Politics on the Edges of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation

Front Cover
Edinburgh University Press, 2007 - History - 166 pages
Politics on the edges of liberalism refers to a grey zone where phenomena such as difference, populism, revolution and agitation turn the distinction between the inside and the outside of liberalism into a matter of dispute.Each chapter takes on one of these ideas, discussing the intellectual background animating the politics of the culture wars and its celebration of particularism over the universalism of classical liberal thought. Populism becomes a spectral recurrence rather than an outside of democracy. Agitation reappears in emancipatory politics, and the idea of revolution is thought through outside the Jacobin view of insurrection, overthrow and total re-foundation.This is truly interdisciplinary inquiry at the cutting edge of contemporary debates in politics, critical theory, philosophy and sociology. The author draws from an impressive range of thinkers such as Kant, Benjamin, Derrida, Freud, Schmitt, Rancière, Gramsci, Canovan, Oakeshott, Foucault, Vattimo, Laclau and

About the author (2007)

Benjamin Arditi is a Professor of Political Theory at the National University of Mexico. He is the author of Polemicization (EUP, 1999) and editor of Fidelity to the Disagreement: Jacques Ranciere and Politics (2006). He is co-editor (with Jeremy Valentine) of Edinburgh University Press's 'Taking on the Political' series.

Bibliographic information