In this paper, I delineate one tradition of contemporary political thought that has emerged within the more general climate of difference and diversity. This is ‘agonistic pluralism’. The paper evaluates the recent work of three authors, who exemplify this strand of political thinking; William Connolly, Chantal Mouffe, and James Tully. Over the past decade, each of these three has developed the notion of agonistic pluralism. The task here is to examine points of comparison between them. I compare the three authors' (...) conceptions of politics and of the dimension of the political. I make the case that their work complements one another, they each endorse broad notions of the political; and they understand politics to be constitutive of social relations. Nevertheless, the forms of politics that they describe differ from one another. It is my contention that these forms of politics are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. However, I maintain that in order for their work to be understood in this way, the political practices described by Connolly and Tully — struggles for self-making and for recognition respectively — must be re-figured as forms of sub-constitutional politics. These forms of politics will make up necessary elements of a viable pluralist society, but they are played out within multiple public spheres made possible by — what we might call — the quasi-republican political constitution elaborated by Mouffe. (shrink)

Recovering a marginal body of pluralist political thought from early twentieth-century India, this article explores how the question of popular sovereignty shaped the federalist reconfiguration of the anticolonial democratic project. The turn to federalism was facilitated by the Indian reckoning with Hegel in the late nineteenth century, which led to the diagnosis that the universality ascribed to monist sovereignty relies on a “unilinear” theory of development. Through a sustained engagement with British pluralist and American progressive thought, Indian federalist thinkers eventually (...) developed a many-willed conception of the people. In so doing, they hoped to overcome the denial of Indian peoplehood on the ground of its lack of national unity and historical backwardness. However, the alternative source of sovereignty the federalists pointed to—plural and many-willed—stood in tension with their simultaneous pursuit of a people speaking in one voice. In this way, the constitutive tension of the pluralist conception of sovereignty came strikingly alive in the colonial world. (shrink)

This paper analyses the intertwinement of legal philosophy and political theory in the British intellectual framework between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with specific regard to Harold Laski's works. I will try to illustrate the transition from 19th-century utilitarianism to H. L. A. Hart and Isaiah Berlin as evolving through important debates which include Laski's contribution. I will argue that a discussion of “juridical” obligation, i.e., the conditions of legal validity, may lie implicitly in these concerns that Laski (...) and other early 20th-century British authors had about “political” obligation—viz., about the nature of the state and its claim to obedience. By approaching Laski's theories and their genealogy through a legal-philosophical perspective, I will contend that this debate about political obligation anticipates to a considerable extent some of the most renowned conceptions of obligation in 20th-century British legal theory. (shrink)