Democracy

Summary

Dominique Pagani links democracy to the birth of philosophy. For him, it begins with the Socratic question "what do you call…?". Addressed to someone who can answer, this question grounds dialogue and the requirement of non-contradiction, which Euclid's "requests" also illustrate1. He then places democracy within Hegel's thesis that history moves toward freedom, from "one alone is free" to "all are free". Greece, where power depends on the speech that convinces, offers an embryo of it. Democracy is born of counter-powers, of "thugs who keep watch on one another", and Rousseau marks the shift from relations of force to relations of right2. On the present, he speaks of a crisis of representative democracy: the Versailles congress that overturned the "no" vote in the European referendum shows that legality is not legitimacy3. In the sessions with guests, other voices are heard: one defends representation against participation, in connection with the yellow vests4; Emmanuel Faye sets Arendt's isonomy against democracy5.

1. 1From Plato to world revolution14 Jul 2022
2. 2Is history a subject?9 Mar 2017
3. 3And what about the subject in all this? Hölderlin, Mallarmé and Baudelaire28 Sept 2022
4. 4Hegel and the yellow vests (part 1)13 Feb 2019
5. 5Arendt and Heidegger: the destruction of thought24 Sept 2020

Introduction produced automatically from the 6 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.