Rethinking Radical Democracy

Over the course of three decades, vocabularies of radical democracy have pressed their stamp on democratic thought. Trading on the intuition that there is more to democracy than elections, they have generated critical insights into the important role that practices of pluralisation and critique play in bettering institutional politics. As a result, few would today deny the radical democratic contribution to democratic thought. What many might question, however, is its continuing traction. The paper probes this question, focusing on the nuanced place of democracy in contemporary radical work. It grapples with the difficulties that this poses for radical democrats and it suggests that a way of overcoming these difficulties – that threaten to undermine the coherence of radical democracy – is to rethink and reconstruct the distinctiveness of its vocabulary. The paper attempts such a reconstruction. It develops the idea of the promissory rule of the many and it discusses the ways it rejuvenates broader democratic thought

Populism, inequality and representation: Negotiating ‘the 99%’ with Occupy London

When Occupy London emerged with a global wave of protest movements in October 2011, it embodied and advanced discursive forms that have characterised the unsettling of political consensus following the financial crisis. The central claim that ‘We are the 99%’ staged a fundamental tension, between a populist appeal to the figure of ‘the people’, and a contrary orientation seeking to critique inequality while rejecting forms of representation and identity. This article – which draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork with Occupy London (October 2011–October 2014) and a critical theorisation of the figure of ‘the people’ in radical movements – follows movement participants’ negotiation of the tension at the heart of the discourse of ‘the 99%’. It offers an account of the conflicting meanings and practices that emerged, arguing that the result was a creative contradiction that sustained the movement for a time, while setting the terms of its ultimate breakdown. Identifying the concept of ‘representation’ as the site of particular controversy, this is unpicked through a number of key figures (Pitkin, Marx, Spivak, Puchner, Deleuze and Guattari) as the basis for an empirical account of Occupy’s practice of assembly, which offered partial, imperfect ‘solutions’ to these tensions. The article concludes with some implications for the limits and possibilities of both a grassroots populism and a politics against representation, in the context of political developments since

Populism, anti-populism and crisis

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Contemporary Political Theory. The definitive publisher-authenticated version STAVRAKAKIS, Y. ... et al, 2017. Populism, anti-populism and crisis. Contemporary Political Theory, 17 (1), pp.4–27. is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-017-0142-yThis article focuses on two issues involved in the formation and political trajectory of populist representations within political antagonism. First, it explores the role of crisis in the articulation of populist discourse. This problematic is far from new within theories of populism but has recently taken a new turn. We thus purport to reconsider the way populism and crisis are related, mapping the different modalities this relation can take and advancing further their theorization from the point of view of a discursive theory of the political, drawing primarily on the Essex School perspective initially developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Second, this will involve focusing on the antagonistic language games developed around populist representations, something that has not attracted equal attention. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, focusing on their mutual constitution, we will test the ensuing theoretical framework in an analysis of SYRIZA, a recent and, as a result, under-researched example of egalitarian, inclusionary populism emerging within the European crisis landscape