Democracy and Revolution: An Essay on Temptation and Anxiety

Abstract

Author examines the question: Is revolutionary consciousness possible in the context of globalization and universalization of the liberal democracy as one universal rational consensus? According to Mouffe we could maintain that liberalism is an attempt for abolition of the political, through its tendency to reduce itself to a liberal critic of the political and to endless procedures. Contemporary liberal thinkers are arguing about new concepts which, in paradoxical way, gain their trans-temporality historically leading to a concept of total state; concepts such as: substitution of the classes with life-styles, de-traditionalization and de-philosophication of the political, neutralization of the state, abolition of the gap between the state and the society. Radical leftists accepted the pluralism and the liberal democratic institutions, so there is no conviction in historical necessity of radical transformation, only acceptance of the end of the history. Therefore, political philosophy is possible only as a regulation of the turbulences of the capitalism for which they see no alternative. Paradoxically, they became the best students of Fukuyama’s conservatism. In the reality of total democracy as an optimal condition, revolutionary consciousness is the last crisis stronghold and just one irrational and politically irrelevant act. Every revolutionary existence is in Abraham’s state of anxiety to choose to accept this temptation of the end of history as its ethical liberation or to suspend the democracy just to obtain its inner prerogatives.