No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
”Fugitive Democracy”
... The coherent public persona that we perform every day is the result of masquerade (Butler 1990: 50). Here I borrow Sheldon Wolin's attribute of fugitivity, which he applies to democracy (Wolin 1994), and understand the subject as being on the run. The fugitive self constantly tries to escape the reification of identity. ...
... Different from agonistic approaches, it is not conflict, but the experience of commonality in collective struggle that defines democracy. Democracy is 'a rebellious moment' (Wolin 1994: 23)-a subjective state of mind. In contrast with agonistic tragedy, the transformative perspective opens prospects for systemic change. ...
When we participate in political debate or protests, we are judged by how we look, which clothes we wear, by our skin colour, gender and body language. This results in exclusions and limits our freedom of expression. The Politics of Becoming explores radical democratic acts of disidentification to counter this problem. Anonymity in masked protest, graffiti, and online de-bate interrupts our everyday identities. This allows us to live our multiple selves. In the digital age, anonymity becomes an inherent part of everyday communication. Through our smart devices we express our selves differently. As cyborgs, our identities are disrupted and reassembled. We curate self-representations on social media, create avatars, share selfies and choose the skin colour of our emojis.
The Politics of Becoming encourages us to engage in a revolution of the self. Democratic pluralism is not only a matter of institutional design but also about how we express our identities. Inner revolutions change our personal realities and plant a seed for democratic futures.
This chapter looks more specifically at the contradiction of being in competition with each other and being committed to communal loyalty. It is discussed how communities are integrated through football by accepting persons that have not belonged to the own social group initially. A look is also taken at mechanisms that hold together diverse national teams which consist of highly paid individuals. Finally, fan communities and their collective action are addressed.
Born as an attempt to move beyond the models of democracy which dominated public and academic discourses during the second postwar period, the deliberative turn has over the years promoted several other turnings, yielding a highly complex and disorienting theoretical landscape—a conceptual spaghetti junction. Following the main deliberative turn we can also count: an ‘epistemic’ turn (Jörke. Critical Policy Studies, 3(3–4), 440–446, 2010), and an ‘empirical’ turn (Thompson. Annual Review of Political Science, 11, 497–520, 2008), a ‘systemic’ turn (Parkinson & Mansbridge. Deliberative systems. Cambridge University Press, 2012) and even a ‘democratic’ turn (Barker et al. Democratizing deliberation: a political theory anthology. Kettering Foundation Press, 2012). The end result of these twists and turns is a plurality of deliberative democratic models reproposing many analytical features which used to characterise those employed in the past (i.e. procedural, aggregative and participatory models of democracy), and which deliberative theorists wanted to transcend. The revitalisation of democracy theory promoted by the deliberative turn has thus made the theoretical landscape extremely intricate and impervious, making even those acquainted with it likely to lose their way. The present work aims to be a rough analytical guide to deliberative democracy (DD) for those who are keen to explore this uneven terrain on their own. As a guide, its goal is twofold: to single out some landmarks to follow along the way, and to indicate which dwelling stations to use in order to make the journey worthwhile. However, its main substantive goal is to understand what practical solutions this speculative activity is envisaging as possible remedies for the legitimacy crisis affecting existing liberal democracies. In keeping with the first goal, this introduction follows a topographical approach, intending to arrive at a conceptual map of DD models. A general assessment of DD’s contribution to the revitalisation of democratic politics will be carried out in Chap. 6.
Radical conceptions of deliberative democracy (RDDs) arise from the efforts of a variegated set of progressive individual thinkers and schools of thought keen to overcome the theory and practice of liberal democracy. Starting from different theoretical standpoints, they end up advocating a form of democratic governance which, according to them, can move beyond the theoretical and political restraints imposed by liberal thought and regimes. Since the liberal tradition is in reality a collection of political positions and practices with some family resemblance (Palumbo, Liberalism. In R. Axmann (Ed.), Understanding democratic politics (pp. 231–240), Sage, 2003), such an approach replicates this pluralistic structure at both theoretical and practical levels. The individuals and groups populating this area of our Cartesian space are therefore a multifarious population aspiring to define the character of a progressive community with a distinctive set of ideas and practical solutions. In pursuing this end, they are strongly committed to supplying conceptual innovations and institutional solutions that can help develop such an aspirational polity in real life. For reasons that will be made clear in the course of my discussion, I shall refer to the latter as a ‘demarchy’. The aim of this chapter is to identify the main contributors to this project, and the analytical elements supporting demarchy as an ideal-type of polity. In doing this, I will stress the differences that, at an analytical level, set RDDs apart from other progressive political visions, above all participatory democracy, with which it is often confused. Once the analytical framework supporting demarchy is spelled out, I shall critically consider its main building blocks, so as to identify the weak points of this project. The author with whom I will mostly be concerned is the Australian philosopher John Burnheim (Is democracy possible? Sydney University Press, 1985/2006; The demarchy manifesto. Sydney University Press, 2016), who is not only one of the earliest explorers, but remains up to now the best representative example of this radical way of thinking. Other more contemporary authors (e.g. Castells, Coleman, Dahlberg, and Smith) will be discussed here only to appraise whether they supply analytical resources that could overcome the limitations affecting Burnheim’s pioneering endeavour.
Past attempts to underscore the limitations of democratic practices and institutions were characterised by two main shortcomings. First, there was an attempt to reduce complexity by identifying democratic politics with only one of its features or manifestations. The more egregious example was the attempt to arrive at a minimalist definition of democracy, and the relevance such an effort attributed to elections and ballot-counting against the more idealistic and dialogical aspects of democratic politics (Mayo. An introduction to democratic theory. Oxford University Press, 1960, ch. 4). Secondly, this type of reductionism was often accompanied by controversial assessments of the discrete ‘democratic games’ thus identified, the aim of which was to show that they yielded logical paradoxes, empirical dilemmas and suboptimal results. The ‘new political economy’ is the postwar disciplinary field where assessments of this sort became commonplace (Coleman. Markets, morals, and the law. Oxford University Press, 1998, ch. 12); soon to be joined by other so-called empirical approaches to democracy (Green & Shapiro. Pathologies of rational choice theory. Yale University Press, 1994). It was to redress these evaluative enterprises—disguising themselves as scientific assessments—that the deliberative turn issued its call to arms among progressive political theorists in the 1990s. Thus, in this book I have tried to show that at the root of the deliberative turn in democratic theory there were initially (1) methodological concerns about the way in which democracy was parcelled out into a series of disjointed ‘games’ to be analysed in isolation from each other, and (2) normative concerns about the ideological biases supporting the negative evaluation of democratic values, norms and practices. Several decades later, and after many other internal twists and turns, it is time to ask whether the various models spawned by the deliberative turn have been able to overcome these shortcomings. Have these models supplied a better picture of democracy, as both an ideal to engender and a set of governance practices to endorse critically? The book is the result of my personal inquiry in the field, and arrives at, by and large, a negative answer to those questions.
In this paper, I discuss the teacher’s role in Laclaudian democratic education in light of the notion of the organic intellectual as proposed by Antonio Gramsci. Unlike common readings of the figure of the organic intellectual, where it is understood as developing organically from within the ranks of the oppressed, I argue that the term “organic” also refers to organization, and that the role of the organic intellectual is to be a political organizer. In contrast to the figure of the charismatic leader to which Laclau and Mouffe often appeal, a political organizer works dialogically, without altogether renouncing the position of active leadership. I argue, accordingly, that the democratic teacher should be an organizer who creates for the students the conditions for articulating their demands and identities and strives to stir the emerging political subjects in a democratic direction, namely against oppressive elites and mechanisms rather than other oppressed groups.
The arts and humanities have become integral components of the theory and practice of transitional justice. At the same time, critics of even this expanded view of transitional justice are finding it incomplete, at best, to meet the challenges facing a widening range of countries, rich and poor, who are striving to reckon with past injustices and prevent future mass violence (Cole. Performance and the afterlives of injustice. University of Michigan Press, 2020; Culbertson. Peacebuilding and the performing arts through the collaborative lens. In J. Mitchell, G. Vincett, T. Hawksley, & H. Culbertson (Eds.), Peacebuilding and the arts (pp. 357–374). Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; Garnsey. The justice of visual art: Creative state-building in times of political transition. Cambridge University Press, 2020). This chapter presents the initial steps we have taken towards a reparative future in which the causes of genocide, human rights violations, and mass violence can be recognised and reckoned with democratically through an ‘everyday’ form of peacebuilding (Mac Ginty. Everyday peace: How so-called ordinary people can disrupt violent conflict. Oxford University Press, 2021). We describe the development of an archive of peacebuilding practices at the national and local levels in the West African country of Mali. From this archive has come a repertoire of picture books, political simulations, and video animations for democratic political education.
The goal of this project of peacebuilding as democratic political education was to prompt and inform local dialogues as one path to peace and democracy in Mali and elsewhere. By orienting themselves around peacebuilding as democratic political education, participants in this project can focus on a point on the horizon beyond transitional justice as it currently exists, mindful of the limitations and dangers they are bound to encounter. In the process, they may gain a clearer working knowledge of the relationship between democracy and power which is, after all, the root meaning of democracy.
Food production in the USA is dominated by a high-modernist ideology and industrial agricultural practices. A wide range of scholars, journalists, and activists have documented the negative impacts of industrial agriculture on human health and welfare in the USA and the world. This article provides a framework for understanding the US food system to see how power is exercised, and to learn what avenues for reform are available to citizens today. This article develops a holistic approach to understanding food systems in the USA and the world. Also highlighted are increasing demands for food justice and the need for greater political activism in food democracy.
This essay applies existing research in new institutional economics to early modern European political theory so as to offer an interpretive proposal. Using Hobbes, Hume, and James Madison as examples, the essay proposes that understanding early modern European political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries (in a particular sense of that term) can benefit contemporary readers in interpreting some of these theorists’ normative prescriptions. Early modern political theorists faced significant risk of large-scale violence, political instability, and state repression in polities that still struggled to accomplish goals such as implementing rule of law, protecting property rights, and widely distributing material resources using impartial criteria. By contrast, many contemporary readers of these writers live in the developed and liberal-democratic West. Contemporary readers are thus liable to normalize their own conditions and to underestimate the political-economic constraints under which early modern political theorists wrote, thereby misreading some of the latter’s normative prescriptions. By interpreting early modern political theorists as writers who faced institutional constraints that have significantly receded in today’s West, contemporary readers can enrich their understanding of these writers’ objectives.
In this paper, I discuss the importance of practices of disidentification and imagination for democratic progress and change. To this end, I bring together certain aspects of Stanley Cavell’s and Richard Rorty’s reflections on democracy, aesthetics, and morality with Jacques Rancière’s account of the importance of appearance for democratic participation. With Rancière, it can be shown that any public–political order always involves the possibility (and often the reality) of exclusion or oppression of those who “have no part” in the current order through a particular order of perceptibility, and that democratic action, therefore, requires rupturing acts of political agency on the part of self-proclaimed political actors through which disidentifications and constructions of difference against such existing orders become possible. With Cavell and Rorty, in turn, it can be shown that these rupturing moments, in order to actually become politically effective, require a responsive disposition and a willingness to engage in practices of imagination on the part of those who occupy dominant positions on existing orders, insofar as they must acknowledge the expression of others’ sense of injustice. The upshot of my discussion is that a comprehensive account of the aesthetic dimension of democratic politics must simultaneously address the interruption of political action on the one hand and responsiveness on the other, and that Rancière and the neo-pragmatists Rorty and Cavell complement each other insofar as they illuminate the blind spots of their respective approaches.
This paper tackles the question of in which sense, if any, educational theory should be considered as ‘political’. From a pragmatist perspective it evaluates three meanings of the term: first, the political as an exception, such as Rancière’s interruption of the existing order, and second, the political as something that is always already given, such as in Derrida’s concept of iteration. Third, the paper turns towards Rorty’s plea for understanding philosophy as cultural politics, i.e., as intervention into the ongoing public discourse. It is argued that this third meaning of the term is better suited for understanding the political of educational theory as it is realistically modest and enables to analyze the political effectiveness of educational theory. These considerations are framed by both a reflection on the very possibility of drawing distinctions between theory and politics as well as an outlook on possible consequences following from an understanding of educational theory as cultural politics. In the outlook, the paper asks why we can hardly see any publicly relevant educational theory and provides suggestions for a “caring critique”, a careful attitude towards our own researching practices, situations, and assemblies.
Finally, a special focus should be placed on the specific contexts of democratic processes and modes, as their influence can be considered significant. For the inclusion of citizens, participation, deliberative practices, organizational processes, formation of social capital, etc. all take place at the local level (Roth 1994; Bogumil 1999; Kersting 2004; Mayer 2004; Evers and Roth 2005; van Deth and Tausendpfund 2013; Roth 2013d; pessimistic: Roth 2011d) and emphasize local and intuitive community spirit as a core principle (Wolin 1994; Little 2002; Taylor 2002; Pettit 2008a) as well as the realization of democratic principles in smaller communities and groups (Gastil 1993; List and Pettit 2013).
In this article the nature of Bruno Latour’s relation to Carl Schmitt is discussed, considering the point by point revisions of Schmitt offered by Latour and his references to Schmitt. These turn out to be plentiful and illuminating. Yet the nature of Latour’s revision and its implications are obscure. The implications of his notion of cosmopolitics for political theory are minimal, and in other respects the Schmittian picture is unchanged. Unlike Schmitt, who embeds political theory in political theology, and presents a political theology in order to problematize political theory, but provides a meta-theology, Latour presents an alternative political theology, and not a meta-theology.
The link between liberty and knowledge is neither static nor simple. Until recently the mutual support between knowledge, science, democracy and emancipation was presupposed. Recently, however, the close relationship between democracy and knowledge has been viewed with skepticism. The growing societal reliance on specialized knowledge often appears to actually undermine democracy. Is it that we do not know enough, but that we know too much? What are the implications for the freedom of societies and their citizens? Does knowledge help or heed them in unraveling the complexity of new challenges? This book systematically explores the shifting dynamics of knowledge production and the implications for the conditions and practices of freedom. It considers the growth of knowledge about knowledge and the impact of an evolving media. It argues for a revised understanding of the societal role of knowledge and presents the concept of 'knowledge societies' as a major resource for liberty.
This article reconstructs and examines the idea that democracy (in various senses) was fragile or, as some had it, in ‘crisis’ in interwar Britain. Recent scholarship on interwar political culture has generally emphasized its democratic or ‘democratizing’ character, in line with a conventional historical view of Britain as an exception to the instability and contestation of democracy in Europe. It is argued here that Britain's embroilment in a European ‘crisis’ of democracy was a commonplace of contemporary political thought, commentary, and argument; and that anxieties surrounding this prompted some of the initiatives that are conventionally seen as evidence of ‘democratization’. A properly historical understanding of those initiatives, and of interwar political culture in general, therefore appears to require that contemporary ideas of the weakness or ‘crisis’ of democracy in Britain are taken seriously (but not necessarily endorsed). In conclusion, the article suggests that interwar discussions of democracy gave rise to a tendency to equate democracy with a form of negative liberty, which registered and facilitated influential developments in politics and political thought beyond the interwar period; and that historical understanding of democracy in modern Britain might be enriched through an engagement with the political theorist Sheldon Wolin's concept of ‘fugitive democracy’.
I propose a theory of popular power, according to which a political order manifests popular power to the extent it robustly maintains an egalitarian basic structure. There are two parts to the theory. First, the power of a political order lies in the basic structure's robust self-maintenance. Second, the popularity of the political order’s power lies in the equality of relations between the society's members.
I will argue that this theory avoids the perverse consequences of some existing radical democratic theories of popular power which focus on mass expression, either in plebiscites or in social movements, as popular power's canonical instances. In particular, my theory does not valourise momentary expression over durable effect, and it offers a ready framework for conceptualising the sometimes-oligarchic substructure of the supposedly canonical instances of popular power. I will show that this theory has strong precedents within a certain republican tradition of political philosophy.
According to the popular view, megacities are troubled polities and unlikely places for the realisation of democratic ideals. This article challenges the popular view and points out the relevance of the democratic ideals employed in such an assessment. It argues that concerns regarding the undemocratic character of megacities are rooted in either constitutional or radical democratic ideals, but that neither of these ideals is suitable for the assessment of megacities. As a result, this article offers a conceptual adjustment. It argues that to identify the challenges to and opportunities for democratic governance in megacities, we should investigate whether megacities promote their inhabitants' political agency, with respect to their equality. This perspective provides a more comprehensive view of megacities’ political organisation, clarifies the nature of existing obstacles, and offers a feasible path for democratic reforms in this context.
Envisager la démocratie comme forme de société plutôt que comme régime politique. Comprendre l’ontologie sociale complexe, faite d’habitudes, schèmes d’interaction, et formes d’organisation qui lui sont propres et qui, seules, donnent tout son sens à la démocratie en tant que régime politique. Telle est la perspective que déploie ce livre. En s’appuyant sur la tradition philosophique du pragmatisme américain, intégrée à la théorie critique et le tocquevilleanisme, il développe une théorie sociale de la démocratie. Il défend l’idée que la démocratie doit être entendue comme un concept qui vise à décrire un état désirable des interactions sociales parmi les individus, en tant que citoyens, mais aussi en tant que membres d’une société qui participent à la vie sociale dans toutes ses institutions: sur leur lieu de travail, dans leur famille, au sein de l’espace public. Il tâche ainsi de dégager les conditions normatives qui favoriseront la démocratisation des marchés, des entreprises, des associations, des églises, des bureaucraties et d’autres institutions sociales. Ce faisant, ce livre nous aide à mieux comprendre la signification, la portée et l’étendue du projet démocratique. Ce projet, ancré dans la vision émancipatrice qui caractérise le monde moderne, se propose d’instaurer une société fondée sur le principe de coopération entre individus libres et égaux. L’idée de démocratie, dès lors, n’acquiert sa signification politique qu’en lien avec cette vision primordiale d’une forme de société qui n’a pas d’équivalent dans toute l’histoire humaine.
Building on recent developments in radical democratic theory, in this article we articulate and explore a fresh perspective for theorists and activists of radical democracy: a ‘living critique of domination’. Characterized by a two-fold analytical effort, a ‘living critique of domination’ calls for a radical critique of contemporary forms of power and control coupled with a reappraisal of emancipatory political experiences created by the political action of the Many. We demonstrate that this project responds to the theoretical and practical challenges faced by a politics of emancipation today. Our article offers a first articulation of this living critique through a discussion of three recent political experiences, namely, the 2016 French uprising, Nuit Debout, as well as the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements.
Contention in the form of protests, riots, and direct action is a central political practice in contemporary democracies. It is also a staple of sociological analysis, after slowly crystallizing as a distinct object of analysis from the 1970s onward. Lately, however, it has become unclear what this distinctiveness consists of and how it may help guide studies of contention: What distinguishes contention from other practices? I argue that contention can be seen as an ontologically distinctive experience. What sets this experience apart is that it expresses a potential for conflict that underlies all social formations. We can take these expressions of conflict as objects of analysis. This means asking how the conflict expressed in contentious practices is ascribed meaning. I develop this perspective theoretically and show how it may facilitate new empirical analyses of contention’s boundaries, its relation to truth, and ethical relations in contention.
This essay offers a reading of the 2016 Republican National Platform (RNP) and the subsequent decision by the Republican Party in 2020 to eschew the production of a new Platform. I outline the contours of populist melancholy, a rhetorical form often utilized—though not exclusively—by conservative rhetors, arguing that such rhetoric sustains a heightened sense of agitation and injury in its audience. By offering fewer off-ramps from its narrative of grievance, such melancholy induces audiences to confuse their selves with the nation, and to think about trauma in depoliticized terms rather than in vocabularies grounded in history. In offering a frame of psychological form for thinking about populism, this essay provides an evaluative schema for considering the circulation and performance of conservative populism in frames extending beyond those of validity and soundness common in rhetorical studies.
In this article, I theorize urban displacement as an anti-democratic politics that emerged and intensified at planetary scale in the last fifty years. I call this assault on the conditions of possibility of democratization organized displacement. As democracy has increasingly taken an urban character across the globe, I argue that organized displacement has emerged as a counter-politics. Organized displacement has two constitutive features: social cleansing and urbicide. The goal of this politics is to undermine the heterogeneity of social life in the name of creating an urban order. Finally, I argue that a theory of organized displacement reveals that the relationship between Trump and other right-wing figures is not simply based on a similarity of political forms. Rather, right-wing politics has been constituted through global practices of urban displacement. Trump, then, is not the originator of a new politics. Rather, he can be characterized alongside Bolsonaro and Mugabe as an exemplar of an anti-democratic politics of displacement.
The political institutionalisation of common wellbeing and the promise that all members of the polity count equally gives political rule its legitimisation. Access to resources at the disposal of public authorities and the ethico-political standing to call upon them is not distributed equally across all groups in a polity. The political struggles of the Wet’suwet’en against the pipeline occupation of Indigenous land, and the initiatives of Black Americans/Turtle Islanders for ReADdress for Slavery attest to this.¹1 I use the term United States/Turtle Island, respectively Canada/Turtle Island, as Turtle Island is an Indigenous term, though not Indigenous word, for North America that stems from Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Lenape origin stories. It is of course not representative of all the different names that the continent has in the hundreds of Indigenous languages. And it is not a representation of an Indigenous concept in an Indigenous language, as English is a colonial language. I sincerely regret that I could not come up with a more inclusive approach to naming that does not make one language central again. I will gladly receive suggestions for more inclusive naming practices. These struggles demonstrate that there are forms of past harmdoing that have an effect on, and are inscribed in, present structures and arrangements of the political. This article looks at the past and present epistemic ignorances and power inequalities to co-shape the authoritative political version of wellbeing that lead to ethico-political abandonment and a refusal to renegotiate the structures and institutions in North America/Turtle Island now that Wet’suwet’en and Black Americans (ought to) have an equal ethico-political standing. I demonstrate that the past injustices of colonialism and slavery co-shape the polity’s present and its haveable futures. Acts of democratising the past in the present bestow upon the harmed an inclusion in current political attentiveness and wellbeing that they did not experience from past contemporaries.
In this article, I question the use of the notion of ‘constituent power’ as a tool for the democratization of the European Union (EU). Rather than seeing the absence of a transnational constituent power as a cause of the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’, I identify it as an opportunity for unfettered democratic participation. Against the reification of power-in-action into a power-constituted-in-law, I argue that the democratization of the EU can only be achieved through the multiplication of ‘constituent moments’. I begin by deconstructing the normative justifications surrounding the concept of constituent power. Here I analyze the structural aporia of constituent power and question the autonomous and emancipatory dimension of this notion. I then test the theoretical hypothesis of this structural aporia of the popular constituent power by comparing it with the historical experiments of a European popular constituent power. Finally, based on these theoretical and empirical observations, I propose to replace the ambivalence of the concept of popular constituent power with a more cautious approach to the bottom-up democratization of European integration: that of a multiplication of transnational constituent moments.
This article argues that Ella Baker’s ideology of radical democracy shaped her theory of organizing, including her theories of mass action and indigenous leadership. Against the emerging consensus in realist and radical democratic theory that both Baker’s praxis and democratic organizing more broadly are nonideological, I argue that all organizing is ideological if, with Stuart Hall, we understand ideology not as a rigid set of beliefs but as a dynamic framework for understanding society. Organizers make decisions based on their own ideologies and they attempt to maintain or reshape the dominant ideologies. In this sense, organizers are political theorists: they have self-conscious theories of how society works and changes based on which they make strategic decisions. I demonstrate a method for interpreting organizers’ political theories and argue that Baker’s theory of radical democracy offers democratic theory insight into the practices and organizational structures that advance democratization.
Maus, Ingeborg, 2018: Justiz als gesellschaftliches Über-Ich. Zur Position der Rechtsprechung in der Demokratie, Suhrkamp, Berlin. / Michelsen, Danny, 2019: Kritischer Republikanismus und die Paradoxa konstitutioneller Demokratie. Politische Freiheit nach Hannah Arendt und Sheldon Wolin, Springer VS, Wiesbaden.
Zusammenfassung
Der Beitrag rekonstruiert die Legitimationsvorstellungen politischer Akteure, wie sie in der Großen Regierungserklärung und der parlamentarischen Aussprache der 19. Wahlperiode diskursiv artikuliert werden und tastet sie auf den (post-)demokratischen Gehalt der Legitimationsargumente ab. Mit der Postdemokratiedebatte wird an eine der prominentesten aktuellen Krisendiagnosen der Demokratie angeknüpft, die auf ihren empirischen Gehalt hinsichtlich ideationaler Wandlungsprozesse, gefasst als legitimatorische Leitideen, befragt wird. Mittels einer diskursnetzwerkanalytischen Betrachtung der legitimatorischen Kerngehalte und über einen Vergleich mit den früheren Regierungserklärungen seit 1949 wird ermittelt, inwieweit die öffentlich vermittelten legitimatorischen Vorstellungen in Tradition oder Opposition zu längerfristigen Entwicklungslinien stehen.
Es wird gezeigt, wie Legitimationsargumente zusammenspielen und letztlich Begründungsmuster dominant sind, die demokratische Kernnormen eher randständig verhandeln und insbesondere die legitimatorische Inputdimension vernachlässigen. Damit setzt sich im legitimationspolitischen Diskurs eine bereits seit Längerem andauernde Entwicklung fort, die sich zudem dadurch auszeichnet, dass es kaum mehr gemeinsame legitimatorische Kernnormen gibt, gleichzeitig aber nur in wenigen Fällen ein offener Konflikt über den legitimatorischen Gehalt von Legitimationsargumenten besteht. Im Vergleich zu Vorgängerdebatten vollzieht sich nun allerdings ein Wandel hinsichtlich einzelner Legitimationsargumente. Insbesondere bricht die Verwendung von Ökonomisierungs- und Freiheitsargumenten sowie ein Konflikt über die legitimatorische Bedeutung von ‚Nationalismus‘ mit bislang bestehenden Kontinuitäten.
The current political ways of organizing human living together are wrought with a democracy deficit and a care deficit. As a result, many, if not most, people are excluded from the deliberations and responsibility-setting processes that most severely affect how well they will be able to live and participate in their polity. This chapter takes up Joan Tronto’s suggestion to solve this grievance by dovetailing care and democracy in democratic ‘caring with’. Democratic ‘caring with’ is first situated within the broader debates about participatory and deliberative democracy to contextualize Tronto’s claim. After identifying the elements of democratic ‘caring with’, the shifts in focus that it brings to the democratic table are sounded out. It is argued that democratic ‘caring with’ brings the political back in and epistemology to the table, tackles in_equality and the care paradox and renegotiates relationships of dissociation. With this, democratic ‘caring with’ is better equipped to address and redress the care paradox that keeps citizens from fully participating democratically than deliberative and participatory democracy are.
Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens’ engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and impedes the freedom of self-expression. To tackle this problem, this article seeks to identify ways to increase the freedom of the subject to explore its multiple self. Understanding the self as inherently fugitive, the article investigates participatory, deliberative and agonistic concepts of self-transformation. As all of them appear limited, it introduces a transformative perspective in democratic thought. Enriching the transformative perspective with queer and gender theory, the article generates the concept of a politics of becoming, which, through radical democratic practices of disidentification, advances the freedom of the subject to change.
To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions.
Thoreau