Varieties of agonism: Conflict, the common good, and the need for synagonism

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 323-339

  Karagiannis, Nathalie ^b   Wagner, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TRENTO   (Italy)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77954249033     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2008.00428.x     Document Type: Review

References (44)

1. (see, for instance, Andrew Schaap, "Agonism in Divided Societies", Philosophy and Social Criticism 32, no. 2(2006):255-77), without though, as we hope to demonstrate here, overcoming the more fundamental limitations of this political-theory debate. Refraining here from detailed referencing for reasons of space, we point to Andrew Schaap's article also for further references to theorists of agonism and of deliberative democracy, the latter being the label under which consensus-oriented thinking mostly occurs.
2. Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner, "Towards a Theory of Synagonism", The Journal of Political Philosophy 13(September 2005):235-62.
3. The authors would like to thank the participants in a seminar at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in September 2006 and in the workshop on "Social and Political Agon" at the European University Institute in November 2006, as well as three reviewers for the Journal of Social Philosophy, for helpful comments and suggestions.
4. See, e.g., Lewis Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1967);
5. John Rex, Social Conflict: A Conceptual and Theoretical Analysis (London: Longman, 1981).
6. Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilisation (London: Fontana Press, 1998);
7. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975);
8. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
9. See Peter Wagner and Nathalie Karagiannis, "The Social and the Political: Retrieving the Meanings of a Distinction", in The Social Sciences in the Global Age, ed. Peter Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, forthcoming).
10. Cornelius Castoriadis, "La 'rationalité' du capitalisme", in Figures du pensable: Les carrefours du labyrinthe VI, ed. Cornelius Castoriadis (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 65-92;
11. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1999).
12. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, De la justification (Paris: Gallimard, 1999).
13. See Nathalie Karagiannis, "Multiple Solidarities", in Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization, ed. Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 154-72;
14. Nathalie Karagiannis, ed., European Solidarity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
15. For a contemporary critique of capitalism see Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), pt. II.
16. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment;
17. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism;
18. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
19. See, among other writings, Chantal Mouffe, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999);
20. Chantal Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism (Vienna: Institut für höhere Studien, 2000), Political science series 72;
21. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005).
22. Jürgen Habermas, "Three Normative Models of Democracy", in The Inclusion of the Other, ed. Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 239-52.
23. see Keith Breen, "Agonism, Antagonism and the Necessity of Care", in Law and Agonistic Politics, ed. Andrew Schaap (London: Ashgate, forthcoming 2008). There is ongoing discussion about Arendt's agonism;
24. see for instance, Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). We are aware of the fact that our distinction between Arendtian and Schmittian agonism, following an established way of speaking, does not quite do justice to Arendt, whose agonism is indeed rather close to synagonism, except for the relation between the social and the political that we discuss below.
25. We have briefly discussed Chantal Mouffe's conceptualization of the political and the social in Karagiannis and Wagner, "Towards a Theory of Synagonism"
26. Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy, 15;
27. see also similarly Mouffe, On the Political, 9.
28. See Bonnie Honig, "On Two Paradoxes in Democratic Theory: Rousseau, Habermas and the Politics of Legitimation", paper presented at the University of Chicago, 2002, for a similar criticism.
29. Our objective is to apply the synagonistic approach to questions of policy-making, and we have started to do so in Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner, "The Stranger and Synagonistic Politics", in Law and Agonistic Politics, ed. Andrew Schaap (London: Ashgate, forthcoming 2008).
30. (see for more detail Karagiannis and Wagner, "The Social and the Political"). In Kant, at the moment before the rise of the social sciences, there is an implicit separation of the social and the political, a divide that becomes explicit in Honneth after a long experience with, and critique of, the social sciences.
31. Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" (1784), in Kant's Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 44.
32. (Reiss, Kant's Political Writings, 27).
33. See, e.g., Hans Reiss in the "Introduction" to Kant's Political Writings, 36.
34. Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992)
35. English trans. Struggle for Recognition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
36. Axel Honneth, Pathologien des Sozialen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984).
37. see Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault, "Politicizing Honneth's Ethics of Recognition", Thesis Eleven, no. 88(February 2007):92-111.
38. Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner, "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to the One of the Moderns", in The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy: A Politico-Cultural Transformation and Its Interpretations, ed. Johann P. Arnason, Kurt Raaflaub, and Peter Wagner, in preparation.
39. Michael Walzer, "Liberalism and the Art of Separation", Political Theory 12, no. 3(1984):315-30.
40. Axel Honneth, "Gerechtigkeit und kommunikative Freiheit: Überlegungen im Anschluss an Hegel", in Subjektivität und Anerkennung, ed. Barbara Merker, Georg Mohr, and Michael Quante (Paderborn: Mentis, 2004), 213-32;
41. Axel Honneth, "Preliminary Remarks on Theories of Justice as Analyses of Society", lecture in the Colloquium "Philosophy and Society" at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, May 2008;
42. Joel Anderson and Axel Honneth, "Autonomy, Vulnerability, Recognition, and Justice", in Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays, ed. John Christman and Joel Anderson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77-100.
43. see Axel Honneth, ed., Befreiung aus der Mündigkeit: Paradoxien des gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002). Until now, though, the relation between the research agenda and the philosophy has not been clearly spelled out. The recent Rome lecture
44. (Honneth, "Preliminary Remarks") addresses this issue directly and refers to the (Hegel-inspired) method of "normative reconstruction" with the objective of "showing which social spheres make which contributions to securing and realizing values that are already socially institutionalized." While broadly agreeing with the approach, we note two points of difference: From a synagonistic perspective, first, it is not "spheres" but actions, thus the struggle itself, that make such contributions. And second, the idea of social institutionalization of values obscures the persistent need for arguing for values (and their changes) as something indeed to be striven for in common, thus something inherently political.