The Return of the Political

this project has set out to pursue and deepen the democratic project of modernity. Such a strategy requires us to abandon the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment, the essentialist conception of a social totality, and the myth of a unitary subject.

It is probably in the work of Machiavelli that civic republicanism has the most to offer us,

But radical democracy also needs an idea of liberty that transcends the false dilemma between the liberty of the ancients and the moderns and allows us to think individual liberty and political liberty together.

rights which, while belonging to the individual, can only be exercised collectively and which presuppose the existence of equal rights for others.

It is only under these circumstances that struggles against power become truly democratic.

In order that the defence of workers’ interests is not pursued at the cost of the rights of women, immigrants or consumers, it is necessary to establish an equivalence between these different struggles.

If the task of radical democracy is indeed to deepen the democratic revolution and to link diverse democratic struggles, such a task requires the creation of new subject positions that would allow the common articulation, for example, of antiracism, antisexism and anticapitalism. These struggles do not spontaneously converge, and in order to establish democratic equivalences a new ‘common sense’ is necessary, which would transform the identity of different groups so that the demands of each group could be articulated with those of others according to the principle of democratic equivalence.

Relations of authority and power cannot completely disappear, and it is important to abandon the myth of a transparent society, reconciled with itself, for that kind of fantasy leads to totalitarianism. A project of radical and plural democracy, on the contrary, requires the existence of multiplicity, of plurality and of conflict, and sees in them the raison d’être of politics.

Recent attempts by neoliberals and neoconservatives to redefine concepts such as liberty and equality, and to disarticulate the idea of liberty from that of democracy, demonstrate how within the liberal democratic tradition different strategies can be pursued, making available different kinds of intimations.

tradition is the set of discourses and practices that form us as subjects.