Abstract
This article’s guiding thesis is that the theory of radical democratic citizenship is built on a tension between a radical, conflictual element and a democratic element. As radical democrats, these philosophers point to the intimate relation between conflict and both emancipation and democracy. But as radical democrats, they also propose different methods that prevent conflict from breaking up the polis—the common ground that makes democratic conflict possible. I look at two radical democrats’ way of dealing with this tension: Chantal Mouffe and Étienne Balibar. My claim is that the former ends up overemphasising the danger of division in her later democratic works and is therefore unable to account for more intense forms of democratic resistance (such as riots). In the work of Balibar, however, we find a way of dealing with this tension.
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Notes
This formulation was initially proposed by Ernesto Laclau in New Reflections on the Revolutions of our Times (Laclau 1990, pp. 3–89).
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This article is partially based on an earlier version of argument in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie (under the title ‘De Uiterste Limieten van de Democratische Verdeeldheid: Grenzen aan het Conflict in de Radical Democratie’). The author would like to thank Tijdschrift voor Filosofie for the permission to translate earlier arguments and Toon Braeckman and Matthias Lievens for comments and discussion. The research was funded by a grant from the Research Foundation Flanders.
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Boonen, C. At the Outer Limits of Democratic Division: on Citizenship, Conflict and Violence in the Work of Chantal Mouffe and Étienne Balibar. Int J Polit Cult Soc 33, 529–544 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-020-09357-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-020-09357-5