Exploring the Edges of Democracy

Sometimes modern political theory makes me wonder if there is anything but the "edges" of liberal-democracy. Does liberal-democracy have a core at all? I imagine the modern liberal-democratic state like Akira Kurosawa's famous hidden fortress, and that thinkers like Wendy Brown, Jacques Ranciere, and Slavoj Zizek are all like The Hidden Fortress' General Rokurota, picking away at the edges of the fortification. That being said, there is no doubt that much of the most interesting work in political theory is being done about and/or around the "edges." In this context, Benjamin Arditi's new book, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation, is, at its best, a work that further illuminates the edges around liberalism, and, at its worst, provides a synthesis of previous authors.

Arditi uses a neo-Freudean framework to explain what he calls the "internal periphery" of liberal-democracy. Such internal peripheries are the ironic 'edges' that inspire the monograph's moniker, and, on Arditi's account, are intimately connected to the "center" of liberalism. In this sense the above-mentioned Hidden Fortress analogy is not completely fair: the edge of liberalism is explicitly "a region where the distinction between inside and outside is a matter of dispute and cannot be thought outside a polemic. To speak of politics on the edges of liberalism is to speak of the internal periphery of liberalism." (3-4) Arditi's book is an attempt to understand this periphery. Arditi efficiently examines some of the enduring problems of contemporary political philosophy: difference, populism, agitation and revolution. Using some stylish flourishes, he offers examples ranging from the ancient society of the Greek polis to the postmodern world of identity politics. Given this emphasis, Arditi's work exists nicely within the pantheon of thinkers such as Gramsci, Laclau, Hardt and Negri, Ranciere, Žižek and others. As Arditi's title implies, the text divides its topics—which reflect the afore-mentioned "edges" of liberalism, as well as the extension of the Freudian notion of 'internal periphery'—into four separate categories: postmodern difference (Chapter one), populism (Chapters two and three), agitation (Chapter four) and revolution (Chapter five).

In a move that is strange in an age of "front-loading" consumable products, Arditi's work starts with by far its weakest chapter, which recounts familiar problems of "difference" and the way that it reaffirms the neo-capitalist order. On Arditi's account, the "freedoms" one gets from postmodern notions of identity and difference creates a subject that oscillates between "belonging" and "disorientation," an oscillation which "at least tends to undermine strong, stable, and long-term participation." (26) Arditi also writes that the "endogamous undertones of this celebration [of identity] opens up a scenario of action and a way of conceiving political intervention that make it more difficult to forge horizontal links between particular groups."(14) In other words, identity politics of the postmodern variety makes solidarity a hard-sell.

This critique of "difference" is not unique, and Arditi adds little to the discussion. Thinkers like Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Gayatri Spivak have all rendered similar critiques of identity politics, often with greater clarity. Despite the section's lack of originality, Arditi does an admirable job of corralling these thinkers into an aggregate criticism of the politics of difference. Yet Arditi does not seem to append the discussion substantially; even the notion that identity politics is linked to liberalism itself is one that people like Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault have already discussed. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's call for a kind of "equivalence," between oppressed groups (in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy) seems more rigorous and workable than the "oscillation" described by Arditi.

Chapters two and three of Arditi's book discuss populism, and they represent the best sections of the work. Arditi dissects various theories of "populism," arguing that a "spectre of democracy" embodies the "internal periphery of democratic politics." This formulation is interesting in quite...