"Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?"
In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Rancière highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it.
Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate.
Badiou, Alain: - Alain Badiou (PhD, Philosophy, Ecole Normale Superieure) holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School; he also teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure and the College International de Philosophie in Paris. He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works, including his masterwork, Being and Event (Continuum, 2007), and several Columbia titles, includng Plato's Republic (2013) and Jacques Lacan Past and Present (2016).
Brown, Wendy: - Wendy Brown (PhD, Political Philosophy, Princeton) is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Zone, 2015), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone, 2010), and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire and Identity (Princeton, 2006) and coauthor (with Rainer Forst) of The Power of Tolerance (Columbia, 2014), among a number of other titles. Her interests include political theory, critical theory, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, democratic theory, capitalism, and neoliberalism.
Nancy, Jean-Luc: - Jean-Luc Nancy (PhD, Philosophy, Toulouse) is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Human Sciences in Strasbourg and the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School. He is the author of more than 20 books, many of them translated into English, including The Banality of Heidegger (Fordham, 2017), Being Singular Plural (Stanford, 2000), The Sense of the World (Minnesota, 2008), and (with Alain Badiou) German Pgilosophy: A Dialogue (MIT, 2018); he is also a contributor to our successful book Democracy in What Sense? One of the leading French philosophers of our time, he is best known for his writings on psychoanalysis, deconstruction, Heidegger, globalization, Christianity, and the arts.
Zizek, Slavoj: - Slavoj Zizek (PhD, Philosophy, Ljubljana) is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. An internationally renowned psychoanalytic philosopher, cultural critic, and Hegelian Marxist, he is the author of numerous books, including Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Verso, 2012) and Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (Verso, 2014).
