Agonistic Political Community
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2025
Having shown how conflict belongs to the goodness of creaturely life and can be generative of human social flourishing, this chapter revisits the question of political community. “Agonistic community,” as I delineate it, incorporates the creative use of conflict in order to forge collectivity across difference, thereby reconceptualizing political community and difference in mutually constitutive terms. I begin the chapter by considering two neglected figures in the history of Christian political thought: the early modern Calvinist Johannes Althusius and the twentieth-century Catholic social philosopher Yves Simon. Both Althusius and Simon, I show, approach politics by theorizing the distinct features of creaturely action and relation, and so center the work of politics on the activities of shared judgment and action. The remainder of the chapter takes up the subject of democratic judgment, showing how agonistic democracy generates shared judgment and action without transcending or effacing conflict and difference. I conclude by examining the community organizing practices of the Industrial Areas Foundation as an instance of agonistic democratic community.
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