The Lessons of Community Rights Ordinances for Democratic Philosophizing

Abstract

Opposition to corporate legal rights has become more visible in recent years. Activists seek ways to address the influence of corporations on the state and its ancillary institutions. The most wellknown tactics range from Occupy's embrace of anarchic, leaderless horizontalism to the Mayday PAC raising money to elect representatives who support a campaign finance amendment to the United States Constitution (Ennis 2014, Kloc 2014). The spectrum of political efforts between these two approaches speaks to how the problem of corporate power resonates with many people in the United States. It also, however, demonstrates how "democracy," as the ostensible other of corporate politics, can be interpreted as everything from radical protest to electoral processes. At one end of the spectrum between horizontal and representative politics, certain kinds of leftism rejects the notion that the modern state has any democratic potential. Democracy, in this view, is a concept that is only legitimately meaningful in the context of leaderless or quasi-anarchic movement. For horizontalist political philosophy, democracy is purely "other" to a state-based politics of managing populations through vertical, hierarchical, and representational liberal governance that partakes in ongoing inequality and exploitation. Jacques Rancière's work on politics is both an extension of and a departure from an antistatist and horizontal vision of democracy (1999, 2010). Although thinkers of anarchist politics like Todd May have claimed Rancière's work for the cause of pure horizontalism, others like Samuel Chambers have argued that Rancière's perspective is more complex (2008, 2013). For Rancière, democracy is a political event that interrupts the expected order of what he calls "the police," including representation established by liberal government. Democracy is, by Rancière's definition, not a politics that has been institutionalized in an apparatus of management. Rancière's vision of democracy, however, requires an understanding of the interplay between political action and the political order. Unlike horizontalist definitions of democracy striving for