What lurks behind appeals to “community” and a “democracy of the common” as models for the organization of political life is the desire for an existential authenticity that has overcome the contradictions and antagonisms that are part of normal political life under the conditions of democratic pluralism. Placing our hopes in community and the common as alternative, and somehow more authentic, models for the organization of political life always comes at the cost of preparing the ground for abandoning democracy altogether. Real democracy, counterintuitively, does not require community, but it involves distance among those who are represented, those who represent, and those who govern. We might experience this distance as alienating, or as inauthentic, but it allows for what we might call the self-control of self-government. In contrast to appeals to “community” and “the common,” the task of democracy is to negotiate the irreducible pluralism of political life through a normative organization that can be justified to, and is also justifiable by, all those who are subject to such norms.

The Marxist legacy is rich, plural, and contradictory. It is characterized by complexity and difference, but it can also be understood as bifurcated. There are two souls of socialism. One leads to domination; the other seeks out emancipation. This chapter seeks to map both the dualism and the diversity that have been suggested by thinkers ranging from Marx himself through to his remaining followers today.

Peter Beilharz is Professor of Culture and Society at Curtin University, Western Australia, and Professor of Critical Theory at Sichuan University. He is the author of 30 books and 200 papers. He founded the journal Thesis Eleven in 1980.

Critical approaches to understanding and practicing peacebuilding have arguably made contributions to the articulation of new understandings of conflict and new strategies of conflict management. Drawing upon a wide variety of theoretical interests and political convictions, critical approaches to peacebuilding often work at the intersection of Marxism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and gender/sexuality studies. Unlike traditional approaches toward peacebuilding that take their cues from mainstream debates in International Relations theory, critical approaches frequently decenter the state in their analysis and often highlight the essential role that would have to be played by subaltern identities, social movements, and revolutionary political change in the elaboration of a durable peace. Despite these clear contributions to the thought and praxis of peacebuilding, there does not exist a clearly defined school of thought that calls itself Critical Peace Studies. This chapter explores this seemingly paradoxical state of affairs — the absence of Critical Peace Studies per se despite its significant contributions — so as to understand the ways in which the diverse intellectual traditions that inform critical approaches to peacebuilding are markedly different from other approaches in this volume at the level of theory and the level of political practice.