Πολιτική φιλοσοφία: Οι δύο παραδόσεις

Abstract

The crisis of political philosophy is deeply connected to the radical transformation of democracy over the period of late modernity. Based on this general view, I am discussing the two traditions within political philosophy: the «deliberation» tradition and the one related to «decision» theories. I am suggesting that the latter -the «desicion» tradition- was bom and spread as a reaction to what we may call a «bourgeois-liberal» version of deliberative politics. In fact, behind this tension, we have to recognise a deeper dichotomy between rationalists and historicists, a dichotomy that characterises the whole democratic modernity. According to this analysis, the main point is to explore the simultaneous evolution of deliberative and decisionist political cultures: in other words, the crucial reduction of democratic deliberation to rational discussion and doxographic pluralism, that is to say, the symbolic limitation of politics under the liberal-procedural conception of public dialogue; and, on the other hand, the decisionist path to an irrational and largely subjectivist “intuition” of political struggle. The purpose of reconstruction in political philosophy owes a lot to the elaboration of a democratic and institutional voluntarism; the political will becomes a critical instrument for the rehabilitation and revitalisation of political philosophy. According to this purpose, the quest for a modem “deliberation culture” is inevitably a central topic of today’s political philosophy.