Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Movement

In the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," the young Marx elliptically alludes to a true democracy whose advent would go hand in hand with the disappearance of the state. Miguel Abensour's rigorous interpretation of this seminal text reveals an "unknown Marx" who undermines the identification of democracy with the state and defends a historically occluded form of politics.

True democracy does not entail the political and economic power of the state, but it does not dream of a post-political society either. On the contrary, the battle of democracy is waged by a demos that invents a public sphere of permanent struggles, a politics that counters political bureaucracy and representation. Democracy is won by a people forewarned that any dissolution of the political realm in its independence, any subordination to the state, is tantamount to annihilating the site for gaining and regaining a genuinely human existence.

In this explicitly heterodox reading of Marx, Miguel Abensour proposes a theory of insurgent democracy that makes political liberty synonymous with a living critique of domination.

Author: Miguel Abensour
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 02/07/2011
Pages: 200
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780745650104

Review Citation(s):
Choice 10/01/2011

About the Author
Miguel Abensour is Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Paris VII - Denis-Diderot.

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