Title
Democracy against the state : Marx and the Machiavellian moment / Miguel Abensour ; translated by Max Blechman and Martin Breaugh.
Uniform Title
Démocratie contre l'Etat. English
ISBN
9780745650104 (pbk.)
0745650104 (pbk.)
9780745650098
0745650090
Imprint
Cambridge ; Malden, MA : Polity, c2011.
Language
English
Language Note
In English translated from the French.
Description
xlvi, 149 p. ; 23 cm.
Call Number
JC423 .A23313 2011
Dewey Decimal Classification
321.8
Summary
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 Abensourʹs 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. -- Back cover.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Translator's introduction : "To think emancipation otherwise" / Max Blechman
Preface to the Italian edition (2008) : "Insurgent democracy and institution"
Foreword to the second French edition (2004) : "Of insurgent democracy"
Preface
Introduction
The utopia of the rational state
Political intelligence
From the 1843 Crisis to the criticism of politics
A reading hypothesis
The four characteristics of true democracy
True democracy and modernity
Conclusion
Appendix : "Savage democracy" and the "Principle of anarchy".
