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Redirecting Radical Democracy: From Antagonism to Alienation

Online ISBN:
9781399522182
Print ISBN:
9781399522168
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Book

Redirecting Radical Democracy: From Antagonism to Alienation

Sofia Anceau Helander
Sofia Anceau Helander

Lecturer and Researcher

Uppsala University
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
1 February 2024
Online ISBN:
9781399522182
Print ISBN:
9781399522168
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

Today, alienation manifests itself primarily as precarisation and deprofessionalisation. When the subject’s work security or professional autonomy is undermined, relations – not only to others, but also to one's self – can become inhibited. This book shows that while alienation poses serious problems to modern democracies, it is a form of social suffering that is particularly difficult for democratic theory – preoccupied by the political – to address. The book highlights that not even radical democracy, which emphasises the importance of social resistance, can include the alienated. The author shows this is not merely due to the historical emergence of radical democracy and its turn away from traditional socialism, but also to a deeper problem in the theory itself. Anceau Helander argues that in order to address alienation, radical democracy – as both normative theory and political strategy, must be reformulated starting with its deep assumptions about the subject.

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