This article compares the theories of democracy of John Dewey and Claude Lefort, identifying some common themes in their otherwise radically different philosophical outlooks. In so doing, it attempts to analyze the philosophical implications of a ‘democracy first’ approach to politics. It then explains in what sense Dewey’s idea of ‘democracy as a way of life’ and Claude Lefort’s conception of ‘democracy as a form of society’ provide the cornerstone of an original and so far insufficiently explored approach to political (...) philosophy. Such an approach offers an alternative both to the classical-liberal and to the critical-radical projects which still dominate contemporary political philosophy. It then indicates some of the potential advantages of such a ‘wide view’ for contemporary debates in democratic theory. (shrink)

This article addresses Eric L. Santner’s claim that “there is more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought” by analyzing the “theologico-political problem” in the work of three prominent twentieth-century political thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt share a preoccupation with the crisis of modern political liberalism and confront the theologico-political problem in a similar spirit: although their responses differ dramatically, their individual accounts dwell on the absence of incontestable principles in (...) modern society that can justify life-in-common and the persistence of the political order. Their writings thus engage with the question of the place of “the absolute” in the political realm. In particular, Arendt’s indirect approach to the theologico-political problem is crucial to understanding the radicality of a political world in which traditional certainties can no longer be re-established. The theoretical trajectory I present suggests that the dispersion of political theology in everyday life has a specific corollary: modern politics operates within the tragic and paradoxical nature of its unstable and common origins that cannot be incorporated in exceptionalist versions of the body politic. (shrink)