choice theory has provided the insight that egalitarian liberal democracy, which relies on reason to arrive at collective decisions, can only work if citizens do not act as rational individuals pursuing their own interests but instead accept the validity of the notion of some common good. The key task for democracy is therefore that to guarantee for freely accessible institutions which provide the foundation for open debate and decision making processes which are based on giving reasons. Furthermore, the conceptual distinction between separability and separateness shows why society is still struggling to find the right balance between allowing enough space for character development and establishing firm collective identities. If one wants to challenge the populist rise in Western democracies one needs to foster once again the role of the individual in such way that he knows what democracy can and cannot be and will be able to deeply care about it. Populism, as we will see, thrives on discord, fear and appeals to an imaginary ‘will of the people’ which should be confronted with the insight that democracy is based on character formation, individual sacrifice and responsibility and the belief in something larger than decision by majority rule. Therefore, the question is raised how democracy shall be understood if it is to preserve its commitment to individual responsibility, personal development and a notion of the common good but nevertheless addresses the serious and highly topical problems that neo-liberalism, globalism, and post-structuralism pose for society on a socio-political level.
IPP Review, 2016
In his seminal 1989 essay “The End of History?” — which he expanded into his bestselling 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man — Francis Fukuyama argued that the human desire for recognition, which is driven by the part of the psyche the ancient Greeks identified as “thymos” (spiritedness), is best fulfilled by the political and economic structure of liberal democracy.
Deliberative Justice and Collective Identity
Political Theory
Drawing upon insights from virtue ethics, this essay develops a concept of collective identity specifically suited to deliberative democracy: a virtues-centered theory of deliberative justice. Viewing democratic legitimacy as a political phenomenon, we must account for more than the formal rules that must be satisfied according to deontological theories of deliberative democracy. I argue that common approaches to deliberative democracy are unable to account for the motivations of deliberation, or ensure that citizens have the cognitive skills to deliberate well. Next, I engage with critics of deliberative democracy who have moved toward broader and more humanistic concepts of deliberation but have stopped short of conceiving of justice as a virtue and, in their own way, neglected questions of collective identity. I reconstruct justice as a virtue from a deliberative perspective, combining virtue ethics’ emphasis on habituation with a weaker sense of collective identity that allows f...
Becoming One: Visions of Political Unity from the Ancients to the Postmoderns
Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory
This article addresses how the relationship of political unity and exclusion occupies a constitutive place in the history of political thought from the ancients to the postmoderns. Political unity - or “becoming one” – has been presented repeatedly as the key to a flourishing polity, as well as to remedying socio-political decay. I catalogue and name the unique visions of unity found in thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke and Rorty. I maintain that despite their differences, the shared concern with becoming one demands that political rule - and even the structure of society - be posed as the unified property of a single will. I show how this assumption enacts exclusions from political life, and raise whether the postmodern notion of the multitude breaks with this long tradition. Finally, I contrast the fortunes of the sovereign imagination and the democratic imagination, and argue that although both are necessary, the diminishment of politics will continue unless the former’s dominance is overcome.
2023
That democracy is in crisis today is a truism, so much so that our era has been called “postdemocratic” (CROUCH 2005). The disintegration of the relationship between territory, legislation and rights induced by globalisation creates difficulties in the configuration of political spaces, as what regulates them is the growing relevance of non-representative powers (IMF, rating agencies – SASSEN 2007) and the processes of non-State juridification that marginalise democratic self-determination (Patents right, new lex mercatoria – TEUBNER 1997). Moreover, devaluation of democratic principles results in the constant reduction of citizens’ electoral participation and in de-constitutionalisation of social rights (BROWN 2015). All these phenomena lead to the crisis of political representation as the essence of the crisis of modern democracy (DUSO 2010, CHIGNOLA 2020). I would like to illustrate how the modern concept of political representation is an epistemic obstacle for the resolution of this crisis. Firstly, I will show that this concept is unsuitable for thinking democratic pluralism. Playing an essential role in conceptualising the political unity of the State (the ideal that is to be re-presented), the representation makes individuals depoliticised, subjected to the procedures of the Law that just enables the decisions of an abstract homogeneous concept, “the People”, for which material relationships among concrete individuals turns indefinite, since in this theoretical framework only what is expressed with this level of abstraction can be labelled as “political”. Then, I would propose an alternative model to regain concrete decision-making on political processes: reconsidering groups-formation practices based on the plural concrete political realities already constituted within the constitutional framework (like social cooperatives, feminist collectives, unions.