My paper, “Realism, Resistance, and Democracy,” has been accepted to the Association for Social and Political Philosophy conference, to be held June 25-26, 2015 at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It should be a great conference; more information can be found on their website.
The abstract of the paper is below the fold:
This paper outlines a form of democratic realism that highlights the importance of resistance—understood here as any action that brings the issue of legitimacy into relief as something open to being questioned—within political thought. While political realism’s insistence that the political is a sphere distinct from morality is a necessary critique of the shortcomings and blind spots of moralism, the nature of the split between ethics and politics deserves further consideration. In this paper I argue that a fruitful way to do so is to examine the meaning of democracy in relation to the commitments of political realism, bringing out the importance of resistance to the constitution of the political.
Realism has focused on identifying legitimacy as its primary concern rather than justice, as in Bernard Williams’ Basic Legitimation Demand, which allows for at best imperfect legitimation within political rule. Thinkers such as Sheldon Wolin and Jacques Rancière emphasize that democracy is born in revolt, conceiving of the very idea of democracy as highlighting the radical contingencies of political rule and hierarchy. This understanding of democracy makes an important contribution to understanding how realism can be further developed. If the demand for legitimation is never settled, its continual reanimation is brought about through democratic resistance. Democracy is therefore understood as the radical impulse toward the undoing of hierarchical power structures of domination and oppression, providing political realism with the conceptual apparatus to formulate how legitimation of rule is consistently demanded by those who are ruled.
Democratic realism emphasizes resistance as the means of answering whether or not legitimation has been achieved, and to what degree. If legitimation can be imperfect at best, we are left to contemplate the historical specificities of particular instances of attempted legitimation in order to adjudicate outcomes. In other words, democratic realism makes clear the limitation of general political theory. Resistance on this view need not imply organized and explicit goals, though it may occur that way—the specificities of resistance will only be found within particular historical circumstances.
Incorporating democracy and resistance into the discourse of political realism can therefore help clarify processes of legitimacy as well as connect realism to the real politics that it aims to take more seriously than moralism. Resistance also speaks to the importance of investigating the divide between politics and ethics by making clear that, while politics remains irreducible to morality, exactly where politics is constituted is a shifting ground dependent upon the actions of those over whom power is wielded within society and how they react to those circumstances. Resistance is what constitutes and renews the space politics through the demand for legitimation, wherever it occurs.