Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian MovementISBN: 978-0-7456-5009-8
Hardcover
200 pages
December 2010, Polity
Other Available Formats: Paperback
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In the "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,” the young
Marx elliptically alludes to a "true democracy" whose advent would
go hand in hand with the disappearance of the state. Miguel
Abensour’s rigorous interpretation of this seminal text
reveals an “unknown Marx” who undermines the
identification of democracy with the state and defends a
historically occluded form of politics.
True democracy does not entail the political and economic power of the state, but it does not dream of a post-political society either. On the contrary, the battle of democracy is waged by a demos that invents a public sphere of permanent struggles, a politics that counters political bureaucracy and representation. Democracy is "won" by a people forewarned that any dissolution of the political realm in its independence, any subordination to the state, is tantamount to annihilating the site for gaining and regaining a genuinely human existence.
In this explicitly heterodox reading of Marx, Miguel Abensour proposes a theory of "insurgent" democracy that makes political liberty synonymous with a living critique of domination.
True democracy does not entail the political and economic power of the state, but it does not dream of a post-political society either. On the contrary, the battle of democracy is waged by a demos that invents a public sphere of permanent struggles, a politics that counters political bureaucracy and representation. Democracy is "won" by a people forewarned that any dissolution of the political realm in its independence, any subordination to the state, is tantamount to annihilating the site for gaining and regaining a genuinely human existence.
In this explicitly heterodox reading of Marx, Miguel Abensour proposes a theory of "insurgent" democracy that makes political liberty synonymous with a living critique of domination.