Beyond the Naked Square: the Idea of an Agonistic Public Sphere
(this is a draft: do not quote)
Sante Maletta
University of Calabria, Italy
sante.maletta@unical.it
The major aim of this paper is to present some reflections about the political domain and
the common good that may be helpful in answering one of the issues of this conference: How can
religions contribute to the common good?
The problematic background of this paper can be summarized by the so-called Dilemma of
Böckenförde (“The free secular state lives according to presuppositions that it cannot itself
guarantee”), and by the Habermasian notion of a “post-secular society”.
I will first discuss the notion of “neutralization” with the support of Carl Schmitt. Then I will
present Chantal Mouffe’s doctrine of the “agonistic pluralism” and her partial legitimization of the
presence of religions in the political domain. Eventually I will criticize Mouffe’s approach with the
help of MacIntyre’s phenomenology of social practices in order to stress the importance of public
religions in contemporary liberal societies.
1.
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”1 I hold that Schmitt’s emphasis on the
category of decision does not imply a sort of irrational ‘decisionism’, but it is a reaction to the
formalistic and positivistic approaches prevailing in the philosophy of law at the beginning of the
20th cent. Schmitt stresses the fact that beyond any norms and rules there is always the will of a
subject. He means decision as the representation of a transcendent principle―an idea―by a
personal authority. Decision is supposed to mediate between the idea and the social reality which
needs be ordered.
Decisions open up the possibility of conflicts, and conflict is the essence of the political
domain. For Schmitt what characterizes the Political is “the distinction of friend and enemy
[which] denotes utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or
1
C. Schmitt, Political Theology (1922).
S. Maletta, Beyond the Naked Square
dissociation.”2 This dissociation is utmost as it includes the possibility of a bloody conflict that
cannot be turned either into a conflict of interest or into an ideal or normative conflict: “The
political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic
competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he
is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a special
intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with
him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by
the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.”3 The enemy is not private
(inimicus) but public (hostis). One is ready to risk her life to fight back when something essential is
in danger: without it her life, as a member of a group, has no sense anymore. The political
community, as a community, characterizes individuals as a whole because they share the same
opinions about non-negotiable issues identifying their political existence. This means that the
political authority (the state), i.e. the decision-maker, is what produces the sense of the political
community. Therefore in its neutralization of conflicts the state cannot use repressive means only.
This is what happens with the end of civil religious wars and the rise of the modern state.
The sovereign takes the chance to occupy the theological sphere―i.e. the conflictual “central
domain” (Zentralgebiet) in the 16th cent.―and to neutralize it. This is part of the secularization
process. The sovereign does it by ‘pouring’ wisely persuasion and coercion. Through this
Sinngebung the state keeps the control over the definition of the political identity of the
community―i.e. about the friend and the enemy―as it is the only power authorized to define the
non-negotiable issues. This neutralization is always unstable and precarious and aims to turn
outward any radical antagonism. It is a kind of active neutralization as it is based on a decision that
produces community. This means that the disorder, which the decision intends to overcome, is not
absolute; there is an ethical prerequisite to the political decision. From this viewpoint, the decision
restores order instead of creating a new one. Therefore the neutralization and the secularization
embodied by the modern state are possible as long as there is something to neutralize and
secularize: i.e. an idea, a truth.
But during the modern time the Zentralgebieten change―”from the theological to the
metaphysical domain, and from there to the humanitarian-moral and finally to the economic
domain”4―and this affects the nature of neutralization. Schmitt considers the first stage of this
process―the shift from the theological to the metaphysical domain― as “the strongest and most
consequential of all” as it “has determined the direction of all further development”.5 Theology
was abandoned because it was controversial (from this viewpoint it was neutralized: “Concepts
elaborated over many centuries of theological reflection now became uninteresting and merely
private matters”)6 in favor of another domain, taken as neutral, where Europeans “hoped to find
minimum agreement and common premises allowing for the possibility of security, clarity,
2
Id., The Concept of the Political (1932), §2.
Ivi.
4
C. Schmitt, The Age of Neutralizations and Depolitizations (1929).
5
Ivi.
6
Ivi.
3
2
S. Maletta, Beyond the Naked Square
prudence, and peace.”7 But this is an illusion: “Europeans always have wandered from a conflictual
to a neutral domain, and always the newly won neutral domain has become immediately another
arena of struggle, once again necessitating the search for a neutral domain». 8
The present widespread “belief in technology” is founded on the opinion we have found
“the absolute and ultimate neutral ground”: “Technology appeared to be a domain of peace,
understanding, and reconciliation”.9
But there is something new in technology: its neutrality is different from the neutrality of
the other domains. As it is “always only an instrument and weapon”, technology cannot produce
any single decision, “least of all for neutrality”, it is “culturally blind”.10
This means that in the domain of technology people live as if conflicts could be overcome
not through personal decisions representing some kind of truth, but through a mere automatic
process, that is through technology itself.
Schmitt goes back to this question in one of his last works, Political Theology II (1970). Here
he doe not stress anymore the unsuccessful neutralizing action of technology but rather he holds
that behind this there is a ‘spirit’, i.e. a decision about non-negotiable issues. This kind of
neutralization is dangerous as those who are subject to it are unaware of it. There is an ideological
dynamic going on: technology claims to be neutral but it is actually subject to some social
interests. Behind the mask of its apparent neutrality, technology imposes a social sense (a ‘supersense’) which removes any differences and proclaims the end of any divisions. On the contrary this
deceitful neutralization increases antagonism, as it delegitimizes the enemy, who is treated at best
as a ‘positive’ fact (in the Hegelian sense of the expression).
A good example of this ideological neutralization is given by Chantal Mouffe. Those
scholars who nowadays aim to overcome any antagonistic model of the Political in the direction of
a discursive democracy tend to use an ideological strategy that goes like this: conflicts are
foreclosed through the rhetorical usage of the category of modernization, “whose effect is to
discriminate between those who are in tune with the new conditions of the modern, posttraditional world and those who still cling desperately to the past.”11 These scholars are therefore
allowed to “draw a political frontier between ‘the moderns’ and ‘the traditionalists or
fundamentalists’, while at the same time denying the political character of their move.”12 In other
words, the ideological aspect of this move is that this friend/enemy discrimination is hidden by
presenting this frontier as sociological evidence. The conclusion, to be agreed with, is that “the
political in its antagonistic dimension has not disappeared, but [….] manifests itself under a
different guise, as a mechanism of exclusion justified on pseudo-scientific grounds.”13 There are
7
Ivi.
Ivi.
9
Ivi.
10
Ivi.
11
Ch. Mouffe, On the Political (2005), p. 54.
12
Ivi, p. 55.
13
Ivi.
8
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two possible consequences of this ideological move: either the excluded stay away from the public
domain or they go back to it in an intolerant way: either apathy or fanaticism.
2.
Since 1990s Chantal Mouffe used Schmitt’s category of the Political to explain the origins of
what she calls “post-political society”, characterized by two just mentioned phenomena,
apparently contradictory but actually symbiotic: political apathy and political fanaticism. The postpolitical society is the outcome of the liberalist strategy to expel conflicts from the political domain
either through the negotiation among interests or through rational discussion and deliberation
(Rawls, Habermas). Mouffe’s Schmittian move is to recall that the principle of the Political is the
friend/enemy distinction, that there is no political domain without the exclusion of some ‘other’,
without a “constitutive outside” (J. Derrida). What makes the citizens of a political community
equal is at the same time what makes them different from those who are outside the community.
A political body is such only when it has its own political identity―and identities always entail
differences.
But Mouffe’s aim is to go beyond Schmitt’s approach, whose main weakness is its
impossibility to consider political pluralism in a political body as legitimate. Pluralism actually
exists only in the international domain, where―according to the Westphalian system of
international relations―sovereign states face each other under the non-written rules of the jus
publicum aeropeum. Schmitt explicitly rejects the idea of a pluralist state and holds democracy as
incompatible with liberalism, as pluralism makes decision impossible.
Mouffe faces the following question: “How can we envisage a form of commonality strong
enough to institute a ‘demos’ but nevertheless compatible with certain forms of pluralism:
religious, moral, and cultural pluralism as well as pluralism of political parties?”.14 This is possible if
we recall that a political identity is never natural or spontaneous; it is a linguistic production and
“must be seen as the result of the political process of hegemonic articulation.”15 However such an
identity is never “fully constituted” and it can exist only “through multiple and competing forms of
identifications.”16 Yes, it is true that “there no hegemonic articulation without the determination
of a frontier, the definition of a ‘them’. But in the case of liberal democratic politics this frontier is
an internal one and the ‘them’ is not a permanent outsider.”17
A theoretical move is presupposed : the difference between the Political, “the dimension of
antagonism that is inherent in human relations”, and politics, the ensemble of practices,
discourses and institutions which seek to domesticate hostility and weaken potential
14
Ch. Mouffe, Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy (1997).
Ivi.
16
Ivi.
17
Ivi.
15
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antagonism.18 This difference is the core of what Mouffe calls agonistic pluralism: “the aim of
democratic politics is to construct the ‘them’ in such a way that it is no longer perceived as an
enemy to be destroyed, but an ‘adversary’ i.e. somebody whose ideas we combat but whose right
to defend those ideas we do not put into question”.19 An adversary is no more an enemy in the
Schmittian sense, as with her there is a common ground, the principles of liberal democracy (i.e.
liberty and equality for all). In other words, the major aim of democratic politics is to transform
antagonism in agonism and “this requires providing channels through which collective passions
will be given ways to express themselves over issues, which, while allowing enough possibility for
identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an adversary.” 20 Sharing the
same principles does not prevent conflict as they can effect politics only through different
interpretations, and this produces a “conflictual consensus”. Conflict avoid apathy and disaffection
with political participation because it enables processes of polemical identification; on the other
hand the consensus on the basic principles of liberal democracy prevents “the crystallization of
collective passions around issues, which cannot be managed by the democratic process”.21
A relevant outcome of Mouffe’s perspective is that pluralism involves the end of any
substantive idea of good life as the core of the identity of a political body. No Schmittian active
neutralization of the Political is possible anymore. Not a total one, at least: liberal democracy, in
fact, cannot hold a relativistic conception of the world: “a liberal democratic state must be
agnostic in matters of religion and morality [but] it cannot be agnostic concerning political values,
since by definition it postulates certain ethico-political values that constitute its principles of
legitimacy.”22 This is a logical consequence of the Wittgensteinian doctrine of the primacy of
Lebensformen over rules and procedures: “procedures only exist as a complex ensemble of
practices. Those practices constitute specific forms of individuality, which make possible the
allegiance to the procedures.”23 Therefore: “What is really at stake in the allegiance to democratic
institutions is the constitution of an ensemble of practices that make the constitution of
democratic citizens possible. This is not a matter of rational justification but of availability of
democratic forms of individuality and subjectivity.”24 In summary, democratic politics requires “a
democratic Sittlichkeit.”25 The square cannot be naked.
It is now possible to conceive of a notion of citizenship as allegiance to the ethico-political
values of liberal democracy which is able to “reconcile the strong meaning it had in the civic
republican tradition with the pluralism constitutive of modern democracy.”26 Therefore it is not
possible for democratic politics “to do without an idea of political community and a reference to
18
Ch. Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism (2000).
Ivi.
20
Ivi.
21
Ivi.
22
Ch. Mouffe, Religion, Democracy, and Citizenship (2006).
23
Ch. Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism.
24
Ivi.
25
Ch. Mouffe, Wittgenstein and the Ethos of Democracy (2001).
26
Ch. Mouffe, Religion, Democracy, and Citizenship, p. 322.
19
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the common good.”27 This is a delicate point as Mouffe’s aim is to go beyond the
liberals/communitarians divide by making a sort of Hegelian synthesis. To be compatible with
pluralism, the notions of political community and of common good need a peculiar definition.
Political community is to be imagined “as a surface for inscribing demands where a ‘we’ is
constituted”.28 The common good is seen as a “vanishing point”, a “horizon of meaning”. It
functions as a social imaginary, “that is, as that on which its very impossibility of achieving full
representation bestows the role of a horizon that is the condition of possibility of any
representation within the space that it delimits.”29 As already seen above, consensus on principles
does not prevent the rise of political fights and divisions as these principles work only through
conflicting interpretations―each producing its own conception of citizenship―in order to define
the common sense and establish an hegemony.
Can religions contribute to the common good, then? And how?
For Mouffe there is no reason to keep religions outside the political realm as they produce
important forms of identification which motivate people to political participation. The unique
requirement for religions is to respect the constitutional limits of liberal democratic regimes. As
the ethico-political principles which legitimize these regimes are subject to different possible
interpretations, also the constitutional limits can anyway change in time and space. So there is of
course no space for theocratic or fundamentalist approaches in the political domain. Moreover
(but this is controversial: see below) it seems to be no space for any kind of civil religion à la
Rousseau intended as an “appropriation of religion by politics for its own purposes”.30 In
summary, religious groups can play a public role either in the political society (through the
creation of single-issues movements, or institutional lobbying, or electoral mobilization), or in the
civil society through the participation in open public debates about public affairs and the common
good.31 In all these cases religion identities can be powerful sources for political and civil
participation, when they do not pass constitutional limits.
3.
Mouffe’s perspective is interesting but not completely persuasive. I identify the most
controversial point in her approach is when she holds that what is at stake in the allegiance to
democratic institutions is not consent but the practices that make the constitution of democratic
citizens possible. These practices―according to the approach peculiar of the second Wittgenstein
espoused by Mouffe―are an essential prerequisite for democratic politics, and as such they seem
to go beyond any rational justifications. The same is for the common good defined in terms of a
27
Ivi.
Ivi.
29
Ivi.
30
R. Beiner, Civil Religion, p. 1. “Civil religion s the empowerment of religion, not for the sake of religion, but
for the sake of enhanced citizenship―of making members of the political community better citizens, in accordance
with whatever conception one holds of what constitutes being a good citizen.” (p. 2)
31
J. Casanova, What is a Public Religion?
28
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social imaginary, i.e. as a quasi-transcendental condition of possibility for the existence of social
sense. In summary, Mouffe’s vis polemica against the models of discursive democracy defended by
Rawls and Habermas brings her to hold that the question of the different forms of practical
rationality is not relevant for the issue of the allegiance to the democratic institutions. This view is
dangerous as it opens the possibility of non-rational developments in the radical democratic
approach to the problems of post-political societies. It is not a case that Mouffe legitimizes the
presence of passions in the public domain and their support of political participation and justifies
any “attempt to mobilize those passions toward democratic designs.”32 There is a danger in such
an approach―a danger that is peculiar of any form of political radicalism from Rousseau on: the
illusory temptation to justify and perform (for good purposes, of course) an instrumental approach
to the modern social imaginary and its emotional potentialities―what Charles Taylor calls “the
dark sides of modern social imaginary”.33 The possibility of such a development is strengthened by
the fact that in Mouffe’s perspective the main goal of any political fight is hegemony, i.e. the
construction of a new common sense, something that necessarily involves also the non-rational
aspects of human life. If this is true, in this perspective one could eventually justify some kind of
civil religion able to gain the hegemonic position in the society if it works to mobilize individuals in
the good direction.
I believe that this danger can be avoided if we look for a phenomenology of social practices
more accurate than the one provided by Mouffe through her interpretation of the second
Wittgenstein. This can be found in the works of MacIntyre. Here I summarize this approach.34
The prerequisite to understand MacIntyrian approach to social practices is to take the “first
person viewpoint”, that is the viewpoint of the acting person. To non-participants, in fact, a
practice may appear to be constituted only by rule-following behavior; to participants, on the
contrary, rules are first of all means to a good internal to the practice. In other words, a practice is
not only a rule-conforming behavior but first of all a goal-oriented action where goals are goods
that give point and purpose to the rules.
MacIntyre’s phenomenology of practices cannot be understood without highlighting the
strong interdependence between practices and institutions: they belong to the same single causal
order. Institutions support practices first by enforcing the rules and second by acquiring and
distributing goods external to practices such as money, power or social status―therefore
institutions may corrupt practices by diverting actor’s intentions from internal to external goods.
To resist this corrupting power, practices need both intellectual and moral virtues. The first teach
us what are the goods internal to a practice and the goods which deserve to be achieved in our
lives. The second―such as courage, truthfulness, justice―help us in this intellectual activity. When
an individual constantly raises questions about the goods of the practices she is engaged in and
what place they should have in her own life, in fact, what she realizes sooner or later is that she
32
Ch. Mouffe, Religion, Democracy, and Citizenship, p. 324.
Cf. Ch. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginary.
34
Cf. K. Knight, Practices: The Aristotelian Concept (2008); Rules, Powers, and Goods (2012).
33
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cannot do that without involving those who take part in the practices, that is without a common
reasoning and a common deliberation about action.
This approach does not deny the existence of conflicts in common practical reasoning. On
the contrary, it is well aware of the fact that, when an individual raises questions about the good
and the goods of her life, she can do this only from within a certain tradition of moral enquiry,
better still from within a particular interpretation of this tradition. Traditions of moral enquiry live
on the competition with other traditions and with conflicting interpretations of the tradition itself.
A very relevant point that Mouffe misses is that practice, when it is in good order―i.e.
when it is a goal-oriented activity ordered by virtues and rules and not corrupted by
institutions―requires the educations of desires and their redirection to internal goods. In other
words, desires cannot be considered neither as positive data nor as something non-rational that
can be changed only through rhetorical means. This is the strongest and most unaware form of
contemporary reification: when human beings relate to their own desires as if they were
‘objective things’ (as it happens for instance when they turn to a marriage bureau), they are
alienated from themselves.
Here we may find a model of political community that relies on a bond which is not
cultural, ethic, or linguistic, but rather rational. What generates the social bond is in fact the
question of the order of the goods, because it is impossible to tackle this problem without
involving the others with whom one is engaged in the activities of practices. It is practical
rationality itself, therefore, that has a political dimension. From this viewpoint, politics is to be
considered as the activity of answering questions about the ordering of practices in ordinary life. 35
Politics is a second-order practice that, in summary, embodies the common good itself.
This approach opens up the possibility of a new assessment of the public role of religions.
In general religions do enforce the moral virtues that strengthen our resistance to the corruption
power of institutions. Moreover religions―especially those that have always been effective in the
Western societies (Judaism, Christianity, Islam)―are to be considered also as intellectual bodies.
Therefore they develop in their own educational and research institutions traditions of inquiry into
the human good which are still effective in post-secular societies and which cannot legitimately be
excluded from the political debate without taking the risk to weaken the moral and the intellectual
virtues of the people. But the most relevant beneficial effect of religions can be understood when
we consider one major trait of liberal societies, what MacIntyre calls the compartmentalization of
roles. Such compartmentalisation occurs when “each distinct sphere of social activity comes to
have its own role structure governed by its own specific norms in relative independence of other
such spheres”36. The precepts of the virtues are understood as prescriptions for the development
of habits that make an individual more efficient in his or her role-playing. Virtues lose the
subjective dimension: they no longer support the development of an awareness of the goals
included in one’s social role and therefore the possibility of criticising them. The outcome of the
35
36
Cf. M. Murphy, MacIntyre’s Political Philosophy (2003), p. 163.
A. MacIntyre, Social Structures and their Threat to Moral Agency, p. 167.
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compartmentalisation of roles is a divided self, who lacks the two virtues basic to the exercise of
his moral responsibility—integrity, which sets limits to one’s adaptability to social roles, and
constancy, which sets limits to flexibility of character. In summary, the compartmentalisation of
roles produces an uncritical and therefore irresponsible moral agent.
To avoid this outcome we do not need a positive religious faith: the mere posing of the
religious problem―what is the sense of my life? what is my good? how should I live? unde
malum?―allows the subject to gain an unitary perspective on her own existence, to take a
position from which it is easier for her to resist and criticize the immoral demands of the social
roles and the corrupting power of institutions. The more one practises the moral and the
intellectual virtues, the more one is able to do that. But this can be done only within communities
which, in our Western societies, have generally been and still are religious communities.
Religions can and do play a decisive role within contemporary liberal societies: they make
possible the constitution of subjects who are able to partially detach from their own social roles
and to have a critical stance over them. This is a necessary prerequisite for the existence of
different social identities in competition about the definition of the common good.
In other words, religions can and do play an important public role as they belong to the
small group of social agencies that are still able to educate moral conscience. Conscience brings in
the public space what liberals usually try to keep in the private forum, i.e. non-negotiable issues.
But when everything is negotiable, it is very difficult to resist the corrupting power of the
institutions . Without non-negotiable issues, pace Mouffe, the political domain loses its agonistic
spirit and degenerates into apathy and fanaticism. The political domain in a liberal democratic
regime lives thanks to a tension between its constitutional limits and the challenges represented
by the non-negotiable issues. Democracy is always “to come” (J. Derrida).
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