Suchergebnisse

John Rawls' account of political liberalism posits the necessity of a metaphysically neutral "public reason" to avoid privileging any comprehensive doctrine in the public square. The natural law tradition has been claimed by some as meeting this standard. However, thinkers such as Tracey Rowland criticize the attempt to make natural law a secular, neutral ground; she believes it must be rooted in an overtly Trinitarian and Christological theology. However, such theological assumptions are not shared by those of other comprehensive doctrines. Chantal Mouffe has also challenged Rawls' consensus conception, focusing rather on the inevitable ideological conflicts to be found in society. This approach is known as agonistic pluralism. I contend that agonistic pluralist theory can provide one way of intellectually justifying an Augustinian Thomist natural law approach to public discourse. That is, agonism's critique of the concept of "public reason" creates space for political argumentation rooted a natural law account; even an account such as Rowland's that is strongly suspicious of the possibility of an ideologically or theologically neutral common ground. This is ironic given that Mouffe's theory is premised on a rejection of the idea of "nature" as natural law theorists understand it.

'Dieser Artikel widmet sich dem gegenwärtigen Diskurs über das Wesen der Demokratie und untersucht die zentralen Thesen des Ansatzes der 'deliberativen Demokratie' in ihren zwei wesentlichen Ausprägungsformen: die von John Rawls und die von Jürgen Habermas. Obwohl die Autorin mit diesen Zugangsweisen insofern übereinstimmt, als sie es ebenfalls für notwendig erachtet, eine weitreichendere Konzeption von Demokratie als jene die durch das 'aggregative' Modell bereitgestellt wird, zu entwickeln, gibt sie zu bedenken, daß diese Konzepte nicht im Stande sind, ein angemessenes Verständnis für die Hauptaufgabe der Demokratie zu vermitteln. Indem Anhänger des Konzepts der 'deliberativen Demokratie' festhalten, daß Demokratie nicht auf Verfahrensfragen zur Vermittlung von entgegengesetzten Interessen reduziert werden kann, verteidigen sie zwar zweifelsohne eine Auffassungsweise der Demokratie, die eine weitreichendere Konzeption von Politik beinhaltet. Ihre Zugangsweise ist jedoch sehr wohl - wenn auch in einer anderen Form als jene Herangehensweise an der sie Kritik üben - auch rational, wonach die wesentliche Rolle die 'Leidenschaft' und kollektive Formen der Identifikation im Bereich der Politik spielen, außer Acht gelassen wird. In dem Bestreben die liberale Zugangsweise mit jener der demokratischen Herangehensweise zu vereinen, neigen die Vertreter des Ansatzes der 'deliberativen' Demokratie dazu, die Spannungen, die zwischen ihnen existieren aufzulösen und sind somit nicht in der Lage, das konfliktreiche Wesen der demokratischen Politik zu bewältigen. Die Haupthese, die die Autorin in diesem Artikel vertritt, geht davon aus, daß demokratische Theorie die Unüberwindbarkeit von gewissen Antagonismen zu berücksichtigen hat. Sie vertritt die Meinung, daß ein Demokratiemodell in der Ausprägung des 'agonistic pluralism' dazu beitragen kann, die wesentliche Herausforderung mit der sich demokratische Politik derzeit konfrontiert sieht, besser zu bewältigen: demokratische Formen der Identifikation zu schaffen, die dazu führen können, Kräfte und 'Passionen' für demokratische Modelle zu mobilisieren.' (Autorenreferat)

There is no goal for public consultation in community planning, there are several conflicting ones, using Chantal Mouffes model of democracy to acknowledge the conflictual nature of democratic politics, not striving for consensus but agonistic pluralism. Our work builds on experience from co-design workshops we held in Upplands Väsby concerning a conflict between politicians, civil servants and citizens. Seeing the workshop as a space of agonism, an arena for different positions to meet and negotiate, we as designers work with form and material to support the different interests. We suggest three categories to consider when crafting this agonistic space; perspectives, format and material. Acknowledging the complexity of planning, no longer striving for consensus but to keep the negotiation alive, is a starting-point for understanding the different conflicting interests and together create ways of working well with wickedness through making more sensible judgements.

In this article I use Chantal Mouffe's theory of agonistic pluralism as a framework through which to analyze the actual and potential role of ethnic media as facilitators of counterhegemonic discourses in Australia and other liberal democracies. The pluralist approach provides a powerful way to circumvent the integration-fragmentation divide that often inhibits both political and academic understandings of ethnic media. It articulates a political culture that can sustain and respond to counterhegemonic movements and has at its center the transformation of differing political identities from enemies into adversaries. Two areas of the current media landscape are analyzed: policy and professionalism. It is argued that both are far from simple in the way they shape ethnic media's counterhegemonic potential, and in its current form each presents an adaptable and flexible hegemonic position that must be exposed to further the democratic potential of ethnic media.

In this article, we consider the role of value pluralism in theorising urban development and the politics of participatory planning. Rather than situating analyses of urban development in a monist or universalist ethics, where values are reducible to a single universal (e.g. human rights), or a normative pluralism based on the tension between different bearers of political value (e.g. liberty and equality), we argue for a plural ethics to make sense of the complex empirical reality of our cities. Post-consensus theories of planning treat the presence of conflict as an enduring reality in urban development, with Chantal Mouffe providing one way of conceptualising a productive politics of conflict. We extend Mouffe's plural politics through an appeal to value pluralism in the form of anthropological theories of value. A better understanding of the plural and incommensurable nature of values not only contributes to our understanding of the operation of agonistic pluralism, it also provides a more robust theoretical account of how different urban actors in the city transition from antagonism to agonism, which Mouffe suggests is necessary for a more inclusive urban politics. The politics of value resides in the struggle for legitimacy of particular regimes of value; not just to determine economic value, but to define what value is, and how different values dominate, encompass or otherwise relate to one another. This moral politics approach, via value theory, provides one way of tracing an ethical urbanism that exists between conflict and consensus. It allows us to reframe the central challenge of agonistic pluralism as the transition from antagonistic positions, marked by moral intransigence and immutability, towards more flexible value positions that allow 'adversaries' to enter into a viable agonistic politics.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the main tenets of the theory of competitive democracy and its underlying principle of agonistic pluralism, which have become quite widespread among the Western political philosophers in the recent years. The author identifies two main approaches to the normative substantiation of the value of democratic competition. The first approach is based on the postulate about the importance of maintaining the diversity of public discourses and, therefore, inadmissibility of giving one of them the status of dominant or preferred. The second approach emphasizes the importance of constantly challenging the established power relations. Having demonstrated serious flaws in these approaches, one of which, in fact, promotes diversity for the sake of diversity, and the other — variability for the sake of variability, the author turns to the strategy of justifying competitive democracy that focuses on providing all stakeholders with an equal opportunity to change the existing power relations. In his estimation, this strategy, which largely overcomes the shortcomings of the above mentioned approaches, also has its weaknesses related to (1) the difficulty of disentangling between unequal opportunities for transforming power mechanisms and other social inequalities, (2) the unattainability of the complete equality of opportunities, and (3) the ambiguous relationship between the value of the opportunity to define and abolish social restrictions (political equality) and other values (in particular, the so-called intrinsic equality). A special attention in the article is paid to the identification of the deep value foundations of agonistic pluralism. The author notices that advocates of agonism want to evade clarification of these foundations and states that agonistic pluralism as the highest moral basis of politics is highly doubtful, while the part of the concept that is acceptable does not represent anything fundamentally new. According to his conclusion, all this speaks of the purely instrumental nature of this principle, and thus of its relative importance in comparison with those ideals that it intends to achieve.

The modern French school system was established in the late nineteenth century upon an acculturating, assimilationist, and secular ideology of making "French people French" and emphasizing unity over cultural diversity. Thus, most scholarship on the French education system aptly highlights the system's French Republican "mold" characteristics—hyper-centralization, Franco-conformity, and "Republican sanctuary"—even if adherence to the mold is not always achieved. However, French hors contrat or independent schools are afforded significant freedoms in terms of curriculum, pedagogy, admittance criteria, and the incorporation of religion. These independent schools represent a veritable rainbow of ethical and educational perspectives that break from the French Republican schooling mold. Drawing upon seven months of ethnographic research in a variety of French independent schools, I suggest that these schools' existence illustrate flexibility and plasticity within the otherwise monolithic French education system, collectively pointing to a surprising form of agonistic pluralism on the margins of French Republicanism.