The Genesis of Democratic Norms: Agonistic Pluralism or Experimentalism?

Abstract

After indicating what I take to be important insights on both sides of the “universalist—contextualist” debate concerning the status of political norms, especially those related to democratic forms of life, I consider two attempts to carve out a “third way” between the two positions.1 Agonistic pluralism, as advanced by Chantai Mouffe, is a nonrationalist understanding of the political constructed on a Derridian-type account of undecidability in which social division constitutes a field in which new objects and relations between objects become thinkable. Experimentalism, as advanced by John Dewey, provides for a genetic analysis of political norms as arising out of experimental practice, rather than “reason,” as well as potentially universalizable across otherwise quite diverse cultural contexts.KeywordsLanguage GameSocial DivisionAgricultural MachineryDemocratic FormInclusive CommunityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.