Jacques Rancière

In the Street ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 121-150
Author(s):  
Çiğdem Çidam
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Theory Of Education ◽  
Democratic Action ◽  
Action Taking ◽  
As If

This chapter demonstrates that Rancière’s journey to democratic theory started in the aftermath of May 1968 with his efforts to overcome the problematic transformation of political theory into “a theory of education.” For Rancière, unpredictability is integral to democratic politics. Thus, in an anti-Rousseauian move, he emphasizes the theatrical aspect of democratic action: taking on a role other than who they are, acting as if they are a part in a given social order in which they have no part, political actors stage their equality, disrupting the existing distribution of the sensible. Rancière’s focus on the moments of disruption, however, opens him to the charge of reducing democratic politics to immediate acts of negation. Insofar as he erases the role of intermediating practices in the stagings of equality, Rancière imposes on his accounts a kind of purity that his own work, with its emphasis on broken, polemical voices, cautions against.

Antonio Negri

In the Street ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 63-92
Author(s):  
Çiğdem Çidam
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Factory Workers ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Theory Of Education ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Antonio Negri ◽  
Exclusive Focus

This chapter focuses on Antonio Negri’s turn to democratic theory in the wake of Italy’s “Long ’68.” As an activist thinker involved in the political struggles of his time, starting in the early 1970s, Negri challenged the Marxist orthodoxy’s exclusive focus on factory workers through a series of conceptual innovations, such as the “multitude,” highlighting the emancipatory potential of diverse political actors and their innovative resistance practices. Despite this crucial contribution, the chapter contends, Negri’s account, too, is haunted by the Rousseauian dream of immediacy: for Negri, insurgencies are moments of democracy because they are the immediate expressions of the multitude. And while Negri refuses to characterize such short-lived moments as failures, he still, like Rousseau, considers their transience a problem, which he tries to resolve through the cultivation of “adequate” revolutionary consciousness—a problematic move, the chapter concludes, which reproduces the antidemocratic Rousseauian tendency to turn political theory into a theory of education in Negri’s work.

Leave the Dead Some Room to Dance: Postcolonial Founding and the Problem of Inheritance in Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-356
Author(s):  
David Thomas Suell
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Critical Part ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Dead

In this essay, I examine Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests in order to think through political founding. Viewing founding from the postcolonial context, I explore how members of a political community negotiate among the multiple pasts that continue to affect them, and what kind of institutions and actors are best equipped to pursue this critical part of the founding project. Situating Soyinka’s account against competing narratives of the postcolonial condition, I demonstrate how he uses Yoruba philosophy and cosmology to reframe the challenges and potentials of founding, and I illustrate how political actors should respond to these by adopting the role of “citizen-artists” who can learn from past struggles and overcome their overwhelming legacies. Read as a dramatic intervention into Nigerian democratic politics and as a work of political theory, A Dance offers a lens through which to interrogate founding within and beyond the postcolony.

James Madison's Political Theory: Hostage to Democratic Fortune

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard K. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
James Madison

Professor Alan Gibson's insightful article contains much that is admirable. He is, in my view, correct in calling scholars' attention—particularly political scientists—to James Madison's often neglected views in his National Gazette essays and the foundational role of public opinion on all governments. In addition, Gibson asserts several claims hoping to establish Madison's credentials as a democratic theorist that should be of interest as well. Specifically, he seeks to accomplish four tasks: (1) “to clarify the enduring debate over the credibility of Madison's democratic credentials”; (2) to “examine Madison's role in justifying, popularizing, and understanding… public opinion”; (3) to “highlight some of Madison's neglected insights into democratic theory, especially his understanding of the problem of collective action, and thereby establish him as a prescient democratic theorist”; and (4) to argue the case that Madison “contributed to a developing tradition of political thought in America upon a broad-based conception of freedom of speech and on the belief that political truths best emerge from the full flow of ideas.”While I concur with much of Gibson's position—especially his fourth, indisputable point—I also disagree with him on at least one significant position: James Madison was not a democrat.

Education for Citizenship in a Changing Country

2021 ◽  
pp. 70-88
Author(s):  
Alexa Zellentin
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Basic Structure ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Theory Of Education ◽  
Role Of The State

This chapter discusses some questions regarding the political theory of education in Ireland: 1. Which value commitments and attitudes should be encouraged to prepare children for their roles in society? 2. Who should decide what children learn? How is the role of the state to be balanced against that of parents and educational institutions? 3. How should education respond to increasing diversity and value pluralism? 4. To what extent should public education promote equality of opportunities? It identifies the concerns relevant to policy choices on these issues. The first section presents the basic structure of the Irish educational system. The second discusses its implications for debates on the authority and responsibility to educate, the third debates dealing with diversity, the fourth value education. The final section considers the idea of equality of opportunity in view of the different resources available to different schools.

Democratic Theory and the Athenian Public Sphere

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-51
Author(s):  
Matthew Landauer
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Democratic Practice ◽  
Accountability Practices ◽  
The Relationship

Classical Athens has left to political theorists a dual legacy: a crucial historical case of democratic practice, and a rich tradition of political reflection. A growing number of scholars have placed the relationship between these two legacies at the center of their research. I argue that these scholars collectively offer us a model of a broad, engaged, Athenian public sphere. Yet I also caution that we should avoid overly harmonizing pictures of what that public sphere was like. I focus in particular on two prominent claims in the literature: that Socratic philosophy can be read as an expansion of Athenian accountability practices, and that ancient dramatists, philosophers, and historians were alike engaged in a project to educate citizen judgment. I argue that both claims threaten to obscure arguments over the appropriate role of the judgment of the demos in democratic politics.

Political Representation in Leader Democracy

2005 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 358-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
András Körösényi
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Public Office

AbstractThe essay focuses on the neglected problem of democratic politics, i.e. on the role of leadership. Although in democracies public office holders are controlled to a certain extent, leaders still have wide room for political manoeuvre and decide without any ‘instruction’ of the citizens. Re-working Weber's and Schumpeter's theory, the author aims to build the model of leader democracy. He highlights the major traits of it in a comparison with the deliberative and the aggregative–utilitarian concepts of democratic theory. The theory of leader democracy is applied to the problem of representation, which, in contrast to mechanical mirroring, gains a new, dynamic and qualitative meaning.

Debating Space

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-60
Author(s):  
Laurens E. Tacoma
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Dynamic ◽  
As If

This chapter analyses the first tension around which Roman political culture revolved: the restricted space for debate. The issue is discussed on the basis of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis. With the coming of the Principate the number of issues on which the senate could take decisions was reduced, as was its capacity to debate them seriously. At the same time, the emperor positioned himself as the upholder of the social order and as protector of the state’s institutions. As the senate’s functioning was predicated on the voluntary behaviour of its members, this left the senators some agency. The result was a particular social dynamic in which debates were conducted as if nothing had changed, but where both emperor and senators were locked in expectations about each other’s behaviour. In reflecting on the ambiguities, there were two major themes to consider. The first was that there were situations in which the senate had to debate matters that pertained directly to the position of the emperor. The other occurred when the senate debated its own membership. Both not only revolved around the senate’s capacity to debate these matters in a serious way, but both also raised the issue of the role of imperial intervention. How much space for debate was left? The Apocolocyntosis brilliantly explored both.

scholarly journals ‘A Life of Their Own’? Traditions, Power and ‘As If Realism’ in Political Analysis

2020 ◽  
pp. 003232172092150
Author(s):  
Karl Pike
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Institutional Context ◽  
Social World ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
As If

This article explores the role of tradition in the social world and offers a theory of why some traditions ‘stick’. Building on the ontological insight of ‘as if realism’, I argue that traditions are constitutive both of an actor’s beliefs and of their institutional context, and so critical to political analysis. The relative resonance of traditions can be understood as contingent upon power relations and ideational maintenance of traditions by groups of upholders – what could be termed ‘socially contingent’. Traditions help us understand why a person believes what they believe and how a person’s strategic calculations are affected by perceptions of what others believe. They exert a powerful pull to political actors as orientation tools in complex social settings and through the symbols and argumentation attached by those who uphold them. While traditions are contingent upon people’s beliefs, it is ‘as if’ they have a life of their own.

Confucian Humanitarian Intervention? Toward Democratic Theory

2017 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sungmoon Kim
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
International Society ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Moral Pluralism ◽  
The People

AbstractIt is widely claimed that Mencius's account of punitive expedition can be understood as a Confucian justification of humanitarian intervention and thus has the potential to play the role of constraining China's imperial ventures abroad. This paper challenges this optimism, by drawing attention to internal and external obstacles—the problem of virtue's self-indulgence and the problem of justification to non-Confucians—that prevent Mencius's virtue-based political theory of punitive expedition from developing into a modern theory of humanitarian intervention. It argues that for the Mencian theory to be relevant in the modern world marked most notably by moral pluralism, it must be transformed into a democratic theory, at the center of which is the stipulation that humanitarian intervention be morally justified internally, that is, to the people of the intervening state, as well as externally, first to the people to be intervened state, and second to international society.

Enacting Political Friendship in Gezi

In the Street ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 151-188
Author(s):  
Çiğdem Çidam
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Democratic Action ◽  
May 68 ◽  
The Moment

This chapter deploys the alternative conceptual lens developed in the book, according to which democratic action is a theatrical experience created and sustained through the intermediating practices of political friendship, to analyze the Gezi protests of 2013. What emerges from this analysis is a richer account of events that moves beyond the limiting frameworks of success/failure and spontaneity/organization by bringing to light both the on-the-ground practices of political actors and the messiness and impurity of democratic politics even in the moment of its staging. Focusing on such intermediating practices as deliberation, judging, negotiation, artistic production, common use, and the organization of the mundane aspects of everyday life, the chapter demonstrates that those who took part in Gezi borrowed from past struggles, including May ’68, re-activated political habits, and, acting in unexpected ways, created new, if imperfect and fragile, forms of commonality among diverse figures, showing that another way of doing things is possible.

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