{"title":"Agonistic Pluralism and Competitive Model of Democracy: Problems of Normative Justification","authors":"N. A. Shaveko","doi":"10.30570/2078-5089-2023-108-1-6-24","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The article is devoted to the analysis of the main tenets of the theory of competitive democracy and its underlying principle of agonistic pluralism, which have become quite widespread among the Western political philosophers in the recent years. The author identifies two main approaches to the normative substantiation of the value of democratic competition. The first approach is based on the postulate about the importance of maintaining the diversity of public discourses and, therefore, inadmissibility of giving one of them the status of dominant or preferred. The second approach emphasizes the importance of constantly challenging the established power relations. Having demonstrated serious flaws in these approaches, one of which, in fact, promotes diversity for the sake of diversity, and the other — variability for the sake of variability, the author turns to the strategy of justifying competitive democracy that focuses on providing all stakeholders with an equal opportunity to change the existing power relations. In his estimation, this strategy, which largely overcomes the shortcomings of the above mentioned approaches, also has its weaknesses related to (1) the difficulty of disentangling between unequal opportunities for transforming power mechanisms and other social inequalities, (2) the unattainability of the complete equality of opportunities, and (3) the ambiguous relationship between the value of the opportunity to define and abolish social restrictions (political equality) and other values (in particular, the so-called intrinsic equality). A special attention in the article is paid to the identification of the deep value foundations of agonistic pluralism. The author notices that advocates of agonism want to evade clarification of these foundations and states that agonistic pluralism as the highest moral basis of politics is highly doubtful, while the part of the concept that is acceptable does not represent anything fundamentally new. According to his conclusion, all this speaks of the purely instrumental nature of this principle, and thus of its relative importance in comparison with those ideals that it intends to achieve.","PeriodicalId":47624,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Political Philosophy","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.30570/2078-5089-2023-108-1-6-24","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ETHICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The article is devoted to the analysis of the main tenets of the theory of competitive democracy and its underlying principle of agonistic pluralism, which have become quite widespread among the Western political philosophers in the recent years. The author identifies two main approaches to the normative substantiation of the value of democratic competition. The first approach is based on the postulate about the importance of maintaining the diversity of public discourses and, therefore, inadmissibility of giving one of them the status of dominant or preferred. The second approach emphasizes the importance of constantly challenging the established power relations. Having demonstrated serious flaws in these approaches, one of which, in fact, promotes diversity for the sake of diversity, and the other — variability for the sake of variability, the author turns to the strategy of justifying competitive democracy that focuses on providing all stakeholders with an equal opportunity to change the existing power relations. In his estimation, this strategy, which largely overcomes the shortcomings of the above mentioned approaches, also has its weaknesses related to (1) the difficulty of disentangling between unequal opportunities for transforming power mechanisms and other social inequalities, (2) the unattainability of the complete equality of opportunities, and (3) the ambiguous relationship between the value of the opportunity to define and abolish social restrictions (political equality) and other values (in particular, the so-called intrinsic equality). A special attention in the article is paid to the identification of the deep value foundations of agonistic pluralism. The author notices that advocates of agonism want to evade clarification of these foundations and states that agonistic pluralism as the highest moral basis of politics is highly doubtful, while the part of the concept that is acceptable does not represent anything fundamentally new. According to his conclusion, all this speaks of the purely instrumental nature of this principle, and thus of its relative importance in comparison with those ideals that it intends to achieve.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Political Philosophy is an international journal devoted to the study of theoretical issues arising out of moral, legal and political life. It welcomes, and hopes to foster, work cutting across a variety of disciplinary concerns, among them philosophy, sociology, history, economics and political science. The journal encourages new approaches, including (but not limited to): feminism; environmentalism; critical theory, post-modernism and analytical Marxism; social and public choice theory; law and economics, critical legal studies and critical race studies; and game theoretic, socio-biological and anthropological approaches to politics. It also welcomes work in the history of political thought which builds to a larger philosophical point and work in the philosophy of the social sciences and applied ethics with broader political implications. Featuring a distinguished editorial board from major centres of thought from around the globe, the journal draws equally upon the work of non-philosophers and philosophers and provides a forum of debate between disparate factions who usually keep to their own separate journals.