We have seen that agonism is defined by an emphasis on pluralism, tragedy, and the value of particular forms of contest. Pluralism and tragedy represent intrinsic conditions of political action, and agonistic contest is said to have the potential – if crafted wisely – to dispel the threat of antagonism or fundamentalist forms of ressentiment, or, with more aspiration, to be a necessary constituent in the struggles of subaltern peoples for independence and against arbitrary forms of power. These points of emphasis capture core insights about political life, and represent some of the central contributions of the theorists examined in this book. The leading proponents of agonism have also skilfully exposed the conceits of the prevailing juridical and deliberative justifications of liberal democracy, they have developed careful genealogies of different elements of our existing institutions and practices, unearthing their contingent foundations, and these narratives have reinforced a vivid sense of the agonic freedom of citizens to introduce genuine novelty into those institutions and practices through periodic moments of augmentation, enactment, articulation, or Wittgensteinian iterations of prevailing rules and norms. These forms of politics are exemplified in the repeated emergence of new social movements from the mid 1960s, as well as in the determination and fortitude of situated subjects like Louis Freeland Post. However, at the same time, we have tracked and identified an assortment of ontological and theoretical assumptions which tend to essentialise these moments of political freedom, and which operate to preclude the possibility of the emergence of the constituent power as an occasion of radical innovation and rupture. In this sense, the contemporary agonistic theorists each present a mono-typical account of the relative priority of the constituent power in the mode of augmentation, and from these viewpoints the moment of the Ursprung is literally inconceivable. This distinguishes the contemporary agonistic theorists from Arendt, who combined an insistence on the pluralistic and open-ended conditions of political action with a keen sense of the miraculously creative power of revolution.

Indeed, contemporary agonistic democracy is perhaps best demarcated by a characteristic emphasis on both (i) genuine innovation in modern politics (i.e. moments of freedom that are not subsumed under juridical or dialectical forms of determination) and, at the same time, (ii) the basic legitimacy of liberal democratic constitutionalism, with its emphasis on the co-originality of democratic self-government and the constitutional protection of individual rights. From the contemporary agonistic perspective, this paradoxical combination of values cannot be perfected, resolved, or progressively integrated, as Habermas would have it, but only perpetually renegotiated in the cut and thrust of genuinely open-ended struggle. However, this also means that the democratic mêlée is not entirely open-ended, in the sense that the constituent power is not seen to enjoy the potentia to instigate profound new beginnings that might discontinue the basic social and political forms of modern liberal democratic constitutionalism. This is problematic, and the contemporary theorists effectively sell themselves short, because there is nothing in the agonistic matrix of pluralism, tragedy, and conflict, which determines that the constituent power must be hemmed in by the norms, values, and institutions of liberal democracy, with its central commitment to the legal protection of forms of possessive individualism.

These conclusions show themselves to be especially problematic in the present circumstances of the global economic and environmental crises and the ascendency of large corporations and the security state. These tendencies in the current conjuncture call for a more militant stance towards existing institutions and practices, and in this final chapter I present a preliminary outline of a theory of agonism and militant cosmopolitanism that seeks to contend with these developments and to find ways to instigate radically new social and political forms in response to pressing issues such as the looming climate, population, energy, and food crises. Tully's depiction of globalisation as the latest stage in European imperialism provides a basic point of departure, and this is combined with Agamben's insights into the reproduction of the security state through a permanent state of exception, which we explored in relation to Honig's work in the previous chapter. After a brief restatement of these predominant features of contemporary politics and of the background conditions of domination, and a consideration of the global movements that struggle within and against these developments and insist that ‘another world’ – and not just an augmentation of liberal democracy – ‘is possible’, this chapter focuses on three areas of theoretical consideration which help to delineate a more militant iteration of agonistic democracy. These are: (i) the conceptual distinction between action and pluralism or action and judgement, and why the expansive power of the democratic agon appears in the interface between bold and decisive action and multiple open-ended judgements; (ii) the crucial importance of a politics of militant conviction in the circumstances of an increasingly post-secular society, and as a response to passive nihilism; (iii) the need to learn something from the original Hellenic idea of leadership or hegemonia, again understood as a vital ingredient in the emergence of a militant cosmopolitan assemblage, and as an alternative both to any kind of sovereignty and to those theories that associate cosmopolitanism with impartiality.

Each of these theoretical interventions is intended to facilitate a theory and practice of militant cosmopolitanism.¹ At the core of this idea is a belief that a moment of absolute initiative might just arise from the politics of the contemporary transnational democratic movements, and if this revolutionary Ursprung was combined with an ensuing augmentation, in a manner that was recommended by Machiavelli and that Arendt so admired in the American founding, then we might have the ingredients for the emergence and subsequent expansion of a new mode of cosmopolitanism. The hope is that this initiative, which introduces a new principle (or set of values) into the world, is subsequently judged to be of wider or more universal significance, so that it is picked up and carried forward in the lived experiences of multiple publics and starts to interrupt and redirect established political priorities at the local, national, and global levels. To some these claims may appear far-fetched and utopian, but, without the invention of radically new ways of being in the world and their subsequent dissemination and genuine materialisation, then all the signs are that our children can look forward to a diminished quality of life, to massive inequalities, political instability, and increasingly authoritarian and militaristic forms of rule.

Alternate globalisation

At several points in this study we have explored the key elements associated with globalisation – most notably in Chapter 4 in relation to Tully's work. I will not repeat these points in detail here, but it is necessary to briefly accentuate a few key themes as a prelude to the conceptual analyses set out in the remainder of this chapter. At the core of economic globalisation is a series of developments, made possible by the revolution in information technology, that have ensured the consolidation of neo-liberal disciplinary control across the planet. The principal political and institutional manifestation of this development has been the relative demise of the efficacy of national government, which is manifest in a decreased capacity of/for national executives to control market mechanisms and basic social and economic processes. Until recently, this tendency has been most pronounced in the developing world, where newly emergent states have established formal independence from former colonial powers, but remain subjugated to the control of the transnational agents of neo-liberalism, for example the World Bank and the WTO, who insist that there is no alternative to ‘free’ trade, the deregulation of markets, and the privatisation of formerly state-run industries as a prerequisite to the all-important objective of competitiveness and economic growth. More recently, however, these same tendencies have been more pronounced in the advanced economies of the West, and most notably in those countries on the periphery of Europe in the context of the on-going financial crises after the 2008 ‘credit crunch’. Indeed, the incapacity of national elites – and their representatives in the G8 and the G20 – to address the financial and sovereign debt crises reinforces the idea that economic processes, and especially capital mobility and investment priorities, are now effectively beyond the control of elected officials. The fact that the financial institutions are deemed ‘too big to fail’ and so have to be propped up with massive amounts of public money, whilst national governments are incapable of regulating these institutions so that the livelihoods of ordinary people remain utterly exposed to the indiscriminate fluctuations of markets, driven by the speculation of hedge fund managers and the pronouncements of credit rating agencies, reaffirms the central fact that people all round the world today are effectively hostage to the arbitrary power of turbo capitalism.

It is not only Marxists who appreciate these pressing realities. Indeed, it is a standard observation in mainstream theories of globalisation, that the increased mobility of capital ‘shifts the balance of power between markets and states and generates powerful pressures on states to develop market friendly policies’ (Held and McGrew, Reference Held and McGrew2002, 23). However, as we saw in Chapter 4, the emergence of economic globalisation represents something more than the relative ascendancy of markets vis-à-vis national executives. Indeed, Tully shares with authors such as Hardt and Negri the crucial insight that globalisation manifests as a novel form of networked imperialism, again centred in market mechanisms and made possible by information technology, that introduces new forms of discipline that ‘increasingly overlap and invest one another’ in a singular process of bio-political control (Hardt and Negri, Reference Hardt and Negri2001, xiii). As Hardt and Negri put it, Empire ‘is a decentred and deteritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command’ (Hardt and Negri, Reference Hardt and Negri2001, xii). Transnational corporations are in many respects the predominant nodal points in these new systems of control. They operate as the nerve centres of a networked system of social symbolic reproduction that interpolates subjects as individual passive customers of particular lifestyle identities through a relentless feasting on consumer products, at the cost of more communal forms of organisation and subjectivity. Indeed, one of the more deeply rooted causes of these developments has been the extension of basic rights of private appropriation to corporations, who have themselves effectively acquired the status of ‘possessive individuals’. The activities of these organisations have a massive impact on peoples’ lives, and yet in all meaningful respects they too are beyond public control.

From the republican perspective, the basic dependence of contemporary peoples all round the world on the ostensibly ‘private’ choices and priorities of massive corporations and financial institutions, and the capricious fluctuations of markets, means that these institutions can only be seen as contemporary forms of arbitrary power and domination. However, it is important to grasp that, whilst enormously significant, these developments only represent one element of corruption in contemporary (neo-)liberal (disciplinary) regimes. Indeed, one of Tully's most significant insights is to draw attention to the fact that, whilst globalisation should be understood as a single system of informal imperialism, this cannot be explained in mono-causal terms, with reference to a single logic of capitalist exploitation. Instead, Empire sutures together complex forms of oppression into a composite system of domination. In fact, Tully makes the crucial observation that the current system of control effectively aims to usurp three basic (and irreducible) moments of the constituent power, which in classical republican thought ought to remain with the people. These are ‘(i) political power or the powers of self-government; (ii) labour or productive power; and (iii) the powers to protect oneself and others, or military and police power’ (Tully, Reference Tully2008b, 204). The reproduction of Empire through the attempted appropriation of this irreducible trinity of the constituent power has important implications, both for how we analyse the current machinations of constituted power, as well as for conceptions of liberation and how progressive movements might find ways to challenge and overcome this goliath.

In terms of how we evaluate the present system, this means that we need to pay due attention not only to the relations between states and markets, but also to the changing character of the military and security dimensions of the state in the context of globalisation. Although Tully is mindful of these questions, Agamben's observations about the operations of new forms of ‘sovereignty’ through the mobilisation of a permanent state of exception become particularly significant here. Indeed, as we discussed in the previous chapter in relation to Honig's work, these insights brilliantly capture some of the principal features of the post–9/11 security state, such as the restriction of civil liberties, increased surveillance, and the principle of pre-emptive war. Agamben is mistaken when he presents these developments as indicative of a core underlying logic of western politics going back to antiquity, and orientated towards the reproduction of forms of ‘bare life’ that are beyond all forms of legal or symbolic status (Agamben, Reference Agamben1998). However, he is correct when he points to the steady consolidation of executive control in the present context, through the rhetorical deployment of a permanent state of exception. In some important respects these forms of resurgent ‘sovereignty’ stand in marked contrast to the basic impotency of national- level decision making in the face of the omnipotence of markets, and I return to the question of this apparent tension in the final section of this chapter below. However, for the moment it is sufficient to note that these new forms of the security state cannot be explained with reference to a single imperative of capital accumulation, and this has clear implications for how we conceptualise those movements that seek to transform the present structures of domination.

Indeed, Empire is manifest in a series of distinct but interlocking institutional forms, which operate in a combined appropriation of the three irreducible constituent capacities (for self-government, productive labour, and self-defence), and this also means that the present struggles against domination cannot be modelled exclusively on any one of these three moments of the constituent power. In other words, the autonomist notion of the ‘multitude’ arising spontaneously from the wellspring of productive labour doesn't represent a credible response to the current predicament. However, whilst this analysis reveals the limitations of Marxist and neo-Marxist reductions of domination to economic exploitation and freedom to emancipated labour, the complex and overlapping forms of control also demonstrate the clear limitations of Arendt's exclusive focus on the value of political freedom and institution building, and her complete disregard of social forms of oppression. Indeed, we might surmise that the displacement of corrupt ‘political’ institutions is relatively achievable compared to the seemingly intractable task of bringing about meaningful ‘regime change’ in the colossal military and corporate structures of the present system. Nevertheless, as Tully says, an analysis that focuses exclusively on political institutions, would ‘be out of touch’ with the ‘global populist…discomfort with the existing order’ (Tully, Reference Tully2008b, 206, emphasis in the original). We need to find ways to bring genuine innovation into the predominant social, economic, and military forms, and not just into forms of government in the narrow sense.

We have seen throughout this book that the political consequences of globalisation are not at all straightforward. One clear trend has been the emergence of novel forms of transnational social movement. Again, these developments are made possible by digital technology, and this reveals that globalisation is an ambiguous phenomenon, which is not only manifest as a new networked form of imperialism, but also creates opportunities for the emergence of the constituent power. The compression of space through real time communication has facilitated the enormous logistical achievements associated with organising events such as the World Social Forum. This has also created new tactical opportunities for the operations of protest, for example through the use of sites such as Facebook and Twitter and services such as Blackberry Messenger. These technologies have provided the infrastructure for the mass increased volume of protest movements around the world, from the G20 summit protests to the protests against the financial crises in Athens and Madrid, to Occupy, and the Arab Spring. We have seen how each of the theorists examined in this book, with the exception of Mouffe, has linked these kinds of developments to the possibility of new forms of cosmopolitanism. Mouffe's reservations about prospects for the emergence of cosmopolitan forms of politics are not unfounded. They stem from her due concern about the hubris of the predominant liberal conceptions of cosmopolitanism, with their focus on transnational institutions and effective global governance (Held), or global civil society understood as the embodiment of the ‘law of humanity’, that is supposedly rationally demonstrable and equivalent to Kantian principles of moral duty (Falk). Mouffe is right to stress that these values and institutions are symptomatic of particular readings of the western tradition, and cannot claim universal validity. Moreover, these theorists do not pay sufficient attention to the on-going significance of national identity, and the fact that institutions beyond a certain scale are incompatible with democracy. The other theorists examined here also share these concerns, but they have insisted that it is nonetheless possible to formulate alternative conceptions of cosmopolitanism that do not reproduce these difficulties and might accompany a restoration of civic activity on a local and national scale. I share this view, but I don't think the alternatives we have explored so far are sufficient.

For Connolly, cosmopolitanism means little more than transnationalism, and he associates this with those forms of social movement politics that apply pressure on particular states; for Honig, cosmopolitanism is conceived in terms of forms of solidarity that are not confined to the nation-state, but which, at best, represent an incessant resistance to false claims to universality; whereas, for Tully, cosmopolitanism supposedly manifests directly in the present, in those ‘glocal’ relations between citizens, directly acting otherwise, and that apparently emerge from the gaps in the present institutions. Each of these contributions highlights necessary but insufficient conditions of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, none of them really quite hits the nail on the head, and they each overlook what is really the most fundamental point, which is that ‘cosmopolitanism’ must mean something more than simply transnationalism. Indeed, the militant form of cosmopolitanism elaborated here is primarily concerned with the capacity of democratic actors to generate new social and political forms that are subsequently recognised to be of wider significance, so that they are picked up and carried forward by different actors and spectators in different locales, and become the foundation of an expanding open-ended form of universality.

With the exception of Honig's deconstructive stance towards false claims to universality, the contemporary agonistic theorists have largely dodged the question of the status of the universal, and of the relationship between the particular and the universal. Again, there are good reasons why this is so, and it is important to stress that the form of cosmopolitanism elaborated in the remainder of the chapter is incompatible with any juridical conception of ‘the universal’ in terms of rational postulates or principles of right, nor is it equivalent to deliberative conceptions of universality in terms of trans-contextual principles of reciprocity or impartiality. Here, the emergence of the universal is figured instead in terms of an on-going, open-ended adventure that takes up a new beginning and sees it disseminated and expanded in entirely unique and unpredictable ways. In the emergence of this origin and expansion, it is also crucially important that the new cosmopolitan principle manifests as a rupture with the present order. It is not that everything has to change overnight or even in the long term, but the key point is that a radically new standard emerges that is unaccounted for in the present system and really begins to engender a wider, cosmopolitan, or universally imagined community with real material effect. Indeed, the rudimentary stirrings of just such a form of cosmopolitan consciousness have been evident in the global justice movement, and more recently in Occupy, as well as in the World Social Forum and its yearning for radical transformation.

These are instances of what Castells calls project identities, aimed at constructing new values in the context of the networked society, as opposed to resistance identities that manifest most significantly in forms of religiously motivated violence and the politics of ethnic conflict (Castells, Reference Castells1997). One of the defining features of these project identities is their irreducible plurality; they are in fact comprised of many different movements, with distinct diagnoses of the current concern. This diversity partly reflects the three-part complexity of the system of constituted powers that they struggle against, and follows also from the fact that the present system manifests primarily as a sequence of distinct yet interlocking crises. Different activist groups focus on dissimilar elements of these crises, with distinct opinions about the underlying causes, and seek to bring divergent principles into being as the basis of an alternative world order. As we will see in more detail below, it is also important to note the increasing prominence of religious groups amongst these project identities, who also struggle against the dominant priorities of the contemporary global system. Indeed, challenges to the present system have been mobilised by socialists, feminists, Muslims, Christians, environmentalists, indigenous peoples, New Agers, and many more. This is where we should rework the idea of a post-secular agon of ideological conflict, but without the Mouffean proviso that these protagonists must declare their fidelity to the basic legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions.

We cannot predict in any way which of these struggles, or combination of struggles, might actually deliver a moment of radical innovation, and, of course, history is not on anyone's side. Indeed, the possibility of a new beginning emerges from and into a world of plurality, tragedy, and conflict and this is not cause for melancholy or regret. Nevertheless, it also remains crucial to find ways to link the struggles of particular actors to a politics of open-ended judgement about the wider significance of specific innovations. This means that the question of judgement becomes critically important in the contemporary agon, and the remainder of this chapter explores how a new militant cosmopolitan expansion might be forged through the interplay between resolute moments of action and the multiple judgements of many varied spectators. Here, we will also see that the two qualitatively distinct moments of the constituent power, i.e. as absolute initiative and as augmentation, both remain central, as does the need to combine them through effective leadership or hegemonia.

Action, pluralism, and judgement

Throughout this study we have focused on the emergence of the constituent power, understood in terms of alternate moments of action or innovation, and it might seem incongruous to introduce the additional category of judgement at this late stage in the proceedings. The emphasis on judgement is also taken from Arendt, and she brought this idea to the fore late in her career, and most notably in her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy. It is important to introduce these reflections here, partly because, as various commentators have said, the notion of reflective judgement taken from Kant's Critique of Judgement offers crucial insights about the formation of public opinion in the context of agonistic pluralism,² but also because these categories become essential after the collapse of the Hegelian/Marxist conception of World History understood as a teleological whole, where History itself was perceived as the essential arbitrator and judge of the wider significance and status of distinct actions and events (Beiner, Reference Beiner and Arendt1992). Indeed, now that we have been liberated from the idea of History as a ground, the stress on the perpetual interplay between action and judgement becomes fundamental to a theory of agonism and militant cosmopolitanism; where the innovations of particular actors meet with agonism at the level of multiple judgements about their significance, and where an on-going and expansive universality might emerge in the interface of this heated relationship. My concerns here, then, are not with the inner workings of the faculties that come into play in the exercise of judgement, i.e. in the respective roles of the imagination and the understanding; I am interested instead in the public function of the exercise of judgement and how this relates to the innovations of the actor. However, it is also necessary to stress at this point that, although the idea of judgement was clearly explored more systematically in Arendt's later writings, this notion was not a late adjunct to her work. In fact, the idea of reflective judgement was always implicit in Arendt's conception of pluralism elaborated in The Human Condition, which I introduced briefly in Chapter 2, and her stress on the importance of judgement in her later work was not designed to displace or restrain her otherwise central concern with bold and decisive action. This is important, because several commentators who are influenced by Arendt mistakenly invoke her notions of judgement and/or plurality to curb or ‘tame’ what might be perceived as her otherwise undue preoccupation with resolute action. For example, according to Ronald Beiner, Arendt turned to the idea of judgement in search of a surrogate for action and as a kind of solace for a ‘genuine public realm’, because the ‘possibility of acting politically’ under conditions of modernity, especially following the experience of totalitarianism, had become ‘more or less foreclosed’ (Beiner, Reference Beiner and Arendt1992, 153). By way of contrast, we will see that these qualities – of pluralism and judgement – provide necessary circumstances for the emergence and the endurance of new beginnings, but they do not displace the centrality of action or freedom that remained at the core of Arendt's account of the vita activa, as well as at the centre of the current struggles for the invention of new forms in the context of globalisation.

The central lesson of Arendtean pluralism, as well as her theory of reflective judgement, is that the actor does not have control over the consequences of her action, and this is to a considerable extent due to the rejoinders of multiple others, who inevitably respond to the innovations of the actor and evaluate (or judge) the significance of her creation. Indeed, one of the central themes of The Human Condition is that the ancient Greeks were mistaken when they imagined that the actor's ‘performance as such will be enough to generate dynamis and not need the transforming reification’ of surrounding spectators (as recipients and storytellers) to ‘keep it in reality’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, 205). Arendt therefore associates pluralism with unpredictability as well as with precariousness and boundlessness (Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, 195, 223). Action is precarious, partly because it is fleeting and often simply ignored or quickly forgotten, but also because it is irreversible, and so when it is judged by the recipients to have a wider impact, action often has boundless results over which the actor has little or no control (Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, 197). Indeed, the actor always ‘acts into a medium where every reaction [judgement] becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new processes’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, 190). Most importantly, this means that the actor is unable to ‘dispose of the future as though it were the present’, and, as we will see below, this insight is crucially important in relation to a critique of sovereignty (Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, 245). Indeed, as Canovan put it, ‘nobody who engages in public affairs can know where the repercussions of his actions and the intervening action of others will carry them all’ (Canovan, Reference Canovan1983, 293). Or, as Markell says:

In Chapter 4 we saw that Markell associates the struggle for recognition with an imprudent demand for sovereignty, and, in fact, there is a deeper message in his book which is that action per se is bound up with an impossible ambition to master the conditions of human plurality (Markell, Reference Markell2003, 65). He therefore derives from Arendt's account of the conditioning qualities of plurality the idea that action, as an attempt at self-mastery, is ‘not only doomed to fail, but risks intensifying [our] suffering unnecessarily, even demanding that we give our lives for what will turn out to have been an illusion of control’ (Markell, Reference Markell2003, 65). Indeed, Markell's mode of agonism is built around the principal observation of the ‘impropriety of action’, which, he says, should not be read pejoratively, but rather simply as the conditioning fact that the actor does not own or control the outcome and consequences of his actions (Markell, Reference Markell2003, 63–4). However, in the various lessons that Markell derives from this observation, he does end up presenting bold and decisive action in disapproving terms. The central message of his theory is that we should practise instead ‘not playing at being sovereign’, and this through an internalisation, i.e. an inner acknowledgement, of the limiting conditions of action and a cultivation of ‘an acceptance of practical finitude’ (Markell, Reference Markell2003, 69, 186, 187).³ However, this is not the central message of Arendt's political theory. As Villa has said, Arendt shared unequivocally Nietzsche's view that the slaves’ revolt in morality is manifest in this association of ‘goodness’ with ‘abstaining from action’ as self-mastery (Villa, Reference Villa1992a, 284). For Arendt, human striving for immortality (which is not the same as sovereignty) through the performance of great words and deeds is definitive of genuine political action, and, like Machiavelli, this is seen as the very kernel of politics. The teaching that she extracts from the pluralistic conditions of political life, and later from her theory of reflective judgement – i.e. the fragility, uniqueness, and irreversibility of action – is definitely not that the actor should internalise a sense of finitude and depreciate or censure her own actions. Her point in The Human Condition and elsewhere is rather simply to stress the corresponding element of reciprocal judgement and opinion, the mutual dependence of the actor (or innovator) and those who recognise and testify to the wider significance of her action, and how the public realm emerges and expands in and from this dynamic relationship between actor and recipient, actor and spectator, actor and storyteller, actor and judge (Arendt, Reference Arendt1992, 55).⁴ It is crucial to restate this point because, in the present context, the heroic action of the engaged partisan, of, say, environmentalism, feminism, Christianity, or Islam, is really the only hope we have to interrupt the systematic reproduction of the neo-liberal disciplinary regime. Without the courageous actor, who, strictly speaking, reveals herself in the moment of action, there simply is no politics.

Nevertheless, before we unpack the expansive non-dialectical dynamism between action and pluralism/judgement still further, we need to first discard one of two basic limitations of Arendt's conceptualisation of pluralism. As we have seen, Arendt derived her understanding of plurality from the relations of isonomy in the ancient polis, the reciprocal play of words and deeds in the assembly, and, on her account, this was conditioned by (supposedly) pre-political forms of domination in the oikos. This unqualified Hellenism is deeply problematic, for reasons I discussed in the previous chapter, and we can't just appropriate Arendtean plurality/judgement without a corresponding structural assessment of the way in which plurality is presently interwoven with relations of systemic violence and oppression. Indeed, both plurality (or multiple and contending judgements) and forms of social and political domination set conditions for human action. It is important to be explicit on this point, because, if plurality is associated above all with the judgements and opinions of recipients and spectators, then one crucial form of power currently lies in the hands of those who control the gateways to, and the framing of, spectatorship. In today's 24-hour digital-networked society we are all (potentially) both actors and spectators in a global public sphere, but one of the principal forms of domination is surely associated with the media control of spectatorship, the control of who gets to observe particular innovations, for example the protests against the WTO and the G20 summits, or the uprisings in North Africa and elsewhere, and what judgements are already built into the narration and coverage of particular events, and so on. The contest to disseminate information about significant actions and inventions around the world has become much more complex in the context of the new digital communications technology. The Internet has greatly enhanced the capacity of activists to upload and publicise concerns about specific issues, and to draw attention to particular struggles and originations. This nonlinear (cyber) space is one of the principal theatres of agonistic conflict today, i.e. the struggle to shape public opinion though a networked multi media politics of the spectacle.⁵ However, this also remains a fundamentally asymmetric contest, and the large media corporations, for example Fox News, CNN, the BBC, etc., retain an enormous influence over access to and the framing of the politics of spectatorship. Moreover, as Tully has stressed, many millions of people around the world live in abject poverty and don't have access to communications technology. These observations need to be kept in mind, and provide important clarifications and qualifications of Arendt's account of the generation of the public sphere through the interface between action and spectatorship/judgement, and, by her account, without reference to forms of domination.

Arendt stressed that there are different sets of qualities or virtues associated with acting and judging, and this is because of the different locations of the actor and the spectator, with the actor providing a new initiative and the spectator in the position of the recipient of those innovations (Arendt, Reference Arendt1992, 48). As Zerilli says, the actor and the spectator simply represent ‘different mode[s] of relating to, or being in, the common world’ (Zerilli, Reference Zerilli2005, 179). For Arendt, action is not concerned with sovereignty, but is nonetheless bold, decisive, focused, singular, and orientated towards the present. We have seen that political action is essentially performative, and so we might think of the captain whose skilful manoeuvres bring the ship and crew safely though a great tempest, or the virtuoso playing of an orchestra who deliver a brilliant, and subsequently renowned performance of a great symphony. These illustrations express how the actor invents new forms here and now, and in the moment of the performance she is fully orientated towards the present. Indeed, Markell's suggestion that she cultivate a sense of her own finitude could only possibly corrupt her creative power. It is true that each of these examples might well pass without a trace if it were not for the subsequent exaltation of the spectators and storytellers. Nevertheless, the need for recognition is not on the actor's mind in the momentary flash of brilliance that animates her performance. Indeed, Arendt accentuates this point; for the actor, she says, the ‘meaningfulness of his act is not in the story that follows. Even though stories are the inevitable results of his action’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, 193).

The circumstances of the spectator are different. The spectators’ viewpoints are retrospective and inherently plural (Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, 192). The spectator is ‘always involved with fellow spectators. He does not share the faculty of genius, originality…with the actor; the faculty they [the spectators] have in common is the faculty of judgement’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1992, 63). Moreover, by Arendt's account, in the agon of reciprocal judgements, the opinions of the spectators repeatedly ‘collide and become entangled with one another’, and the spectators ‘do not easily reach agreement’ (Canovan, Reference Canovan1983, 301). Indeed, as Villa says, the idea that Arendt champions in her discussion of the politics of judgement is a ‘contentious, agonistic, and often polemical exchange of opinion’ (Villa, Reference Villa and Williams2006, 126). In order to finesse her conception of the exercise of judgement in politics Arendt turned specifically to Kant's Critique of Judgement, and to the notion of reflective judgement that Kant associated with aesthetic judgements. Arendt was emphatic that her model of ‘judgement is not practical reason; practical reason…tells me what to do and what not to do; it lays down the law…it speaks in imperatives’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1992, 15). Indeed, she turned to Kant's notion of reflective judgement in order precisely to outsmart the predominant view that there are determinant grounds or principles that can differentiate normatively valid judgements from those that are merely arbitrary. This normative view is, of course, the assumption that runs from Kant's own reflections on moral and political philosophy to contemporary justifications of deliberative democracy or of the public use of reason. So, we need to look more closely at Arendt's appropriation of the Kant of the third critique, and we need especially to scrutinise how this faculty of political judgement is linked to the possibility of cosmopolitanism.

Reflective judgement and cosmopolitanism

In the Critique of JudgementKant describes judgement as the capacity ‘to think the particular as contained under the universal’ (Kant, Reference Kant1987, 18). For him, judgement is determinate when the ‘universal (the rule, principle, law) is given’ in advance and ‘subsumes the particular under it’ (Kant, Reference Kant1987, 18). A paradigm example of this type of judgement is the activity of solving a mathematical equation (Ferrara, Reference Ferrara1999, 5). Kant describes reflective judgement, on the other hand, as in play when ‘only the particular is given and judgement has to find the universal for it’ (Kant, Reference Kant1987, 19). Here a paradigm example is the judgement of taste brought into effect in the assessment of the value of a work of art (Ferrara, Reference Ferrara1999, 5). The judgement of taste is essentially subjective, and yet not entirely so. As Kant illustrated, when we deem an object to be beautiful or sublime we speak ‘as if’ the judgement applies with ‘universal validity’ (Kant, Reference Kant1987, 57). Although we cannot demonstrate the truth of our judgement (as in the activity of solving an equation) we nonetheless ‘always require others to agree’ (Kant, Reference Kant1987, 57). In other words a reflective judgement regarding essentially subjective or ‘private’ feelings ‘still lays claim to universal assent’: others will need to be persuaded (Kant, Reference Kant1987, 104).

This suggests a distinctively agonistic conception of judgement, one that is different from the various models of deliberative democracy (which are ultimately grounded in the notion of determinant judgement),⁶ but one that, in important respects, also moves beyond the four main conceptions of agonistic democracy examined in this study. This is because these Arendtean formulations raise explicitly the question of the relationship between the particular and the universal, but they do so in a mode that retains the agonistic appreciation of the groundlessness of political life, as well as the conditioning qualities of pluralism, tragedy, and the value of conflict. Indeed, Zerilli has stressed the significance of Arendt's appropriation of the Kantian notion of reflective judgement for precisely these reasons (Zerilli, Reference Zerilli2005, 163, 171). She says, in the ‘absence of the objective necessity of an agreement reached by proofs’ an agonism of reciprocal judgements unfolds where ‘each judging subject makes an aesthetic claim’ about the wider significance of various actions, events, values etc. ‘that posits the agreement of others and attempts to persuade them of her or his view’ (Zerilli, Reference Zerilli2005, 170). Moreover, this groundless and interminable agon of reciprocal judgements raises the possibility of the emergence of a new kind of universality, one that rests on temporary agreement, but without epistemic foundations or normative or legislative guidance. However, it is also at exactly this point that some commentators who are inspired by Arendt shy away from the full force of this conception of judgement,⁷ and where others, who are closer to deliberative theory, depict Arendt as a proto-deliberativist, who was supposedly moving in the direction of a grounded universality, and a set of principles of validation and justification.⁸ In contrast to these readings, Villa stresses that at ‘no point in her thought on the nature of political action does she embrace moral cognitivism or indicate a belief in theoretical criteria that could distinguish a genuine from an inauthentic consensus’ (Villa, Reference Villa1992b, 718).⁹ Villa's defence of Arendt's anti-normativism is basically well founded, but perhaps this statement is only really half correct. There is certainly no cognitive foundationalism in Arendt's theory of reflective judgement, but in her reflections on the Kantian notion of impartiality, Arendt appears to come very close to providing something that resembles a criterion for authentic judgement, opinion, and consensus.¹⁰ This is a second element of Arendt's thoughts on plurality/judgement that we need to jettison, and this is also especially important, because, in Kant, it is the notion of impartiality that specifically animates ‘cosmopolitan’ forms of judgement.

Drawing on Kant, Arendt says the viewpoint of the spectator is potentially impartial. In contrast to transcendental theories of communication (e.g. the early Habermas’ ‘universal pragmatics’), she also stressed that ‘impartiality is [only ever] obtained by [concretely] taking the viewpoints of others into account’ rather than by obtaining ‘some higher standpoint that would then actually settle the dispute by being altogether above the mêlée’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1992, 42; Habermas, Reference Habermas1979). Nevertheless, she insisted that a ‘withdrawal from direct involvement to a standpoint outside the game is a condition sine qua non of all judgement’, and the cultivation of this disinterestedness in turn becomes the condition of the formation of an ‘enlarged mentality’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1992, 55; 1977d). This ‘means that one trains one's imagination to go visiting…The greater the reach – the larger the realm in which the enlightened individual is able to move from standpoint to standpoint – the more ‘general’ will be his thinking’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1992, 43).¹¹ Moreover, at this point Arendt seems to follow Kant in associating this capacity for broadened horizons with cosmopolitan citizenship (Kant, Reference Kant and Reiss1991d). The world citizen is, therefore, really a worldly citizen, or a ‘world-spectator’, rather than the legal subject of a world government and, as Arendt would have it following Kant, this world spectator is in the unique position to judge the wider significance – or universality – of any given action, because she can ‘render disinterested judgement on the human significance of events unfolding in the political world’ (Beiner, Reference Beiner and Arendt1992, 123).

This model of disinterested judgement is intended to draw attention to the way in which judgement is itself a form of freedom, in the sense that the exercise of judgement is not reducible to utilitarian calculation (Zerilli, Reference Zerilli, Nagl and Mouffe2001). This is important, and the exercise of judgement does require a relative degree of detachment from the intensity and conviction of the actor, as we will see in more detail below. However, these formulations of ‘impartiality’ through disinterested judgement are nonetheless problematic, and play straight into the hands of the deliberativists, normativists, and jurists. These constructions run the risk of bringing judgement back under a rule, the rule of impartiality through fair-mindedness. Even when the notion of disinterestedness and even-handedness is based upon the model of reflective as opposed to determinant judgement, and divorced from the cognitivism and foundationalism of Habermas’ theory, the idea of impartiality leads inevitably to an idealised short circuit of political power, struggle, and influence. Agonistic democracy must resolutely resist the dangerous allure of the misguided association of cosmopolitanism with the notion of impartiality. The spectator is never fully detached from the actor and her innovations. Indeed, in the era of globalisation we are all bound up in a complex network of connections and of systemic decisions and consequences that span the entire planet. There is no position of impartiality on issues such as the financial crises, diminishing energy resources, climate change, nuclear proliferation, etc., and when I observe events from far away but in real time, such as the protests in Tiananmen square in 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Battle of Seattle in 1999, the September 11 attacks, the bombing of Bagdad in March 2003, the uprising in Tahrir Square in 2011, the self-immolation of Buddhist monks in Tibet, and the Occupy strategies that unfolded in many cities throughout the world, I am immediately compelled into a Janus-faced subject position of spectator/engaged partisan. I am implicated in these events and provocations, if only because they denote struggles to challenge or reproduce the dominant system of control, which has global reach and in which we are all implicated. The position of disinterested spectator is not on the agenda today, and, as we have said throughout this study, agonistic democracy must therefore refuse all normativity and repudiate the dominant juridical modes of thinking characteristic of the bulk of contemporary political theory. We must also discard the lurking normativity in Arendt's apparent association of cosmopolitanism with impartiality.

The pivotal question, then, is whether or not it is possible to formulate an alternative conception of universality, of an ‘enlarged mentality’, and of cosmopolitan citizenship; one that is similarly rooted in the groundlessness of reflective judgement, but which does not lose sight of the irreducible elements of pluralism and of partisanship. The first thing to stress is that the distinction between actor and spectator is not only between (fully) interested activity and (relatively) disinterested opinion, equally important is the temporal dimension of this relationship, where the spectator/judge follows the innovations of the actor, increasingly instantaneously and in real time, but nonetheless the spectatorial viewpoint is a retrospective. In the theory I’m proposing here, the encounter between the spectators takes the form of a dispute about the status of particular acts and deeds. Moreover, as we discussed in Chapter 4, Arendt associated action or the moment of initiative, with the introduction of a new principle or standard into the world,¹² and so the agon of reciprocal judgements might give rise to a broad recognition of the wider significance of a new principle, so that this basic acknowledgement starts to become the expansive force of a sprawling universality, but where this augmentation does not take the form of any kind of agreement on the exact form or status of the new standard, but rather is manifest as an open-ended and expansive disagreement about how the new principle should be spun out for posterity, how it should be lived, spoken about, practised, institutionalised, etc. in endless and multifarious ways, and where the expansion (and the principle) itself would ‘disappear the very moment an exchange became superfluous’ because all the spectators ‘happen to be of the same opinion’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1965, 88). Later in the chapter, I return to this formulation and I consider what cosmopolitanism looks like when mediated by effective leadership, rather than by misguided notions of impartiality. First however, we need to take a detour into the circumstances of the actor and consider the crucial importance of her conviction in the context of post-secularism and as a response to passive nihilism.

Post-secularism and the conviction of the actor

Amidst the more general pluralism of values characteristic of late modernity, one clear trend in the context of globalisation has been the mobilisation of various forms of religious conviction in the public life of ostensibly secular societies. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Cold War, contests between proponents of ‘secular’ ideologies (liberalism, socialism, environmentalism, neo-conservatism, etc.), are also increasingly intermingled with the struggles of religious activists, perhaps most notably Christians and Muslims, but also exponents of the other major world religions, as well as new forms of paganism, New Ageism, etc. In response to this development, liberal theorists have reasserted the neutrality of liberal values and institutions vis-à-vis contending ‘comprehensive doctrines’, and stressed the forms of rationality that are supposedly embedded in political modernity, which is understood as a ‘learning process’ and sees these liberal values progressively realised and recognised in democratic institutions and in ‘post-conventional’ forms of morality (Rawls, Reference Rawls2005; Habermas, Reference Habermas2008). By way of contrast, Connolly has argued persuasively that the modern insistence on a clear distinction between reason and faith, or science and religion, cannot be sustained (Connolly, Reference Connolly2005, 4–5). This means that a whole range of alternative faiths, ideologies, ontologies, and philosophies essentially find themselves on an equal epistemic status as they emerge as contending claims in the public sphere, and the differences between them cannot be arbitrated though a supposedly impartial use of public reason (Connolly, Reference Connolly2005, 4–5). This post-secular form of politics has been implicit throughout this book, and follows from the agonistic idea that all pronouncements about a public ranking of values (including those between faith and reason) are effectively groundless; that they rest on a radical rather than a rational decision, because of the constitutive pluralism of incommensurate values that we explored in Chapter 1. However, at this point, we need to look a little more closely at the circumstances of the democratic actor in the context of the post-secular agon, because it is from amidst this strange place that we might hope to see the emergence of a new beginning, and here we see that it is the conviction of the motivated partisan which is crucial.

Connolly is right to establish an essential parity between (ostensibly) secular ideologies and forms of religious belief, as they emerge as protagonists in the current conjuncture, and if we take this idea seriously then it follows that the different kinds of belief that circulate in contemporary politics cannot be grounded in anything more secure than the convictions of the actors themselves. This idea is explored in more detail in a moment. However, for reasons which will become clear, Connolly's notions of agonistic respect and critical responsiveness cannot sustain the necessary conviction of the actor, which is crucial in the post-secular agon, and, in fact, he ends up reproducing a kind of passive nihilism that misunderstands the politics of conviction. By way of contrast, we will take some inspiration from Badiou's reflections on the ethos of the engaged militant in order to better understand the circumstances of the contemporary political actor. However, we will also introduce some vital qualifications in respect of Badiou's contribution, and the limits of his approach are adjusted with reference to important insights drawn from Weber and Foucault, who together provide an understanding of the contemporary actor and how she might seek to translate her (theistic or atheistic, religious or non-religious) conviction into a transformative force in the democratic agon.

This is not the place for a detailed account of post-secularism,¹³ but, to briefly capture what is at stake in the present resurgence of religion in the public sphere and why the secular assertion of a clear priority of modern reason in respect of religious belief does not offer a simple or straightforward response, we need to briefly return to the Nietzschean terrain of modern nihilism that we explored in Chapter 3. We saw that, for Nietzsche, the impact of modern nihilism is felt as a trauma in the order of knowledge, which sees the status of alternative claims to truth progressively undermined, so that modern society tends to gravitate towards a condition of passive nihilism, or a ‘world [potentially] rendered valueless by the collapse of absolutes and authority’ (Villa, Reference Villa1992b, 287). Of course, the advent of modern scientific reason played a big part in this story. The modern sciences are the principal cause of the ‘death of God’ and have progressively undermined traditional ecclesiastical authority and the status of all those who have declared the truth of revelation. However, Nietzsche also understood that the various forms of modern reason are themselves incapable of withstanding the force of modern nihilism. Indeed, the apostles of modern reason tend to rely on surrogates for the Deity – the priority of method, of accurate observation, of the logic of non-contradiction, as well as notions of efficient causality, of system, process, and mechanism, etc. – which, on close inspection, all turn out to be fables, nothing more than a ‘mobile army of metaphors’ (Nietzsche, Reference Nietzsche and Kaufmann1976; Rorty, Reference Rorty1989). These observations have subsequently been reiterated in the discourse of the philosophy of science, in the movement from Thomas Kuhn to Paul Feyerabend; and in the circumstance of the intensified nihilism characteristic of late or post-modernity, the once sacrosanct status of the sciences has itself been subject to the same kind of displacement that religion underwent during the ‘age of reason’. The priority of reason and of scientific status has, to a considerable extent, lost its conventional authority, and those secularists who insist on the contrary, such as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, end up sounding just as doctrinaire as the religious dogmatists they oppose. In other words, (post-)modern nihilism undermines the status of religion and reason and, as a consequence, in the present conjuncture contending values cannot be grounded in anything more secure than an ultimately groundless politics of conviction. Indeed, this is what is at issue in the Nietzschean thought of the ‘Overman’ who confronts the trauma of passive nihilism, accepts the groundlessness of all belief, and yet who still finds the courage to ‘posit’ for himself ‘productively, a goal, a why, a faith’, for ‘there is much one can achieve only by means of a conviction’ (Nietzsche, Reference Nietzsche1968, 17, 18; 2003, 134, 184).

As we have said, Connolly shares this broad diagnosis of the circumstances of post-secularism. However, we also saw in Chapter 3 that he develops a theory of agonistic democracy that is largely predicated upon an anxiety about the politics of conviction. Indeed, at the core of Connolly's ethos of agonistic respect is the idea that the actor must ‘sacrifice the demand for the unquestioned hegemony’ of her conviction, and come to appreciate the extent to which her beliefs ‘must appear profoundly contestable to others inducted into different practices’ (Connolly, Reference Connolly2005, 32–3). The ethos of agonistic respect requires political actors to:

Indeed, if we read these formulations in light of the dynamic relationship between action and judgement, which we have said is at the heart of the democratic agon, we see that Connolly effectively folds the element of judgement – which ought to belong to the protagonists with whom the actor struggles in the public sphere – into the actor's internal self-relation. The actor is expected to exercise this presumptive judgement as a form of self-censoring, acknowledging the contestability of her convictions, and as a prerequisite for entering into properly agonistic relations with diverse others. Indeed, at the core of Connolly's approach is a similar set of apprehensions to Markell, that is, an anxiety about the basic immodesty of resolute action and conviction, and a corresponding emphasis on the need for the actor to cultivate a sense of her own finitude.¹⁴

Of course, Connolly develops these ideas precisely because of his concerns about the threat of religious and other forms of fundamentalism. On Connolly's account the religious fanatic treats his conviction as ‘absolutely authoritative’ and this is effectively a displacement for an underlying anxiety about the human condition, and one which gives rise to an aggressive and uncompromising politics of ressentiment (Connolly, Reference Connolly2005, 18). However, in the course of this study we have considered an alternative explanation of religious fundamentalism, one which links this phenomenon more to social and cultural factors, i.e. as a response to Euro-American imperialism rather than a reflection of underlying existential anxiety; and so, in short, Connolly overestimates the role of ressentiment in political life, and worries too much about the politics of conviction. Indeed, Connolly's approach is ill equipped to deliver a politics of confident self-belief, because as Vazquez-Arroyo has said, from Connolly's perspective ‘conviction becomes a synonym for authoritarianism’ (Vazquez-Arroyo, Reference Vazquez-Arroyo2004, 14). In the end, his ethic of critical self-relation reproduces a passive kind of nihilism, where buoyant self-assertion is compelled to kneel in the presence of inner doubt and reservation. Moreover, the question of the correct diagnoses of the root causes of fundamentalist violence is crucial, because more than anything today we need the politics of the devout Christian, Hindu, and Muslim, the committed socialist, the engaged feminist, and the champion of environmentalism. These are really the only hope for the generation of new values and forms of life under circumstances of passive nihilism, and these bold innovations simply won't emerge through Connollian style self-testimonies of inherent contestability. The conviction of the democratic actor needs to be at the centre of the post-secular agon, this idea needs a more adequate formulation, and here Badiou's short book on St. Paul offers some pointers in the right direction.

Badiou derives a model of militant conviction from the enthusiasm and self-confidence of first century Christianity, from an assessment of Paul and his testament of universal love. Badiou also shows how an ethics of conviction is definitive not only of religious faith, but also of ‘secular’ forms of militancy, as expressed for example in the Marxist tradition (Badiou, Reference Badiou2003, 2, 31). His affirmative appropriation of Paul stands in clear distinction to Connolly's fashioning of an ethos of agonistic respect as a defence-reaction against Augustine's confrontational doctrine, which is in turn grounded in existential ressentiment.¹⁵ Badiou derives from Paul a conception of truth that is distinct from the truths of philosophy. As Badiou says, the militant Paul is not a philosopher because he knows that the universal cannot take the form of a ‘set of conceptual generalities’ (Badiou, Reference Badiou2003, 108). Instead, Paul testifies to the universality of a ‘singular event’, the truth of Christ's divinity and resurrection (Badiou, Reference Badiou2003, 108). Indeed, here Badiou defines truth as conviction, the militant is an engaged actor or partisan who is marked out by her fidelity to the universal status of a singular event (Badiou, Reference Badiou2001, 42). This kind of truth is sustained by faith and cannot be refuted through empirical falsification or syllogistic reasoning (Badiou, Reference Badiou2003, 106). Indeed, in contrast to Nietzsche's own assessment of the slavishness of the teachings of the Apostle, Badiou sees in Paul all the ingredients of the Overman. Paul exemplifies a mode of conviction as ‘self-legitimating subjective declaration’, a commitment to ‘grand politics’, and an affirmation of life over death and servitude (Badiou, Reference Badiou2003, 61).

Badiou's emphasis on the conviction of the engaged partisan stands in contrast to the apprehensions about resolute action that characterise so much contemporary political thought, including agonistic theorists like Connolly and Markell. However, Badiou's theory also carries several implications that are incompatible with the agonistic circumstances of pluralism, tragedy, and the value of conflict. This is clear when Badiou insists on a clear priority of Truth (here as conviction rather than episteme) over opinions (Badiou, Reference Badiou2003, 49, 70, 100). Indeed, Badiou labours under the false and utterly contemptible idea that the actor is the bearer of a Truth that has the capacity to reorder the opinions of others, without any interchange and persuasion, and through a kind of Grace (Badiou, Reference Badiou2001, 82).¹⁶ Badiou's contempt for ‘mere opinions’ is in complete contradistinction to Arendt, and he lacks the core Arendtean understanding that pluralism, i.e. the realm of reciprocal judgements, always conditions the circumstances of the actor.¹⁷ This means that the question of the status of the universal remains with those who judge the significance of particular actions, and no form of universality will ever emerge directly from the convictions of the actor. One key issue, then, from the perspective of the democratic actor, is how she might try to translate her (theistic or atheistic, religious or non-religious) conviction into a transformative force in democratic politics, in the absence of Badiou's loathsome idea about the clear priority of Truth over opinions and in the light instead of Arendt's understanding that politics is always an inherently ‘drawn-out wearisome process of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise’, i.e. of winning over diverse opinions (Arendt, Reference Arendt1965, 83), and, importantly, also without having to introduce Connollian style self-doubt (contestability) into her pride, her self-confidence, and her convictions, in order to obtain a boarding pass into the democratic agon. Here, we can pick up a few valuable tips from Weber and Foucault.

Although the precise formulation is a little different, Badiou's depiction of the committed militant more or less corresponds to Weber's account of the advocate of an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’, who doesn't give consideration to consequences, and whom Weber similarly associates with the religious ‘crusader’ and the modern revolutionary temperament (Weber, Reference Weber, Gerth and Mills1993a, 122, 125). By Weber's account, this disposition represents one basic personality in political life, and one which he contrasts with the equally significant advocate of an ‘ethic of responsibility’ defined in terms of a concern with consequences. In his view, these ‘are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements, which only in unison constitute a genuine man…who can have the “calling for politics”’ (Weber, Reference Weber, Gerth and Mills1993a, 127). Or, as Viroli puts it, the ‘true political leader is a person who is able to imagine new and better worlds and manners of living, and to work, with determination and prudence, to make them real’ (Viroli, Reference Viroli2008, 27). These formulations are altogether better suited to a post-secular agonistic politics of contending beliefs than either Badiou's ethic of militant conviction without the need for persuasion, or Connolly's ethic of professed self-contestability. Instead, the main suggestion here is for the actor to combine her sense of conviction with an equally important recognition of the public virtues associated with the art of persuasion.

Foucault also offers important insights into how the actor might seek to translate her ‘conviction’ into an effective public engagement with carriers of alternate ‘opinions’, in his discussion of parrhesia. Foucault derived his account of parrhesia (speaking freely or with libertas) from late Roman antiquity, and the term refers to a form of self-artistry, that was practised by public officials, and designed to cultivate a capacity to speak candidly. Parrhesia is a mode of speech that enables ‘one to say what one has to say, as one wishes to say it, when one wishes to say it, and in the form one thinks is necessary for saying it’ (Foucault, Reference Foucault2005, 372). The virtue at the heart of the practice of parrhesia is for the actor to establish a kind of congruence between her speech and her conduct (Foucault, Reference Foucault2005, 402). The crucial objective is to cultivate an ethics of confident self-assertion, so that I become a living example of my own convictions (Foucault, Reference Foucault2005, 406–7).¹⁸ Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Junior, and Che Guevara might all provide historical examples of this kind of lived ethos of self-assured engagement, and it seems to me that this particular gloss on the techniques-of-the-self might prove highly appropriate for the actor in the contemporary democratic agon, where various sets of convictions (theistic and atheistic, religious and ‘secular’) contend with one another, and where these contests are overlaced with the dispute between multiple spectators about the status and wider significance of particular acts and deeds. As we have said, it is in this interface between the actors and judges that we might see the emergence of a new militant form of cosmopolitanism. So, having explored the circumstances of the actor, the importance of her convictions, and her attempts to persuade others of the sincerity of her public assertion of her beliefs, we can now return to the dynamic interface between action and judgement, and examine what this relationship looks like when mediated by effective leadership rather than by misguided notions of impartiality.

Agonism, cosmopolitanism, and post-sovereign leadership

We have seen that one of the main consequences of globalisation has been the relative demise of the capacity of the nation-state to make effective decisions in the context of the devastating supremacy of capital mobility and the impact of uncontrollable market fluctuations. This tendency has been widely represented as an underlying crisis in the Westphalian order of ‘sovereign’ states. However, at the same the time, we have also noted the resurgence of an alternate mode of ‘sovereignty’ in the form of the security state, with its rhetorical deployment of a ‘permanent state of exception’. Here, I explore this ambiguity more closely and examine the current machinations of sovereignty. I then consider how and in what ways the emergence and expansion of a militant form of cosmopolitanism relates to, but is also importantly different from, a mode of transnational ‘popular sovereignty’. To tease out these nuances, I look back for inspiration to earlier formulations of sovereignty and of leadership in the tradition of western political thought. Indeed, I offer two brief genealogies of these ideas. In the first of these excursions I draw on Skinner's account of popular sovereignty, as it was understood in the Italian Renaissance, and before the consolidation of the modern notion of sovereignty as embodied in the abstract person of the state, which was formulated most notably by Hobbes. In the Renaissance republican tradition we see that sovereignty was located instead in the dynamic relationship between the populus and the person of the prince, and ultimately in the peoples’ judgements about his on-going status as the principal citizen. These insights reinforce what we have already said about the possible emergence of an expansive and open-ended form of universality located in the dispute between the spectators about the wider significance of particular actors and actions. However, to really appreciate the potential in this dynamic relationship we need to travel back even further, to the notion of leadership (or hegemonia) as it was understood in Greek antiquity. Again, the focus here is on the capacity of the leader, understood literally as the citizen or the state who invokes a new initiative, to carry others with him, through persuasion and the on-going demonstration of his areté. Once again, the decisive point in this formulation is that the expansive power of the leader, or of the new inception, lies not with the actor, but rather in the judgements of those who pick up upon and expand the new initiative.

The emphasis on absolutism and omnipotence is at the heart of the notion of sovereignty, as it was formulated in early modern Europe, most notably by Jean Bodin and Hobbes, and in the context of the crises of ecclesiastical and temporal authorities that followed the European Reformation. In effect, these theories sought to transfer the power of the deity that underpinned medieval notions of divine right to modern secular institutions. In some important respects, Hobbes was a theorist of the constituent power, i.e. in his presentation of sovereign authority as originally bottom-up, as a compound of the ‘Powers of most men, united by consent in one person’ (Hobbes, Reference Hobbes1994, 47). However, his story is one of a single decisive transfer of the constituent power to a constituted authority, in the creation of the abstract person of the state. After this decisive moment of initiation, the multitude ‘cannot lawfully make a new Covenant, amongst themselves, to be obedient to any other, in any thing whatsoever, without his permission’ (Hobbes, Reference Hobbes1994, 101). Indeed, one of the key features of early modern theories of sovereignty was to insist on the permanence of the sovereign power: once constituted, the sovereign remains in perpetuity. As Bodin put it, ‘sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth’ and is in no sense limited ‘either in power, or in function, or length of time’ (Bodin, Reference Bodin1992, 3). In Hobbes, the only alternative to the perpetuity of the sovereign is to return to the state of nature, figured as absolute privation and therefore not really an option at all. As we saw in Chapter 2, Arendt rejected the idea that anything like the omnipotence of the divine ‘will’, might ever find a place in the public realm between men. Perhaps most significantly, these early modern theories are predicated on the fantasy that the secular power has a God-like capacity to render the future like the present, and this presupposes that he can control the consequences and subsequent reception of his actions. This fantasy of omnipotence and omnipresence can only possibly be sustained through a violation of human plurality, and so the idea of sovereignty is, therefore, inherently despotic.¹⁹ Given these observations, it follows that any conception of cosmopolitan action in concert, that seeks to tackle the problems that define the present conjuncture, must be something essentially distinct from ‘sovereignty’.

I return to this in a moment. First, however, we must reiterate the distinctive features of the contemporary security state as Agamben has explained it. This is because although this mode of resurgent ‘sovereignty’ is clearly not conducive to human plurality, the most disconcerting thing about this contemporary mode of government is that it does appear to have found ways to circumvent the conditioning circumstances of temporal finitude, i.e. through the rhetorical strategy of a ‘permanent state of exception’. In Chapter 2 we saw that Schmitt shared the basic Hobbesean paradigm of the state as concerned above all with ensuring security and order. However, he departed from Hobbes in his acknowledgement that sovereignty cannot be established in perpetuity. For Schmitt, the durability of the power that holds together the unity of the state remains in place unless and until it is annihilated by another sovereign power. In contrast to the early modern theories, this introduces the prospect of certain temporal limitations on the reproduction of sovereignty. Indeed, in Schmitt's account the sovereign slumbers in normal times and only reveals his real identity, i.e. in the form of a ‘decision in absolute purity’, in times of crisis or exception, such as a civil war or violent insurrection, and precisely when everything is at stake (Schmitt, Reference Schmitt2005, 13). However, the contemporary security state has managed to derive from these Schmittean formulations of the temporal circumstances of the exercise of sovereign power, a new modality of perpetuity, i.e. in the oxymoron of a ‘permanent state of exception’. As Agamben says, the state of the exception is ‘not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension’, and in ‘our age, the state of the exception comes more and more to the foreground as the fundamental political structure and ultimately begins to become the rule’ (Agamben, Reference Agamben1998, 18, 20). Indeed, in the context of globalisation this system of rule has gradually extended ‘itself over the entire planet’ (Agamben, Reference Agamben1998, 38). It is important to acknowledge how, in these formulations, the contemporary security state appears to find a solution to the ordeal of its own impermanence. This is especially disconcerting because we appear to be confronting a form of tyranny that has learnt how to endure and expand without rooting itself in the people. Instead, this power expands through keeping the people disorganised and permanently fearful for their security.

However, we have also noted how this consolidation of the security state seems to be at odds with the predominant view that state sovereignty is in crisis, in the context of economic globalisation. According to Wendy Brown, for example, the idea of sovereignty is tied to a basic ‘fiction about the autonomy of the political’, and it is ironic that this idea re-emerges at the moment when the political is being ‘overwhelmed by the economic’ (Brown, Reference Brown, Campbell and Schoolman2008, 251). She says the current talk of sovereignty operates as ‘a kind of Viagra for the political’ at the point when ‘capital…becomes godlike: almighty, limitless, and uncontrollable’ (Brown, Reference Brown, Campbell and Schoolman2008, 251, 263). Indeed, Brown sees the move towards security, demonstrated for example in the proclivity for building and reinforcing border controls and security walls, as evidence not of a renewed effectiveness of state power, but rather of an underlying weakness and anxiety (Brown, Reference Brown2010, 24). In some respects, these are pertinent observations, and there can be no doubt about the overwhelming power of capital in the context of globalisation, and the fundamental weakening of executive power in relation to markets. This erosion of national autonomy, vis-à-vis the transnational agents of capital, such as the World Bank and the WTO, is one of the principal drivers of the new-networked form of imperialism that we explored in detail in Chapter 4. However, I don't think it follows that the emergence of the security state can be explained entirely as an object displacement for an otherwise impotent state power, overwhelmed by a loss of control of economic processes. Indeed, as we have already said, the idea of the permanent exception, as formulated by Agamben, needs to be understood in its own terms, as a distinct modality of control. This is important, not only because contemporary movements need to generate alternatives to both turbo capitalism and the security state, but also because we need to keep the distinctive modality of the security state in mind, when we consider what a post-sovereign form of democratic agency and cosmopolitanism might look like.

One thing is clear, which is that we cannot respond to this paradoxical mix of declining national government and the resurgence of the ‘sovereign’ security state by resurrecting a conception of popular sovereignty modelled on the Rousseauean notion of the ‘general will’, at least not if we want to construct forms of action in concert that are compatible with pluralism. As Brown says, ‘it is nearly impossible to reconcile the classical features of sovereignty – power that is not only foundational and unimpeachable, but enduring and indivisible, magisterial and awe-inducing, decisive and supralegal – with the requisites of rule by the demos’ (Brown, Reference Brown2010, 49). In Chapter 6 we considered Honig's rejoinder to Rousseau and also to Agamben and we saw that she figures agonistic politics as a perpetual displacement of the location of sovereign power, or of the ‘general will’, through forms of iteration, augmentation, and administrative discretion etc. She says, what is ‘most decisive is not, contra Schmitt, the decision, but our orientation to it, and most important of all, our (non-)complicity in it’ (Honig, Reference Honig2009b, 111). However, this represents an essentially negative posture towards the demands of the sovereign and his claims to omnipotence, whereas what we really need is an alternate model of collective power and agency that is congruent with pluralism, and can rival and displace the claims of the sovereign, and it is in this regard that we now turn first to the Renaissance republican tradition and then to Greek antiquity.

For Renaissance writers, ‘popular sovereignty’ was the marker of a republican form of government, as opposed to tyranny and arbitrary forms of power. On this model, the community must retain ‘ultimate sovereignty, [and partly by] assigning its rulers and magistrates a [legal] status no higher than that of an elected functionary’ (Skinner, Reference Skinner2002, 380). More importantly, however, for our present discussion, Skinner also stresses that for pre-Hobbsean writers the ‘bearer of sovereignty is always the [concrete] persona constituted by the corporate body of the people, never the impersonal body of the civitas or respublica itself’ (Skinner, Reference Skinner2002, 394). One of the defining features of the transition to modern forms of government was consequently the move from this personalised conception of sovereignty located in the body politic to the impersonal sovereignty of the great leviathan. The Hobbesian moment represents the crystallisation of this movement towards an association of sovereignty with the abstract person of the state (Skinner, Reference Skinner2002, 404). Post-Hobbesean political theory is therefore characterised by the ‘claim that it is the state itself, rather than the community over which it holds sway, that constitutes the seat of sovereignty’, and the etymology of the word state, neatly illustrates this transition (Skinner, Reference Skinner2002, 386). In Renaissance writers, the Latin term status – together with vernacular equivalents such as estat, stato, and state – ‘were predominantly employed to refer to the state or standing of rulers themselves’ (Skinner, Reference Skinner2002, 369). This suggests a certain model of political legitimacy. Indeed, when ‘the question of the ruler's status was raised, the reason for doing so was generally to emphasise that it ought to be viewed [or judged] as a state of majesty, a high estate, a condition of stateliness’ and the on-going status of the sovereign was dependent on the peoples’ judgement that he remained capable of preserving the ‘city in a happy, advantageous, honourable and prosperous state’ (Skinner, Reference Skinner2002, 369, 371). In other words, a crucial feature of this tradition was to stress the dynamic relationship between the populus and the person of the prince, i.e. the person who enjoys a principal status on account of his virtù, which ensures that the commonwealth remains in a good state or condition (Skinner, Reference Skinner2002, 372).

It is important to stress that this Renaissance tradition does not place the seat of sovereignty in the hands of the prince, but rather it resides with the populus and in their on-going judgements regarding his identity and status as the principal actor. In this respect, these pre-Hobbesian conceptions of popular sovereignty provide important insights for a contemporary theory of agonistic democracy, and they reinforce the idea that a new mode of expansive cosmopolitanism might be driven by the multiple judgements of diverse publics about the status and significance of a new principle. Moreover, in important respects this Renaissance conception of sovereignty is essentially analogous to the Hellenic conception of leadership (or hegemonia).²⁰ Indeed, in The Human Condition and elsewhere Arendt presented the original notion of hegemonia as an inherent factor in action in concert. Arendt derived this idea from the Hellenic notion of kingship, which, she emphasised, was not synonymous with ruling, but rather with leadership. And here leadership needs to be understood literally; the leader is the actor who takes the lead or starts something new. However, as we have seen, the actor/leader does not have control over the reception of his initiation, and it is because action is always action in concert that the leader can only ever ‘carry through whatever he had started’ with the ‘help of others’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1977b, 164). Indeed, the Greek king was only ever ‘primus inter pares’ and this idea was predicated on ‘the original interdependence of action, the dependence of the beginner and leader upon others for help and the dependence of his followers upon him for an occasion to act themselves’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, 189). Only later was this dynamic relationship, which on Arendt's account is at the very heart of the public realm, ‘split into two altogether different functions: the function of giving commands, which became the prerogative of the ruler, and the function of executing them, which became the duty of his subjects’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, 189).²¹

We can see how the Renaissance conception of popular sovereignty and the Hellenic notion of leadership share a common emphasis on the dynamic relationship between the prince/populus and leader/followers or fellow travellers. However, the earlier formulation is more original, because it renders perspicuous the central point that the prince/leader is not sovereign. Her position is entirely dependent on the judgements of others, regarding her on-going status as primus inter pares. Moreover, as we have said, the actor introduces a new principle or standard into the world, and so, on this Hellenic model of leadership, we see that the endurance and expansion of the new principle is entirely dependent on it being picked up and carried forward by others, who both judge the significance of the principle and use it as an occasion for action (or new initiatives) themselves. Indeed, ‘the principle inspires the deeds that are to follow and remains apparent [only] as long as the [collective] action lasts’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1965, 214). Again, it is this dynamic that enables us to understand the conditions of the emergence and augmentation of a militant form of cosmopolitanism. The idea is that an act of radical initiative emerging from within the transnational social movements might deliver an original principle that is subsequently judged to be of broader importance by a wide range of spectators, who then carry the new standard as a lived experience and as a set of values to multiple institutional settings, above, below, and at the level of the nation-state. This is how we might figure an expansive form of universality, where the new standard becomes a real material force in the world, as it is judged, debated upon, redirected, reiterated, and augmented in multiple, open-ended, and unpredictable ways. This means that the actors who initiate the new beginning have no control over its subsequent direction, and the principle only remains present in the world as long as it is manifest in the practices of the many subsequent travellers who convey and rework its values.

Moreover, this suggests an altogether different way of linking the faculty of judgement to cosmopolitanism than the misguided Kantian idea that it is possible to develop a cosmopolitan standpoint by extricating oneself from the passionate attachments of the actors, and cultivating a capacity to see the world from a disinterested and impartial viewpoint. Here, instead, the identity of the cosmopolitan citizen follows from her acknowledgement of the wider significance or universality of a particular principle that has emerged from within the democratic mêlée, and in fact, on closer examination, among the resources for this alternative model of cosmopolitan judgement can also be found Kant's notion of reflective judgement, in his discussion of the role of the exemplar. Indeed, as Arendt says, in the exercise of reflective judgement, we inevitably make use of examples to illustrate our judgement, because, unlike in the application of determinant judgement, we cannot appeal to an abstract principle or schema (Arendt, Reference Arendt1992, 84). So, for example, when the Greeks thought and spoke about courageous acts, they would say that courage is like Achilles, or when Christians speak about goodness, they say that goodness is like Saint Francis or Jesus of Nazareth, etc. (Arendt, Reference Arendt1992, 84). However, in contrast to the status of the universal concept or schema in the determinant judgement, the example that comes to be the referent of a more universal moment in the exercise of reflective judgement, nonetheless also remains indissociable from its own particularity. Indeed, the word ‘example’ comes from eximere, ‘to single out some particular’ and this ‘exemplar is and remains a particular that in its very particularity reveals the generality that otherwise could not be defined’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1992, 77). Again, these formulations suggest a democratic contest staged around a struggle to determine or judge which particular innovation might be, as Rado Riha puts it, elevated ‘to the dignity of a “case of the universal”’ (Riha, Reference Riha, Critchley and Marchart2004, 83).²² From the viewpoint of the actor (the proponent of environmentalism, feminism, Christianity, Islam, etc.) agonistic politics is a struggle for leadership (hegemonia), i.e. to become the innovator of a new principle, and through a demonstration of her conviction, or by speaking freely and frankly in the public realm and practising the art of persuasion. And from the viewpoint of the judge the dispute is to determine which of these struggles might become the exemplar for a new form of ‘enlarged mentality’.²³

Conclusion

We have seen that there is a basic homology between the Renaissance conception of popular sovereignty, the Greek conception of hegemonia, and the role of the exemplar in the Kantian conception of reflective judgement. The crucial element in each of these formulations is the dynamic relationship between the actors and the spectators/judges, and this is a complex and ambiguous relationship. On the one hand, the leader is clearly principus: where leadership is successful, as Philp says, it involves setting a ‘pattern of action for others’ (Philp, Reference Philp2007, 78). Indeed, as Alan Keenan has stressed, Arendt's theory of leadership has this same implication. He says, ‘to the extent that the freedom of the political realm is founded on a specific project, it cannot be entirely free: the “space” for action opened up’ by the emergence of a new principle ‘will necessarily form boundaries to and limits on the possibility of new action that follows this founding moment and founding principle’ (Keenan, Reference Keenan1994, 309). This demonstrates why the alternative to the current neo-liberal modes of governance cannot take the form of a strict egalitarianism. To the extent that a new principle emerges to counter neo-liberalism, and is widely acknowledged to represent a new beginning so that it starts to shape the practices of diverse actors in multiple publics around the world, this origin sets certain horizons for any subsequent augmentation. In other words, these conclusions are out of step with a great deal of contemporary activist literature, where the emphasis tends to be precisely on horizontalism and on a ceaseless multiplicity – for example Tully's ‘glocal citizens’ who supposedly enjoy unbounded freedom in their temporary autonomous zones. However, at the same time, as we have said, the actor or originator is entirely unable to control the subsequent reception of her innovation, and for the endurance and expansion of her invention she remains wholly dependent on the judgements of others, who recognise its significance and continue to carry it forward and rework it daily in their lived experience of the world, so that the principle becomes transformed and disseminated in multiple and unpredictable ways.

Indeed, these formulations also reiterate the reasons why the exclusive emphasis on augmentation characteristic of Connolly, Tully, Mouffe, and Honig leaves them forever hemmed in within the horizons of possibility established in the revolutions of the eighteenth century and their founding principles. The only way to move beyond this horizon will be in the form of a new origin and subsequent expansion. Such a possibility is really our only prospect to find long-term solutions to the present multiple and overlapping crises. The transnational movements and the World Social Forum are great cauldrons of experimentation and innovation, but it is striking how little originality and genuine leadership there is currently in more mainstream political institutions and parties. In the wake of the financial crisis, and as we hover on the precipice of a global economic slump, the talk is to a very large extent about how much of the debt we have to service in order to pretty much go on as before. The biggest challenge today is, therefore, to translate the radical capacity for innovation associated with the transnational social movements into a genuine material force in the world; and the only way this is going to happen is if a new principle or standard emerges which becomes embedded in the lived practices of the citizens, who carry the new standard into the arenas of governmental and trans-governmental decision making and debate, so that is begins to operate as a genuine rival to the utterly discredited system of disciplinary neo-liberalism, and in turn provides the foundation for a new organising code for the networked global system. Without this kind of movement, we will continue to muddle on as before, but the destructive consequences of the present system will be more and more acutely felt.

In the introduction I suggested that the contemporary agonists run the risk of complicity in the idea that we have reached the ‘end of history’. Indeed, we have seen that the contemporary theorists find themselves hemmed in within the basic horizon of liberal democracy for two principal reasons: firstly, because of their explicit commitment to the legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions and practices, and especially to the idea of the co-originality of public and private autonomy; and, secondly, because of the tendency, which we have seen repeated throughout this study, to associate agonistic freedom exclusively with the constituent power in the mode of augmentation. The idea of augmentation captures the sense of interruption and tradition, or innovation and continuity, and if these forms of politics (as enactment, articulation, aversion, iterability, etc.) represent the essential structure of the constituent power, then this means that all new innovations that emerge in the current conjuncture will at the same time be bound back to the eighteenth-century origins of our present institutions and practices. The referent of this expansion is the authority of the liberal democratic (capitalist) regimes that were founded in the age of Enlightenment. By Arendt's account, these systems were themselves created in a moment of radical rupture with the pre-modern Roman past. However, if the notion of the absolute beginning is now exhausted, or was always an illusion, as the contemporary agonists would have it, then we no longer possess the resources to move beyond the legacy of these elementary foundations. By way of concluding this study, I’d like to return to these assertions, and to offer some brief comments on the complicated question of the relationship between agonistic democracy and the possibility of historical transformation.

Of course, none of the agonistic theorists we have examined in this book share Fukuyama's claim that the collapse of the Soviet Union could be read in Hegelian terms, i.e. as evidence that western liberal democratic capitalism represents the final historical form of state, one that lacks any serious contenders, and which therefore ensures the full realisation of freedom (through the free-market economy) and mutual recognition (through universal rights of citizenship) (Fukuyama, Reference Fukuyama1992). Instead, as Derrida emphasised, the discourse of the end of history really signalled the end of the dialectical conception of History, because the nineteenth-century idea, invoked by Fukuyama like Alexandre Kojève before him, i.e. that historical change could be grasped retrospectively in its Totality, is now widely discredited (Derrida, Reference Derrida1994). The demise of the dialectical understanding of World History as a teleological Whole has been in no small measure down to the contributions of post-structuralism, and we have seen that the anti-dialectical mode of thought is one of the defining features of contemporary agonistic democracy. We have also seen that Schmitt, Benjamin, and Arendt were similarly fierce critics of the Hegelian/Marxist conception of history in the first half of the twentieth century, from the 1920s to the 1950s, and, in this sense at least, they pre-empted the general orientation of post-structuralism. By Arendt's account, modern conceptions of history – whether they are derived from Hegel, Marx, Comte, or Durkheim – effectively degrade particular actions and events, which become ‘accidental by products’ or ‘functions of an over-all process’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1977c, 57, 63). If the purpose of history is realised in an inner telos, then the end effectively cancels out and makes unimportant what went before, so that ‘single events and deeds and sufferings have no more meaning here than hammer and nails have with respect to the finished table’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1977c, 80).

Again, we have seen these same sentiments expressed in the contemporary agonistic theorists, perhaps especially in the critique of Habermas’ account of liberal democracy as an on-going learning process, oriented towards a progressive reconciliation of popular sovereignty and constitutional rights. As the contemporary agonists have shown, these ideas effectively subsume the politics of genuine open-ended innovation under the direction of an overall process. The Habermasian dialectic might not be as grandiose as Fukuyama or as deterministic as the Marxism of the Second International, but the tendency to incorporate freedom into the overall movement of a teleological process is inherent in all forms of modernity represented as process or progress. As Arendt flatly put it, it ‘is against human dignity to believe in progress’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1992, 77). When Benjamin and Arendt developed their critiques of the dialectic they were somewhat lonely figures. However, today we find widespread incredulity towards the dialectic and also more generally towards the idea of progress, and not just in the academy but also more generally in popular culture and throughout society. This represents liberation, and this liberation goes hand in hand with the agonistic stress on freedom and with the restoration of the idea of the priority of politics and of the constituent power.

However, in the Introduction we also said that the withering away of the discourse of World History as Totality has not produced an alternative conception of the temporality of the post-modern republic that is conducive to human flourishing. Instead, we seem to find ourselves trapped in a destructive apparition that there is no alternative to the present system of free-market capitalism, and this is all the more remarkable in the context of the present financial crisis, which by all accounts is on the scale of the underlying problems of the 1930s, and yet, as we have said, mainstream political debate and political leadership is bereft of new ideas. In the course of this study we have seen that the neo-liberal discourse of the perpetuity of free-market capitalism is further compounded by the machinations of the security state, which also claims to have discovered the secret of eternal youth by mobilising society around the idea of a permanent state of exception. The combined effect of these two claims to perpetuity leaves contemporary citizens caught in a nightmare scenario of being progressively administered through various mechanisms of governance that are designed to constantly regenerate economic growth and to protect them from unknown and yet recurrent security threats. The contemporary agonists are mindful of these developments, and they offer poignant and often compelling accounts of the ways in which situated subjects seek to contest and redirect these tendencies. However, this is also the point where the contemporary theorists find themselves exposed to the risk of complicity in the reproduction of the present system, and for the two reasons mentioned above.

The explicit commitment to the basic legitimacy of liberal democracy is not the most decisive factor. This reflects the choices and commitments of the individual thinkers and doesn't imply anything fundamental about the relationship between agonism and liberal democracy. In fact, if we consider some of the most recent publications we can perhaps detect the stirrings of a different attitude. The second volume of Tully's Public Philosophy (2008) represents one of the best diagnoses of the pathologies of neo-liberalism, and Tully's analyses call for a more radical response to the machinations of imperial power than he himself delivers; Connolly's A World of Becoming (2010) has a much more militant tone than his earlier writings, and Honig's Emergency Politics (2011) is similarly very edgy and captures what is at stake in the murky and dangerous world of an expanding extra-judicial sovereign power. Perhaps, if the present trends continue, these theorists will be pulled further away from their explicit fidelity to the traditions and practices of liberal democracy. However, it is the second point that is more intrinsic, i.e. the fact that these theorists work with theoretical and ontological frameworks that cannot grasp the qualitative distinction between augmentation and revolution, and which establish augmentation, i.e. the moment of transformation and continuity, as the essential structure of the constituent power. In the end, it is for this reason that the contemporary agonistic theorists lack an adequate conception of the possibility of historical transformation.

The contemporary theorists are mindful of the importance of history, and we have seen that they have made extensive use of the Nietzschean/Foucauldean idea of genealogy. This is a retrospective procedure, which is designed to reveal the arbitrary foundations of existing institutions and practices that have become naturalised by bringing back into view past alternatives that have been suppressed or inhibited. Genealogy is a powerful tool that helps to open up possibilities for change, i.e. by exposing the contingency of norms and practices that are currently taken as given, and by demonstrating how things have been otherwise. Tully describes this as a form of context-transgressing critique, which he contrasts favourably to the context-transcending forms of critical theory modelled on Habermas’ juridical mode of thought, i.e. where the idea is to establish critical purchase on existing practices from a kind of God's eye view (of idealised communication) that is arrived at by abstracting from the normative content of each and every historical form of society (Tully, Reference Tully, Ashenden and Owen1999b). Again, these are important differences, and Tully is right to stress the priority of the situated critique of the genealogist, over the overblown claims to transcendence characteristic of Habermasian critical theory. However, at the same time, the agonistic emphasis on genealogy strongly reinforces the idea that augmentation represents the essential structure of the constituent power. This is because genealogy involves drawing existing institutions into question one at a time, and this helps to create possibilities for change, but only ever in the form of partial moments of transgression, i.e. those moments of illegality that we explored in Chapter 4. Thankfully, we don't have to choose between the incomplete transgressions of the genealogist and the Archimedean form of transcendence characteristic of Habermasian critical theory, and this becomes clear when we get back behind post-structuralism, where we find the possibility of the revolutionary Ursprung as it was formulated by Arendt and Benjamin.

Indeed, the contributions of these two thinkers remain remarkably fresh and pertinent, and precisely because they both linked the democratic agon to the possible emergence of a moment of radical origin. As we saw in Chapter 2, this idea was at the centre of Arendt's On Revolution, where she reiterated Benjamin's conception of revolution which he had set out in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ written early in 1940, shortly before his untimely death. For Benjamin, revolution is an insurgent ‘now time’, or a moment of rupture that radically interrupts the historical continuum, or which breaks open history conceived as any kind of evolutionary or dialectical process. Brown, who is mindful of the ahistorical tendencies in a great deal of contemporary political theory, says that, in Benjamin's view, history is occasionally interrupted by a ‘fecund political moment’, one that ‘sets history's sails in a new [and unexpected] direction’, but which ‘comes with no guarantees, with no lack of struggle and no certainty about the outcome’ (Brown, Reference Brown2001, 157–8). In other words, the Benjaminian conception of revolution facilitates a more dramatic model of the possibility of/for historical transformation than the only ever partial transgressions of the genealogist, but, importantly, this is not a dialectical conception of change. Indeed, in the course of this study we have seen that the Ursprung is not sovereign, nor is it capable of giving rise to any kind of autogenesis. In other words, this is not the model of origin as full presence or as the ‘transcendental signified’ that is the object of the post-structuralist critique. The Benjaminian idea is more nuanced; the Ursprung represents a momentary leap into being that emerges from what Althusser calls the ‘vacuum of the conjuncture’. This breaks open the historical continuum, and really represents nothing more than a moment of radical possibility, one which announces the prospect of an absolute beginning (Althusser, Reference Althusser1999, 64). Moreover, as we have seen, in the Arendtean version, this moment of innovation would be doomed to pass without a trace unless it was picked up and carried forward in multiple and unpredictable ways, and the initiators have no control or direction over this subsequent expansion.

In Benjamin, the revolutionary ‘now time’ is also associated with messianism. In the absolute contingency of the revolutionary moment we glimpse the possibility of redemption for past sufferings and the opportunity to reactivate previous possibilities that were foreclosed in the consolidation of the present system (Benjamin, Reference Benjamin1999). Again, there are certain parallels here (but only up to a point) with the genealogist, in the sense that both approaches draw attention to the fact that aspects of the past are never entirely beyond the possibility of retrieval. However, my sense is that we should avoid this association of the Ursprung with any notion of redemption for past sufferings. This reading lends itself to an ethical rather than a properly political understanding of the ruptural moment. Indeed, it is just such a reading that we find in Derrida, who is also influenced by Benjamin, and for whom the messianic redemption, i.e. the promise of a moment of plenitude or justice ‘to come’, is shorn of its capacity to create historical transformation, and becomes instead an ethical dimension of my relations with the other, so that ‘the moment I open my mouth I am in the promise’, understood as a commitment to a non-violent and on non-instrumental ‘relation to the other’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida and Mouffe1997, 82–3). By way of contrast, Arendt did not incorporate these messianic qualities into her account of the Ursprung. In Arendt's iteration, revolution simply denotes the human capacity for radical innovation, it signifies the absolute priority of the constituent power, and is associated with the prospect of a moment of profound creativity, one that might contain sufficient potentia ‘in itself to begin a new historical process’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1977c, 81).

In addition, as we have seen throughout this study, Arendt had learnt, from the great wisdom of Machiavelli and from the experience of the American founding, the crucial importance of combining the moment of initiative with a subsequent augmentation. As we saw especially in the previous chapter, the new beginning will only endure and expand if it is subsequently judged to be of wider significance, so that it starts to be spun out for posterity in the lived experiences of many diverse publics. In fact, Arendt stressed that this element of pluralism and judgement was (almost) coterminous with the new beginning. In this respect, she drew attention to the role of the revolutionary councils, which, she emphasised, have emerged around all of the major revolutionary events of modern times: from the ward system in the New England townships, to the Paris commune, the Russian Soviets, and the people's councils in Budapest in 1956 (Arendt, Reference Arendt1965, 275). Each ‘time they appeared, they sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people, not only outside of all revolutionary parties but entirely unexpected by them and their leaders’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt1965, 252). Once again, we find the dynamic relationship between the new revolutionary principle and a wide plurality of judgement and differences of opinion emerging from the epicentre of what Althusser calls the ‘aleatory void’ (Althusser, Reference Althusser1999, 79).

My sense is that these formulations remain highly pertinent for thinking about the continued relevance of the idea of revolution today. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and in the context of Occupy and the Arab Spring, these formulations not only suggest that the prospect of historical transformation remains a real possibility, but they also reiterate how and why this idea is commensurate with the agonistic circumstances of pluralism, tragedy, and the value of conflict. In contrast to Kant, who observed in the enthusiasm of the spectators of the French revolution a sign that history is providential, and moving – however haphazardly – in the overall direction of the Enlightened moral order (Kant, Reference Kant and Reiss1991e), perhaps we might see instead, in the current upsurge in activism all around the planet, a sign that the transnational social movements might just have the potentia to take us beyond the corrupt remnants of the (neo-)liberal ideal and to deliver a miraculous new beginning. This would dislocate the historical continuum and, through its subsequent augmentation, move the historical journey in new and uncharted directions.