Re-Thinking Liberal Democracy

Abstract

Distancing themselves from Fukuyama, many scholars are quick to acknowledge that democracy should not be taken as ‘the end of history’ but is in fact a highly contingent form of regime. Nevertheless, regardless of where the most pressing challenges to democracy are located, most philosophical discourse and public debate still take democracy, and all its contingencies, as the starting point of modern politics. In this sense, democracy may not be the end of history, but it should be. As liberal democracies struggle to satisfy expectations, its failings are assumed to be the result of an insufficient accounting and ordering of democracy’s challenges and weaknesses. Scholarship as a result tends to focus on re-articulating democracy in a way that accounts for and explains these challenges. Rarely is the critical, theoretical gaze turned inward towards those assumptions regarding the concept of democracy itself. Meanwhile, within public debate, polarization and political gridlock becomes increasingly entrenched as each side of the political spectrum sees the other as potentially tyrannical and declared a threat to democracy. This presents a challenge for the political imagination as it assumes that our only options are liberal democracy or an untenable, authoritarian alternative. Therefore, in the spirit of J.S. Mill’s caution that we do not ‘leave off thinking’ regarding those concepts of which we take as fundamental to politics, this panel invites political theorists to return their thinking to the concept of democracy and its foundational assumptions. While there is no shortage of literature outlining the advantages and challenges of a democratic system, this panel will focus on the possible dichotomies, contradictions, and paradoxes in our current thinking with regards to democracy and our political possibilities.

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