In this paper, I argue that Chantal Mouffe's agonistic project fails to yield an effective model of radical democracy. This failure, I contend, is a product of the way her radical model stipulates a determinate curbing of democratic contestation and contestability. To explain how Mouffe falls...

The rights and liberty of people are often considered the keystone to freedom and democracy. Discerning the scope and limits of those same rights have been the controversy for which judicial systems were designed. The arbitrary, and sometimes systematic, discrimination derived from these...

Should the failure of European multiculturalism and Rawlsian political liberalism to answer the challenge of illiberal religion be a cause for dismay for liberals today? Or does liberalism, especially in its American variety, posses theoretical and practical resources that are not exhausted by...

Alexis de Tocqueville views the early to middle of the 19th century as a period of great revolutionary transition from age of aristocracy to the democratic era. In Democracy In America, Tocqueville's project, in turn, was to conceptualize the democratic institutional and cultural factors that...

Theorists as distinct as Giorgio Agamben and Robert Cover have emphasized the paradox at the center of democratic legal authority, viz. that it cannot be self-derived but must ultimately rest on some extra-legal phenomenon, usually an act of exclusion. It has not been generally recognized that...

In this paper I reclaim Susan Okin's provocative essay, 'Multiculturalism Bad for Women' (1999) for feminist democratic theory. The motivating question for feminist democratic theory in this case is what place women residing in minority cultural communities should have in the democratic process....

It is often said that the rise of analytic philosophy in the early 20th C and with it the remarkable transitions in how moral and political concerns appeared could legitimately be addressed spelled the 'death of political theory' in the Anglophone world, until Rawls revived political theory from...

This paper delineates a series of geographical and temporal splits, showing how different configurations of movement allowed liberalism to imagine different forms of subjectivity and produced different forms of rule. Liberal theory often imagines itself as the force opening channels for the free...

The discursive binary between individual freedom and social constraint has been central to the political imaginary of liberal settler colonies. Some have argued that this discursive binary is itself a sediment of European colonial forms which continues to operate as a mode of domination. Much...

This paper traces out the checkered relationship between civic republicanism and the liberal arts tradition. While the notion of liberal learning was born out of classical republican practices and ideals, I argue that republicanism since Machiavelli has largely been disaffected from the liberal...