Law and Agonistic Politics (The Edinburgh Centre for Law and Society)

Description

In contemporary social and political theory, the concept of the agon has been appropriated from the Ancient Greeks to articulate a conflict theory of politics in contrast to prevailing liberal-republican consensus theories. Crucially, while the Ancients could presuppose that the agon would be mediated by a shared ethos and agreement on standards of excellence, in modernity agonism refers to the incommensurable nature of any genuinely political conflict.Rather than appealing to the shared ethos of the political community, dialogical liberalism presupposes only a thin consensus on the fundamental norms of public reason to mediate political conflict in plural societies. Contemporary theorists of agonistic politics argue that even this minimal consensus presupposes too much in representing political conflict as always already communal and thus potentially resolvable.This book examines the relation between law and politics in terms of a range of agonistic theories, influenced by authors such as Arendt, Schmitt, Nietzsche, Foucault, Ranciere, Lefort, Castoriadis and Honneth. In particular, the work addresses the themes of: Political subjectivity and its legal delimitation; Legal intelligibility of political conflict; and the Political foundation of law.This thought provoking volume will be of interest to students and researchers working in the areas of legal and political theory and philosophy.