CIAO DATE: 02/03

Politics and Passions: the Stakes of Democracy

Abstract

For some time I have been concerned with what I see as our growing inability to envisage in political terms the problems facing our societies: that is, to see them as problems the solutions to which entail not just technical but political decisions.These decisions would be made between real alternatives,the existence of which implied the presence of conflicting but legitimate projects of how to organize our common life. We appear to be witnessing not the end of history but the end of politics. Is this not the message of recent trends in political theory and sociology, as well as of the practices of mainstream political parties? They all claim that the adversarial model of politics has become obsolete and that we have entered a new phase of reflexive modernity, one in which an inclusive consensus can be built around a ‘radical centre ’. All those who disagree with this consensus are dismissed as archaic or condemned as evil. Morality has been promoted to the position of a master narrative; as such, it replaces discredited political and social discourses as a framework for collective action. Morality is rapidly becoming the only legitimate vocabulary: we are now urged to think not in terms of right and left, but of right and wrong.

This displacement of politics by morality means that there is now no properly ‘agonistic’ debate in the democratic political public sphere about possible alternatives to the existing hegemonic order; as a consequence, this sphere has been seriously weakened. Hence the growing disaffection with liberal democratic institutions, a disaffection which manifests itself in declining electoral participation and in the attraction exerted by right-wing populist parties that challenge the political establishment.

There are many reasons for the disappearance of a properly political perspective:they include the predominance of a neo-liberal regime of globalization,and the influence of the individualistic consumer culture which now pervades most advanced industrial societies. From a more strictly political perspective, it is clear that the collapse of communism and the disappearance of the political frontiers that structured the political imaginary for most of the last century have caused the political markers of society to crumble. The steady blurring of the distinction between right and left which so many celebrate as progress is, in my view,one of main reasons for the growing irrelevance of the democratic,political public sphere. It has negative consequences for democratic politics. Before returning to this point I would like to examine the responsibility of political theory for our current inability to think in political terms – a phenomenon with which I, as a political theorist, am particularly concerned.

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