Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2025
This chapter engages the work of two prominent theorists of agonistic democracy, William Connolly and Chantal Mouffe. It analyzes their critiques of liberal theory and Western political thought, both of which, they argue, divest politics of its essential vitality by prizing consensus, unity, and agreement. Commending agonism for its recovery of the ineliminable place of contestation in democratic politics, as well as its appreciation of the generative and emancipatory possibilities of conflict, the chapter then raises the question of political community. Must agonism’s safeguarding of difference and its preservation of perpetual contestation entail the abandonment of the concept of community? I argue agonists are right to worry about the ways appeals to community threaten difference, but contend nevertheless that a vision of collectivity is necessary for agonistic politics to survive the pressures of neoliberalism. The chapter concludes by considering a movement of radical theology that has adopted some of agonism’s central insights but which, I argue, remains captive to a form of analogical thinking that insufficiently attends to the nature of creaturehood.
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