Beyond the search for the subject: An anti-essentialist ontology for liberal democracy

Abstract

Reading Foucault's work on power and subjectivity alongside "developmentalist" approaches to evolutionary biology, this paper endorses poststructuralist critiques of political ideals grounded in the value of subjective agency. Many political theorists embrace such critiques, of course, but those who do are often skeptical of liberal democracy, and even of normative theory itself. By contrast, those who are left to theorize liberal democracy tend to reject or ignore poststructuralist insights, and have continued to employ dubious ontological assumptions regarding human agents. Against both groups, I argue that Foucault's poststructuralism must be taken seriously, but that it is ultimately consistent with normative theory and liberal democracy. Linking poststructuralist attempts to transcend the dichotomy between agency and structure with recent efforts by evolutionary theorists to dissolve a similarly stubborn opposition between nature and nurture, I develop an anti-essentialist account of human nature and agency that vindicates poststructuralist criticism while enabling a novel defense of liberal democracy.

The Power of the Multitude: Answering Epistemic Challenges to Democracy

“…At the same time, polarization reliably weakens their motivational force relative to immediate substantive concerns (Svolik, n.d.). Perhaps even more troublingly, it can be difficult to disentangle principled from expedient motives in the first place (Bagg 2018a, 2018b; Lodge and Taber 2013). Given these vulnerabilities, it would be unwise to rely entirely on the production of principled commitments through education and socialization to maintain the integrity of notoriously fragile constraints on centralized power.…”

Actions, habits and forms of life

“…If those who argue so are correct, the agent would think herself free when otherwise she would only be performing the actions that have been imposed on her by various channels and dispositives. In the extreme case, and accepting that this is the most plausible account of the way social agents act, it could be argued that in this belief of freedom there is certain consciousness and identification with what is done, to the point that Foucault himself wrote that “power is exercised only over free subjects” (see quoted and discussed in Bagg, , p. 27). Regardless of whether there are devices that control parcels of social and individual life (or even the totality of it as in the state of indistinctness between law and life, bios in opposition to zoe , that Agamben has studied, ), if we accept that there are habits and forms of life, then there needs to be a constitutive principle with which agents identify freely and consciously (leaving aside possible persuasion or determination, issue that belongs to the free will debate).…”

Plato’s Myth of Er and the Reconfiguration of Nature

“…and reflecting the fluid interaction of internal and external influences on human development (Bagg 2018;Frost 2016;Kronfeldner, Roughley, and Toepfer 2014;Kronfeldner 2018).…”

“…Today, much of the controversy surrounding the concept of nature tends to center on biology and genetics, but it is important to recognize that these contemporary discussions are part of a broader effort to grapple with this more normative task—an ontological undertaking on which recent political theory has often been conspicuously silent (Bagg 2018, 3 and 20–5; Rawls 2005, 18, 86–8, 481–2; White 2000, 17). To begin, that project requires us to grasp the extent to which deeply ingrained world views, intuitions, and linguistic practices continue to be structured by the idea that humans are importantly defined in some capacity by a set of essential and invariant traits, which accompany them throughout their lives and ground their dispositions (Keller 2010).…”

“…To begin, that project requires us to grasp the extent to which deeply ingrained world views, intuitions, and linguistic practices continue to be structured by the idea that humans are importantly defined in some capacity by a set of essential and invariant traits, which accompany them throughout their lives and ground their dispositions (Keller 2010). Recent defenders of the concept of nature have therefore argued instead for its reconceptualization: disassociating it from the deterministic connotations that have traditionally loomed over it; better accounting for the plurality of human experiences and sources of identity; and reflecting the fluid interaction of internal and external influences on human development (Bagg 2018; Frost 2016; Kronfeldner 2018; Kronfeldner, Roughley, and Toepfer 2014).…”