Radical theory of democracy: It could also be different, but it is not

Recognize the situation: This maxim, which Gottfried Benn recommended to his friend Friedrich Wilhelm Oelze, applies perhaps even more to political theory than it does to the individual.

If she loses sight of political realities, her concepts run the risk of becoming empty abstractions.

Paradoxically, this fate could threaten the so-called radical theory of democracy at the very moment when it has become well established in local political science.

Historically, the emergence of this family of theories can be traced back to a rather specific situation.

Neoliberalism, post-democracy and the “third way” of social democracy formulated by Anthony Giddens were the opponents of radical democrats from the very beginning such as Jacques Rancière or Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau.

Radical democracy theorists point to the contingency of political order against the transformation of political disputes into supposed factual issues.

Politicians always have a choice, no order is set in stone.

In addition to contingency, conflict is therefore also a basic concept of these theories.

Because if there is no indisputable, ultimate ordering principle like God, the market or the nation, society must always be founded anew.

In this theoretical paradigm, democracy designates that form of society that does justice to this absence of ultimate reasons;

which, as the French democracy theorist Claude Lefort put it, turns the “place of power” into a “void” that can only be filled temporarily.

Changed location

The neoliberal slogan “there is no alternative” is also countered by the more recent forms of radical democratic theory with “it could also be different”.

From this point of view, theory is, as Oliver Flügel-Martinsen puts it, a practice of critically questioning order.

Their mechanisms of exclusion are to be examined with the intention of constantly expanding the circle of those involved in politics.

For example, Rancière described the recognition of workers or women as political subjects as genuinely political processes in which democracy was expanded.

As valuable as the insistence on changeability is, this theoretical program is reaching its limits in the changed political present.

After all, the Western liberal democracy he criticized is by no means the undisputed model of order today.

Rather, it sees itself challenged from within by right-wing populism and identity politics, and from without by authoritarian regimes such as Russia or China.

The accumulation of crises in the last decade has also meant that the present can also be described as too much conflict, contingency and politicization: nutrition, mobility, wearing a mask or the decision about the room temperature that seems almost foreign policy - more and more areas , which until recently were considered private, can now unleash political energies.

A theory that wants to be radical would do well to question its own assumptions in view of the changed situation.

It would be wrong to assume that such reflections do not take place.

The “Transformations of the Political” conference, which took place at the University of Freiburg at the end of October, explicitly aimed to adapt radical theories of democracy to the challenges of the decade.

However, it also became clear how difficult this adjustment would be.

Instead of getting involved with the increasingly rough political reality – from the civil war threats of Trumpist militias to neo-imperial covetousness towards Ukraine or Taiwan – and drawing conclusions for their own basic concepts, they repeated theoretical debates, some of which were well documented.

The unwillingness of a current of theory, which, as numerous recent introductory and reference works show, has arrived in the theoretical mainstream, to engage in political changes, is striking.

The blind spot of war is particularly striking.

In these theories, violence only appears as a symptom of deficient conflict institutionalization.

However, the fact that (martial) violence can be deliberately used for political purposes and is not necessarily the expression of a group that has not been heard is lost sight of.

In these theories, violence only appears as a symptom of deficient conflict institutionalization.

However, the fact that (martial) violence can be deliberately used for political purposes and is not necessarily the expression of a group that has not been heard is lost sight of.

In these theories, violence only appears as a symptom of deficient conflict institutionalization.

However, the fact that (martial) violence can be deliberately used for political purposes and is not necessarily the expression of a group that has not been heard is lost sight of.

Theories do not have to offer world formulas.

In the conventional understanding, they take on the task of recognizing individual aspects of reality better.

Precisely because the radical theory of democracy has meanwhile firmly established itself in the theoretical landscape, an opinion on questions of war and violence, which have been omnipresent since the universally proclaimed "turn of the era" at the latest, would be expected - even if it only consisted of speaking out in favor of war not feeling responsible.

In the best-case scenario, accepting more of the challenges of the current situation would enable you to better define your own limits.

Or as Gottfried Benn said: reckon with your own defects.