Agonism in divided societies

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 255-277

  Schaap, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE   (Australia)

Author keywords

agonism; deliberation; democracy; reconciliation; transitional justice

Indexed keywords

EID: 33751187247     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453706061095     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. Emilios Christodoulidis, ‘“Truth and Reconciliation” as Risks’, Social and Legal Studies 9(2) (2000): 198.
2. Paul Muldoon, ‘Reconciliation and Political Legitimacy: the Old Australia and the New South Africa’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 49(2) (2003): 194–96.
3. Seyla Benhabib, ‘Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy’, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996);
4. Joshua Cohen, ‘Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy’, in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997);
5. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).
6. William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002);
7. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993);
8. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000);
9. Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy’, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
10. Christodoulidis, ‘“Truth and Reconciliation” as Risks’;
11. Aletta J. Norval, ‘Memory, Identity and the (Im)Possibility of Reconciliation: The Work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa’, Constellations 5(2) (1998): 250–65;
12. Colin Perrin and Scott Veitch, ‘The Promise of Reconciliation’, Law, Text, Culture 4(1) (1998): 225–32;
13. Andrew Schaap, Political Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 2005).
14. Scott Veitch, ‘Pro Patria Mori: Law, Reconciliation and the Nation’, in Courting Death: The Law of Mortality, ed. Desmond Manderson (London: Pluto Press, 1999).
15. Chantal Mouffe, ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism’, Social Research 66(3) (1999): 756.
16. Monique Deveaux, ‘Agonism and Pluralism’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 25(4) (1999): 5.
17. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, pp. 52–3.
18. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, ‘The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions’, in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 36.
19. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2nd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 146f.
20. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, pp. 53–63.
21. Gutmann and Thompson, ‘The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions’, p. 35, 26–9, 29–33, 33–5.
22. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, p. 93.
23. Gutmann and Thompson, ‘The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions’, p. 38.
24. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, p. 85.
25. Gutmann and Thompson, ‘The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions’, pp. 37–8.
26. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, p. 32, 24–6.
27. Mouffe, ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism’, p. 749, 751.
28. The identities of colonizer and colonized, for instance, make sense only in relation to each other, a point that is emphasized by Mouffe in her work with Ernesto Laclau. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2001), p. 104. However, as Fred Dallmayr remarks, Mouffe's reliance on Schmitt in her later work leads her astray at times because Schmitt was ‘on the whole ignorant of Hegelian dialectics, and especially the notion of dialectical mediation — according to which opposing elements are opposed precisely in virtue of their relationship’.
29. Fred Dallmayr, ‘Book Review: The Return of the Political by Chantal Mouffe’, Constellations 3(1) (1996): 120.
30. Mouffe, ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism’, p. 750.
31. William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 6.
32. Brandon Hamber and Hugo van der Merwe, ‘What Is This Thing Called Reconciliation?’ (paper presented at the After the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Goedgedacht Farm, Cape Town, 28 March 1998; available online at: http://www.csvr.org.za/articles/artrcbh.htm).
33. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. xviii.
34. Mouffe, ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism’, p. 755.
35. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 4.
36. Emilios Christodoulidis, ‘The Objection that Cannot Be Heard: Communication and Legitimacy in the Courtroom’, in The Trial on Trial: Truth and Due Process, ed. Anthony Duff et al. (Oxford and Portland: Hart Publishing, 2004).
37. Sheldon Wolin, ‘The Liberal Democratic Divide: On Rawls' Political Liberalism’, Political Theory 24(1) (1996): 102.
38. Stanley Fish, ‘Mutual Respect as a Device of Exclusion’, in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Moreover, as Iris Young discusses, the requirement that claims be expressed reasonably may exclude certain modes of political speech such as greeting, rhetoric and story-telling.
39. Iris Marion Young, ‘Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy’, in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib.
40. Wolin, ‘The Liberal Democratic Divide’, p. 102.
41. Fish, ‘Mutual Respect as a Device of Exclusion’, p. 96.
42. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, pp. 34–5, 49.
43. Fish, ‘Mutual Respect as a Device of Exclusion’.
44. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, p. 55.
45. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, ‘Democratic Disagreement’, in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 257–9.
46. See also Benhabib, ‘Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy’, p. 71f.
47. Gutmann and Thompson, ‘The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions’, p. 37.
48. Christodoulidis, ‘“Truth and Reconciliation” as Risks’, pp. 194–5.
49. Scott Veitch, ‘The Legal Politics of Amnesty’, in Lethe's Law: Justice, Law and Ethics in Reconciliation, ed. Emilios Christodoulidis and Scott Veitch (Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2001), p. 41f.
50. Gutmann and Thompson, ‘The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions’, p. 39.
51. John Dryzek, ‘Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies: Alternatives to Agonism and Analgesia’, Political Theory 33(2) (2005): 219.
52. Michael Humphrey, ‘From Terror to Trauma: Commissioning Truth for National Reconciliation’, Social Identities 6(1) (2000): 7.
53. Dryzek, ‘Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies’, p. 219, 224.
54. Humphrey, ‘From Terror to Trauma’, p. 24.
55. Gutmann and Thompson, ‘The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions’, p. 38.
56. Young, ‘Communication and the Other’, p. 126.
57. Roermund's point here is along the lines of Kant's critique of Hobbes' account of the social contract. As Habermas puts it, ‘the parties who agree on the terms of the contract they are about to conclude must … be capable of assuming the social perspective of the first-person plural, a perspective always already tacitly assumed by Hobbes and his readers but withheld from subjects in the state of nature’. Jürgen Habermas, Between Fact and Norms, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 92.
58. I provide an account of how reconciliation is initiated by the invocation of a ‘we’ in ‘The Time of Reconciliation and the Space of Politics’, forthcoming in Scott Veitch and Emilios Christodoulidis (eds), Law, Time and the Politics of Reconciliation (London: Ashgate, forthcoming).
59. Bert van Roermund, ‘Rubbing off and Rubbing on: The Grammar of Reconciliation’, in Lethe's Law: Justice, Law and Ethics in Reconciliation, ed. Christodoulidis and Veitch, p. 188, 187.
60. Christodoulidis, ‘“Truth and Reconciliation” as Risks’, pp. 190–6, 195.
61. Humphrey, ‘From Terror to Trauma’, pp. 17–18.
62. Connolly, Identity/Difference, p. 178;
63. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, p. 103, 101.
64. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 79, 38.
65. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, p. 101, 102.
66. Connolly, Identity/Difference, p. xxx.
67. James Tully, ‘The Agonic Freedom of Citizens’, Economy and Society 28(2) (1999): 174.
68. Deveaux, ‘Agonism and Pluralism’, p. 5;
69. Dryzek, ‘Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies’, pp. 220–1;
70. Ilan Kapoor, ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism? The Relevance of the Habermas-Mouffe Debate for Third World Politics’, Alternatives 27 (2002): 473.
71. Deveaux, ‘Agonism and Pluralism’, p. 15;
72. Dryzek, ‘Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies’, p. 221, 222, 233–5, 221.
73. Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy’, in Athenian Democracy and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. J. Peter Euben, John R. Wallach and Josiah Ober (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
74. However, it does seem to me that a fundamental difference between deliberative democrats and agonistic democrats is that, to be consistent, the latter are compelled to endorse some form of decisionism in accounting for the role of institutions in political life. On this issue, the recent work of Andreas Kalyvas and Hans Lindahl is persuasive. Andreas Kalyvas, ‘From the Act to the Decision: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Decisionism’, Political Theory 32(3) (2004);
75. Hans Lindahl, ‘Give and Take: Arendt and the Nomos of Political Community’, Philosophy & Social Criticism (forthcoming).
76. Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy’, p. 31.
77. Johan van der Walt, ‘The Time of Reconciliation’ (paper presented at the Third Workshop on Time, Law and Reconciliation, University of Glasgow, 17–18 May 2004).
78. Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy’.
79. Wolin, ‘Norm and Form’, p. 55.
80. This argument is more developed more fully in Schaap, Political Reconciliation.