ABSTRACT:This paper argues that, although stakeholder engagement occurs within the context of power, neither market-centered CSR nor the deliberative model of political CSR adequately addresses the specter of power asymmetries and the inevitability of conflict in stakeholder relations, particularly for powerless stakeholders. Noting that the objective of stakeholder engagement should not be benevolence toward stakeholders, but mechanisms that address power asymmetries such that stakeholders are able to protect their own interests, I present a framework of stakeholder engagement based on agonistic (...) pluralism that seeks to structure and utilize discord rather than reduce or eliminate it. I then propose arbitration as an agonistic mechanism to address power asymmetries in stakeholder engagement and explore its implications. (shrink)

In this dissertation I explore the conceptual relationship between equality and resistance in political philosophy. Through examination of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and Jacques Rancière, I formulate a position called Fractured Social Holism. This is a problematic that attempts to articulate core issues at stake in the debates surrounding the purposes, meanings, and possibilities for politics. Through Fractured Social Holism I articulate a theory of equality that emphasizes the communities upon which societys institutions intend to (...) distribute equality, arguing that resistance on the part of a populationgroup opposition, formal or informal, to some element of the societal status quoconceptually grounds equality and its distribution by articulating its very possibilities. My central questionHow is equality constituted?focuses on the community itself in order to shift agency from institutions that distribute equality to those who demand it. It emphasizes the active role of the people in the constitution of a community of equals, as well as the fact that the very notion of the people is what is at stake in that constitution; popular resistance challenges the very meaning and content of any given people. I understand equality in the broadest possible sense, in terms of the opportunity of each and all within society to participate in dictating the terms of their public engagement with that society and with others within it. I argue for the possibility of resistance within egalitarian community in Rousseau, the limits of what that resistance in egalitarian society looks like in Marx, how egalitarian communities can organize themselves in Dewey, and how subjectivity relates to mechanisms of resistance and political action within society in Rancière. These historical interpretations and the conceptual framework they engender provide a novel means of thinking about issues of paramount importance in contemporary political philosophy, including pluralism, oppression and domination, and the purposes and meaning of politics, remaining true to a normative vision of equality while insisting on the necessity of the peoples resistance to the status quo in the name of a re-imagined vision of social harmony. (shrink)

Socialism as a political philosophy confronts many theoretical and empirical challenges in our contemporary world. Some thinkers consider it obsolete and others aspire to reformulate it by couching it in a more pragmatist idiom. My aim here is to show that the salient features of socialism, those that are worth preserving, presuppose the indispensability of critique and reflective subjectivity in a sense that goes beyond pragmatism. To develop my argument for a socialist theory that can benefit from postmodern challenges without (...) surrendering its critical force, I review some recent ideas in the socialist discourse and I contrast them with Cornelius Castoriades's theory of socialism. I conclude by defending the possibility for a new articulation of the socialist project, one that takes into account past failures as well as the shortcomings of current socialist trends. (shrink)

The paper is an interpretation of J.-J.Rousseau’s book on the government of Poland. The central part of the paper is devoted to complex relations between the notions of nature, nation, childhood, and civic education. Methodologically, the analysis involves interpretation of historical contexts and positions significant in the writing of the book, and deconstruction of its key categories. In the latter respect, the idea of “strangeness” of Poland is the point of departure, and the role it plays in the construction of (...) national and European identity is the aim of analysis. (shrink)

The work of Ernesto Laclau (both with and without his occasional collaborator, Chantal Mouffe) has exerted considerable influence in rhetorical studies over the past two decades. Emerging alongside the so-called epistemic and cultural turns, the project of "critical rhetoric" and cognate endeavors have found in Laclau a revision of Gramsci's hegemony thesis that places discursive—and thus, evidently, rhetorical—operations at the center of politics, culture, and social processes generally. While Raymie McKerrow's seminal essay (1989) drew on Laclau and Mouffe to outline (...) a set of tasks for rhetoric that clearly remained within the ambit of ideology critique, subsequent appropriations of what is variously called .. (shrink)

Ernesto Laclau's theory of antagonism and political identity has been widely celebrated as one of the most promising attempts to apply the lessons of ‘poststructuralism’ to political theory. This essay argues, however, that this initial promise is not fulfilled. Laclau's attempt to define and analyse ‘the political’ as such operates at such an abstract level that Laclau is forced to make sweeping claims about the nature of politics and identity that he simply cannot support; and his analysis of the decision (...) that he claims defines politics is an unrealistic one that celebrates violence, and could have the wide appeal it has had only in a political culture that understood freedom as the absence of all constraint, rather than the achievement of autonomy. Key Words: antagonism • autonomy • decision • freedom • hegemony • identity • Laclau • ‘the political’ • rule-following • Wittgenstein. (shrink)

A number of phenomena have lent a new complexity to the long-standing challenge of constructing a legitimate and stable political order. I contend that both legitimacy and integration under contemporary conditions ultimately hinge upon a form of public practical reasoning that departs considerably from the ones proposed by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas and several deliberative democrats. I argue that the generalizability test that constitutes the cornerstone of most contemporary neo-Kantian theories of public reason should be abandoned as a rule of (...) public argumentation and be replaced by a norm of civic responsiveness towards minority claims. I not only suggest that a wider variety of reasons, motives and genres of speech needs to be admitted within the purview of public reason, but more fundamentally that generalizability cannot cogently be seen as anything more (or less) than a civic virtue. The underlying point of this article is that neo-Kantian theories of public reason work with a problematic conception of practical reason. I conclude by providing reasons, against some radical and agonistic democrats, why the language of public reasoning needs to be retained and renovated. Key Words: acknowledgement • agonistic democracy • deliberative democracy • generalizability • Habermas • pluralism • practical reason • public reason • Rawls • social integration. (shrink)

While he develops three different aspects of Lacan's “Real,” Slavoj Žižek does so only partially, in the end leaving an inconsistent and contradictory account. Here these three versions of the Real are outlined and clarified by showing their relation to Marx's account of capitalist exchange and socialist politics. This leads to a discussion of two other aspects of the Real that appear in Žižek's work: the pre-Symbolic Real and the “Sinthome.” Where the former is simultaneously the fear of a unified (...) working class and the fantasy of a world of “total enjoyment” without conflict, the latter is discussed here in terms of political struggle that takes on not only the form of a means to an end but also that of an end in itself. (shrink)

How should sociologists use the word theory? Gabriel Abend’s recent insistence that this question should be tackled politically raises two important issues: Is sociology political? And if so, what normative implications follow for its organization? Drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance and post-Gramscian theories of hegemony, I argue that Abend’s proposal that semantic questions about theory can be addressed separately from ontological, evaluative, and teleological ones is untenable. Disagreements about the latter are constitutive, not merely supplementary to the meaning (...) of theory. Against Abend’s deliberative-democratically oriented vision, I propose an agonistic politics of theory. In doing so, I consider both the internal inconsistencies of deliberativism and the practical advantages and sociological relevance of agonism. (shrink)

The civil society opposition to economic globalization, at times referred to as the ‘anti-globalization movement’, is often seen as unleashing new democratic energies. Some suggest that part of what we are witnessing is some form of deterritorialization of the democratic experience. What is often missing from this claim, however, is a more thorough evaluation of the images of democracy drawn by the movement itself. The first section of this paper will draw from various readings of the democratic experience in view (...) of providing a conceptual framework capable of problematizing the equivalence between democracy and territoriality. On the basis of this understanding of democracy, a second section will offer a reading of the document Alternatives for the Americas prepared by the Hemispheric Social Alliance, a large coalition of civil society groups located throughout the Americas that has organized opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas. This document offers a unique opportunity to assess the anti-globalization movement's vision of democracy. The paper's reading of the document reveals a tension between territorial and non-territorial forms of envisioning democracy. (shrink)

The civil society opposition to economic globalization, at times referred to as the ‘anti-globalization movement’, is often seen as unleashing new democratic energies. Some suggest that part of what we are witnessing is some form of deterritorialization of the democratic experience. What is often missing from this claim, however, is a more thorough evaluation of the images of democracy drawn by the movement itself. The first section of this paper will draw from various readings of the democratic experience in view (...) of providing a conceptual framework capable of problematizing the equivalence between democracy and territoriality. On the basis of this understanding of democracy, a second section will offer a reading of the document Alternatives for the Americas prepared by the Hemispheric Social Alliance, a large coalition of civil society groups located throughout the Americas that has organized opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas. This document offers a unique opportunity to assess the anti-globalization movement's vision of democracy. The paper's reading of the document reveals a tension between territorial and non-territorial forms of envisioning democracy. (shrink)