Syllabus
Course schedule
NB: For a more detailed description of the class topic and assigned reading, please see the course page on Moodle.
Week 1: Introduction: Course overview. The crisis of liberal democracy and the new cold war.
Weeks 2-4: C. Schmitt’s concept of the political; his critique of liberalism and parliamentary democracy
Week 5: C. Mouffe’s critique of the 1990s liberal moment, her agonistic theory of democracy
Weeks 6-7: The notion of biopolitics in the works of H. Arendt and M. Foucault
Week 8-10: Biopolitics, sovereignty and the state of exception in the work of G. Agamben
Weeks 11-12: Truth and politics, or on the political responsibility of intellectuals. (H. Arendt and L. Struass)
Annotation
In 1989, a couple of months before the actual fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama predicted the upcoming end of Cold War which he famously (mis-)diagnosed as the “end of history”. In the retrospect, we can say that the end of Cold War marked not so much the end of history – and hence also the end of politics – but rather an emergence of the (neo-)liberal hegemony, which indeed brought something like an eclipse of the political.
Today, it is obvious that the liberal moment of the 1990s is definitely over. We can also say that the history, or, rather, the political, has returned – with vengeance. Liberal democracies in today’s world feel no longer triumphant and self-confident, but rather vulnerable as they face challenges both from within and from the outside. On the one hand, the liberal democratic order feels threatened by the surge of popularity of anti-liberal populism. On the other hand, liberal democracies are increasingly threatened by more and more openly hostile authoritarian regimes. Indeed, more and more scholars and politicians are arguing that the Cold War has returned.
It must be admitted that in the light of the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine this claim seems to ring true. At the same time, however, the new cold war rhetoric may justifiably seem as both historically misleading and threatening to the key values of the very regime it is aimed to protect, i.e. liberal democracy. It would be indeed hard to argue that freedom and democracy exactly flourished during Senator McCarthy’s era, or, for that matter, during the ‘first new cold war” – i.e. the early 2000s “war on terror”.
In this political theory seminar, we will not focus primarily on the historical analogies between the Cold War and the present situation, but rather on the political function of the rhetorical figure of “cold war” in liberal politics and, more importantly, on the ambiguous relationship between liberalism and war, as well as liberalism and politics. To put it more generally, we shall explore some of the internal tensions or contradictions of liberalism to uncover the deep roots of the present crisis of liberal democracy.