Critical Community

The central issues discussed in this chapter are community and democracy. Modern liberalism has questioned the validity of community as the main source of individual identities and its legitimacy as the foundation of political institutions. On the other hand, with the upsurge of nationalistic ideologies in the 19th and 20th centuries, liberalism started to be accused of neglecting the role of national values in politics. This controversy is discussed at length in the chapter. Various notions of community are explored, and their relationships to liberalism are analyzed, ranging from the 19th-century ideas of Herder, to the early 20th-century concepts of Schmitt, Gramsci, and Plesssner, to the late 20th-century theories of communitarians (Taylor and McIntyre), Agamaben, and Nancy. The closing section of the chapter is devoted to the idea of critical community as a resolution of the communitarian-liberal controversy. Critical community is a community whose members are capable of engaging in dialogue with its traditional values.

Dialogue, Carnival, Democracy: Mikhail Bakhtin and Political Theory

This chapter is devoted to Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogue and carnival and their use in political theory. The notion of language as developed by Bakhtin is analyzed in detail, whereby special attention is given to his idea of language as a system of utterances. These explorations serve to advance the idea of non-consensual dialogue. In this perspective, dialogue is a vehicle of reflexive understanding that is an assimilation of someone else’s ideas into one’s own conceptual system. This concept of dialogue is presented as an alternative to the Habermasian notion of dialogue and to the concept of hegemony as developed by Ernesto Lacalu and Chantal Mouffe. In the second part of the chapter, the concept of carnival is discussed. In Bakhtin, carnival is not just a particular festivity, but an existential feature of human nature which enables people to form intimate bonds outside any institutional circumstances. On this model, carnival can be treated as a liminal example of democracy insofar as democracy needs constant change and re-construction of its institutions and habits.

Democracy and Everyday Life

In chapter 1, democracy is analyzed as everyday life practices. American pragmatism provides theoretical underpinnings for my approach. George Herbert Mead’s and John Dewey’s political concepts are interpreted as showing a passage from everyday life to politics. While G.H. Mead depicts how communication creates the self and, consequently, how politics can be treated as a universalization of everyday life practices, John Dewey describes the way in which democracy becomes a community’s form of life. Both show that community is not inevitably hostile to liberalism, but it can enhance liberal ideals of individual freedom and autonomy Therefore, the pragmatist concept of community is relevant to contemporary discussions on the relationships between community, especially the national community, and democracy, because it transcends the communitarian liberal debate.

Introduction

The book you are going to read features no biographical details, and yet it is a deeply personal one. Many of its theses have been inspired by my own experience. Of course, a biography can never serve as an ultimate substantiation of an argument, but it always remains a powerful source of inspiration, especially for people who, like myself, have lived through a tectonic social transformation. Slightly hyperbolising perhaps, Fyodor Tyutchev, an outstanding Russian poet, envisaged such an experience as partaking of a feast of gods:...

Coda: Non-Consensual Democracy as a Political Form of Critical Community

In this closing chapter, the concept of non-consensual democracy is discussed against the background of the notions of democracy endorsed in contemporary political theory. Two main strands in democratic theory are examined: that of consensus and that of disagreement. The role of disagreement is particularly stressed as this facet of democracy has been underestimated so far. The point is that disagreement does not necessarily have to lead to social chaos and, ultimately, to the hegemony of one group involved in struggle. The project of non-consensual democracy aims at overcoming this contradiction. Non-consensual democracy is a democracy in which disagreement is combined with better understanding among all the parties to a dispute. For non-consensual democracy to be possible, certain conditions must be met. First, it demands an ethical commitment to dialogue. Second, it requires solidarity as a regulative principle. Third, the system of democratic institutions has to be organized to facilitate social understanding.