Theories of Power, Poverty, and Law: In Commemoration of the Contributions of Peter Bachrach: Peter Bachrach: Liberal Democracy and Participation

In: PS: political science & politics, Band 43, Heft 1, S. 87-89

Abstract

When I reflect upon Peter Bachrach's political theorizing from the perspective of the heated primary battles of 2008, I am struck by the unusual character of his political insights and commitments—and of how relevant and compelling they are in the current political climate. Peter might be appropriately considered a radical liberal democrat—who focused very sharply on the tensions between radicalism and liberalism as political ideologies, but sought to maintain a close and continually flowing circuit between radicalism and liberalism as bodies of philosophical understanding that could mutually nurture and sustain each other. Under his hermeneutical gaze, Hobbes was not only the father of modern philosophical liberalism but the theorist who instigated the formation of participatory democracy. By clarifying for us the extent to which we lacked foursquare rational props to support our judgments across a whole spectrum of human experience from everyday practical affairs to science, religion, and metaphysics, he cleared a tremendous space for human beings to actively participate in structuring their own lives and shaping their own destinies. In addition to his explicit statements concerning human equality (whose political payoffs would be mostly unusable by a contemporary democrat), there was implicit in Hobbesian theorizing a massive re-inflection of human limitation and possibility that could make participation seem like a plausible complement to his theorizing.