Psychoanalyzing democracies: Antagonisms, paranoia, and the productivity of depression

Abstract

When John Rawls crowned justice the 'first virtue' of social institutions, stability was its necessary presupposition. For what worth is there of just ideals if the social order they structure will flicker out of existence when under pressure? As Rawls (2005) wrote Political Liberalism, stability became a central concern for his theory of justice, and the "overlapping consensus" is his answer to this problem. The same concern about stability can be found in the works of Habermas, another key theorist of liberal democracy. Habermas (1988Habermas ( , 1998 describes how the only viable source of political legitimacy in the modern world is the socially integrating networks of communication. In his more recent works, he even considers liberal democracy the only viable institutional arrangement that can secure stable political coexistence in our conflict-ridden world.Yet, really existing liberal democracies are far from stable. Followed by decades of neoliberal reform in major liberal democracies, public accountability of governments soon gave way to accountability to private shareholders of multinational capital. Inequalities were staggering, leaving many on the verge of destitution and precarity (Milanović, 2019;Streeck, 2016). Decades after neoliberal reforms have taken root and wreaked havoc, democracies are "undone." The Left is now disoriented, while angry, disenfranchised masses are 're-politicizing' the privatized world with a vengeance, turning to right-wing populisms of hatred, chauvinism, xenophobia, and misogyny (Brown, 2015;Mouffe, 2018).For most ideal theorists, the problem with existing democracies is that liberal democratic ideals are misapplied. 1 They believe that as long as we reattune democracies to their ideals, inequalities will be kept in check, toxic populisms will disappear, and democracies will be stable once again. However, this account seems increasingly untenable: First, politically, the rise of populism in the liberal democratic West shows that politics guided by rationalist ideals are becoming unrealistically "utopian." Second, these populist currents demonstrate how negative affects such as hatred, jealousy, and paranoid anxieties powerfully shape political life, calling into question the negligence of negative (especially antipathic) affects in ideal theories (Mouffe, 2005(Mouffe, , 2009. Thus, if one's theory aims for stable democracies, then one must go beyond ideals, and the 'affective deficit' of rationalist ideal theories must be addressed. Some currents in political thought try to overcome this affective deficit. For instance, Nussbaum (2013Nussbaum ( , 2018 supplements liberal theory with her account of political emotions. She discusses negative emotions such as disgust, anger, and fear, and argues for the need to foster love and forgiveness, redirecting our emotional energies to productive channels. Axel Honneth from the Frankfurt School is also aware of the limitations of pure ideals. His worksThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution...