1NC

(Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s
Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements
, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions .
1. An agent doing the acting ---
“The United States” in “The United States should adopt
a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should
—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action
. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination.
For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means
. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred.
The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur .
What you agree to do, then, when you
Amanda, J.D. Candidate, Fordham University School of Law, “THE AGONY OF ECSTASY: RECONSIDERING
THE PUNITIVE APPROACH TO UNITED STATES DRUG POLICY,” 29 Fordham Urb. L.J. 2133, Lexis, Vitz
Legalization is often misunderstood
. As most advocates define it, legalization involves the repeal of laws prohibiting drug use and the implementation of regulated system of Ecstasy distribution
[*2184] similar to that which currently exists for alcohol and cigarettes, with state-run sales, quality and price control, and regulated advertising. n433
The goal of such legalization is to undercut the criminal element
. n434 Advocates claim that legalization would reduce health risks to users because pills would be tested as part of the regulation process; only a set strength and purity level would be available for purchase. n435 Advocates also cite the high financial cost and ineffectiveness of the drug war as reasons for legalization. In addition to the Office of Drug Control Policy's annual budget, "It costs approximately $ 8.6 billion per year to keep drug law violators behind bars." n436 Drug-related criminal and medical costs total over $ 67 billion, and almost seventy percent of that is attributable to drug-related crime. n437 While legalization may initially drive drug use up, proponents argue that any such increase would taper off and the net result would be less harm than exists under the current prohibition-based drug policy. n438 Some argue that legalization would reduce crimes committed indirectly because of drug use, such as those related to the black market for drug sales which has developed in response to drug prohibition. n439

Ryan
, Samford Comm prof, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28, 2007
Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position.
Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing.
The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements
. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure.
¶
Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative
. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table.
¶
When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant
(Ehninger, 1970, p. 110).
A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice.
Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect , a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced.¶ Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies.
Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power
(Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning: ¶
Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions.
Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships among equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions
(Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197).
¶
Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the conversation
(Farrell, 1985, p. 114).
¶ For example, a n affirmative case
on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the neg ative team , preventing them from

offering effective “counter-word” and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts.
Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.
*Austin J. Freeley is a Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, AND **David L. Steinberg , Lecturer of Communication Studies @ U
Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making pp45-
Debate is a means of settling differences , so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or policy, there is no need for debate
: the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four,
" because there is simply no controversy about this statement.
(Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate
.
Where there is no clash of ideas
, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate
. In addition, debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered
. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of
illegal immigration
.
How many
illegal immigrants are in the United States?
What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes?
Do they take jobs
from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country ?
Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do
? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders?
Should we build a wall on the Mexican border
, establish a national identification can!, or enforce existing laws against employers?
Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens?
Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this
"debate" is likely to be emotional and intense. However , it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy
. To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions
, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the United States. Congress to make progress on the immigration debate
during the summer of 2007.
Someone disturbed by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible job!
They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with."
Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations
, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could
easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding

points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed
—such as "What can be done to improve public education?"— then a more profitable area of discussion is opened upsimply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution
step
.
One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies
. The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate ¶ .
They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by
directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about "homelessness" or
"abortion" or "crime'* or " global warming" we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for argument
. For example, the statement "Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide
much basis for clear argumentation.
If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose.
¶
Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad
, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument.
What sort of writing are we concerned with
—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context?
What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be.
"Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of our support in a certain crisis?"
The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition
such as "Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treatv with Laurania." Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution
. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation
of the controversy by advocates
, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference
, which will be outlined in the following discussion.
Vanderbilt philosophy professor Robert, “Deliberativist responses to activist challenges”, Philosophy &
Social Criticism, 31.4, project muse
Nonetheless, the deliberativist conception of reasonableness differs from the activist’s in at least one crucial respect. On the deliberativist view, a necessary condition for reasonableness is the willingness not only to offer justifications for one’s own views and actions, but also
to listen to criticisms, objections, and the justificatory reasons that can be given in favor of alternative proposals. In light of this further stipulation, we may say that, on the deliberative democrat’s view, reasonable citizens are responsive to reasons, their views are ‘reason tracking’. Reasonableness, then, entails an acknowledgement on the part of the citizen that her current views are possibly mistaken
, incomplete, and in need of revision. Reasonableness is hence a two-way street: the reasonable citizen is able and willing to offer justifications for her views and actions, but is also prepared to consider alternate views, respond to criticism, answer objections, and, if necessary, revise or abandon her views. In short, reasonable citizens do not only believe and act for reasons, they aspire to believe and act according to the best reasons; consequently, they recognize their own fallibility in weighing reasons and hence engage in public deliberation in part for the sake of improving their views
.15 ‘Reasonableness’ as the deliberative democrat understands it is constituted by a willingness to participate in an ongoing public discussion that inevitably involves processes of self-examination by which one at various moments rethinks and revises one’s views in light of encounters with new arguments and new considerations offered by one’s fellow deliberators.
Hence

Gutmann and Thompson write: Citizens who owe one another justifications for the laws that they seek to impose must take seriously the reasons their opponents give
. Taking seriously the reasons one’s opponents give means that, at least for a certain range of views that one opposes, one must acknowledge the possibility that an opposing view may be shown to be correct in the future. This acknowledgement has implications not only for the way they regard their own views. It imposes an obligation to continue to test their own views, seeking forums in which the views can be challenged, and keeping open the possibility of their revision or even rejection
.16 (2000: 172) That Young’s activist is not reasonable in this sense is clear from the ways in which he characterizes his activism. He claims that ‘Activities of protest, boycott, and disruption are more appropriate means for getting citizens to think seriously about what until then they have found normal and acceptable’ (106); activist tactics are employed for the sake of ‘bringing attention’ to injustice
and making ‘a wider public aware of institutional wrongs’ (107).
These characterizations suggest the presumption that questions of justice are essentially settled; the activist takes
himself to know what justice is and
what its implementation
requires. He also believes he knows that those who oppose
him are either
the power-hungry beneficiaries of the unjust s tatus quo or the inattentive
and unaware masses who do not ‘think seriously’ about the injustice
of the institutions that govern their lives and so unwittingly accept them. Hence his political activity is aimed exclusively at enlisting other citizens in support of the cause to which he is tenaciously committed.
The activist implicitly holds that there could be no reasoned objection to his views concerning justice, and no good reason to endorse those institutions he deems unjust
. The activist presumes to know that no deliberative encounter could lead him to reconsider his position or adopt a different method of social action; he ‘declines’ to ‘engage persons he disagrees with’ (107) in discourse because he has judged on a priori grounds
that all opponents are either
pathetically benighted or balefully corrupt
. When one holds one’s view as the only responsible or just option, there is no need for reasoning with those who disagree, and hence no need to be reasonable.
According to the deliberativist, this is the respect in which the activist is unreasonable
. The deliberativist recognizes that questions of justice are difficult and complex
. This is the case not only because justice is a notoriously tricky philosophical concept, but also because, even supposing we had a philosophically sound theory of justice, questions of implementation are especially thorny.
Accordingly, political philosophers, social scientists, economists, and legal theorists continue to work on these questions. In light of much of this literature, it is difficult to maintain the level of epistemic confidence
in one’s own views that the activist seems to muster; thus the deliberativist sees the activist’s confidence as
evidence of a lack of honest engagement with the issues. A possible outcome of the kind of encounter the activist ‘declines’ (107) is the realization that the activist’s image of himself as a ‘David to the Goliath of power wielded by the state
and corporate actors’ (106) is naïve
.
That is, the deliberativist comes to see, through processes of public deliberation, that there are often good arguments to be found on all sides of an important social issue; reasonableness hence demands that one must especially engage the reasons of those with whom one most vehemently disagrees and be ready to revise one’s own views if necessar y. Insofar as the activist holds a view of justice that he is unwilling to put to the test of public criticism, he is unreasonable. Furthermore, insofar as the activist’s conception commits him to the view that there could be no rational opposition to his views, he is literally unable to be reasonable.
Hence the deliberative democrat concludes that activism, as presented by Young’s activist, is an unreasonable model of political engagement.
The dialogical conception of reasonableness adopted by the deliberativist also provides a response to the activist’s reply to the charge that he is engaged in interest group or adversarial politics
. Recall that the activist denied this charge on the grounds that activism is aimed not at private or individual interests, but at the universal good of justice. But this reply also misses the force of the posed objection. On the deliberativist view, the problem with interest-based politics does not derive simply from the source (self or group), scope (particular or universal), or quality (admirable or deplorable) of the interest, but with the concept of interests as such. Not unlike ‘preferences’, ‘interests’ typically function in democratic theory as fixed dispositions that are non-cognitive and hence unresponsive to reasons.
Insofar as the activist sees his view of justice as ‘given’ and not open to rational scrutiny, he is (they are) engaged in the kind of adversarial politics the deliberativist rejects.
The argument thus far might appear to turn exclusively upon different conceptions of what reasonableness entails.
The deliberativist view
I have sketched holds that reasonableness involves some degree of what we may call epistemic modesty
. On this view, the reasonable citizen seeks to have her beliefs reflect

the best available reasons, and so she enters into public discourse as a way of testing her views against the objections and questions of those who disagree
; hence she implicitly holds that her present view is open to reasonable critique and that others who hold opposing views may be able to offer justifications for their views that are at least as strong as her reasons for her own. Thus any mode of politics that presumes that discourse is extraneous to questions of justice and justification is unreasonable. The activist sees no reason to accept this. Reasonableness for the activist consists in the ability to act on reasons that upon due reflection seem adequate to underwrite action; discussion with those who disagree need not be involved.
According to the activist, there are certain cases in which he does in fact know the truth about what justice requires and in which there is no room for reasoned objection. Under such conditions, the deliberativist’s demand for discussion can only obstruct justice; it is therefore irrational. It may seem that we have reached an impasse. However, there is a further line of criticism that the activist must face. To the activist’s view that at least in certain situations he may reasonably decline to engage with persons he disagrees with (107), the deliberative democrat can raise the phenomenon that Cass
Sunstein has called ‘group polarization’ (
Sunstein, 2003; 2001a: ch. 3; 2001b: ch. 1). To explain: consider that political activists cannot eschew deliberation altogether; they often engage in rallies, demonstrations, teach-ins, workshops, and other activities in which they are called to make public the case for their views.
Activists also must engage in deliberation among themselves when deciding strategy. Political movements must be organized, hence those involved must decide upon targets, methods, and tactic s; they must also decide upon the content of their pamphlets and the precise messages they most wish to convey to the press. Often the audience in both of these deliberative contexts will be a self-selected and sympathetic group of like-minded activists. Group polarization is a well-documented phenomenon that has ‘been found all over the world and in many diverse tasks’; it means that ‘members of a deliberating group predictably move towards a more extreme point in the direction indicated by the members’ predeliberation tendencies’ (Sunstein, 2003: 81–2). Importantly, in groups that ‘engage in repeated discussions’ over time, the polarization is even more pronounced (2003: 86).
Hence discussion in a small but devoted activist enclave that meets regularly to strategize and protest ‘should produce a situation in which individuals hold positions more extreme than those of any individual member before the series of deliberations began’
(ibid.).17 The fact of group polarization is relevant to our discussion because the activist has proposed that he may reasonably decline to engage in discussion with those with whom he disagrees in cases in which the requirements of justice are so clear
that he can be confident that he has the truth.
Group polarization suggests that deliberatively confronting those with whom we disagree is essential even when we have the truth
. For even if we have the truth, if we do not
engage opposing views, but instead deliberate only with those with whom we agree, our view will shift progressively to a more extreme point, and thus we lose the truth .
In order to avoid polarization, deliberation must take place within heterogeneous ‘argument pools’ (Sunstein, 2003: 93). This of course does not mean that there should be no groups devoted to the achievement of some common political goal; it rather suggests that engagement with those with whom one disagrees is essential to the proper pursuit of justice. Insofar as the activist denies this, he is unreasonable.
John
, Professor of Social and Political Theory, The Australian National University, Reconciling Pluralism and Consensus as Political Ideals, American Journal of Political Science,Vol. 50, No. 3, July 2006, Pp. 634–649
A more radical contemporary pluralism is suspicious of liberal and communitarian devices for reconciling difference. Such a critical pluralism is associated with agonists such as Connolly
(1991), Honig (1993), and Mouffe
(2000), and difference democrats such as Young
(2000). As Honig puts it, “Difference is just another word for what used to be called pluralism” (1996, 60). Critical pluralists
resemble liberals in that they begin from the variety of ways it is possible to experience the world, but stress that the experiences and perspectives of marginalized
and oppressed groups are likely to be very different from dominant groups
.
They
also have a strong suspicion ofliberal theory that looks neutral but in
practice supports and serves the powerful.
Difference democrats are hostile to consensus
, partly because consensus
decisionmaking (of the sort popular in 1970s radical groups) conceals informal oppression
under the guise of concern for all by disallowing dissent (Zablocki 1980).
But the real target is political theory that deploys consensus, especially deliberative and liberal theory. Young (1996, 125–26) argues that the appeals to unity and the common good that deliberative theorists under sway of the consensus ideal stress as the proper forms of political communication can often be oppressive. For deliberation
so oriented all too easily equates the common good with

the interests of the more powerful
, thus sidelining legitimate concerns of the marginalized.
Asking the underprivileged to set aside their particularistic concerns also means marginalizing their favored forms of expression, especially the telling of personal stories
(Young 1996, 126).3 Speaking for an agonistic conception of democracy (to which Young also subscribes; 2000, 49–51),
Mouffe states: To
negate the ineradicable character of antagonism and aim at a universal rational consensus
— that is the real threat to democracy
.
Indeed, this can lead to violence
being unrecognized and hidden behind appeals to “ rationality
,” as is often the case in liberal thinking. (1996, 248) Mouffe is a radical pluralist: “By pluralism I mean the end of a substantive idea of the good life” (1996, 246).
But neither Mouffe nor Young want to abolish communication in the name of pluralism and difference
; much of their work advocates sustained attention to communication.
Mouffe also cautions against uncritical celebration of difference
, for some differences imply “subordination and should therefore be challenged by a radical democratic politics” (1996, 247).
Mouffe raises the question of the terms in which engagement across difference might proceed
. Participants should ideally accept that the positions of others are legitimate, though not as a result of being persuaded in argument. Instead, it is a matter of being open to conversion due to adoption of a particular kind of democratic attitude that converts antagonism into agonism, fighting into critical engagement
, enemies into adversaries who are treated with respect
. Respect here is notjust
(liberal) toleration, but positive validation of the position of others.
For Young, a communicative democracy would be composed of people showing “equal respect,” under “procedural rules of fair discussion and decisionmaking
” (
1996,
126). Schlosberg speaks of “agonistic respect” as “a critical pluralist ethos” (1999, 70).
Mouffe and
Young
both want pluralism to be regulated by a particular kind of attitude, be it respectful, agonistic, or even in Young’s (2000, 16–51) case reasonable.Thus neither proposes unregulated pluralism as an alternative to (deliberative) consensus
.
This regulation cannot be just procedural, for that would imply “anything goes” in terms of the substance of positions
. Recall thatMouffe rejects differences that imply subordination.
Agonistic ideals demand judgments about what is worthy of respect and what is not
. Connolly (1991, 211) worriesabout dogmatic assertions
and denials of identity that fuel existential resentments that would have to be changed to make agonism possible . Young seeks “transformation of private
, self-regarding desires into public appeals to justice
” (2000, 51). Thus for Mouffe, Connolly, and Young alike, regulative principles for democratic communication are not just attitudinal or procedural; they also refer to the substance of the kinds of claims that are worthy of respect
.
These authors
would not want to legislate substance and are suspicious of
the content of any alleged consensus
.
But in retreating from “anything goes” relativism, they need principles to regulate the substance of what rightfully belongs in democratic debate .
– (Christian Lundberg, Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
“Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D.
Louden, p311)
The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech
—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking
, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interestand money-driven

politics, it is a puzzling solution , at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education
(Dewey 1988,63, 154).
Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them
, to son rhroueh and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly infonnation-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them.
The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy
. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediatcd information environment
(ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other
Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional [debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' selfefficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity.
Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials.
There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in
the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities
.
The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life
. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and selfcritical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life . Expanding this practice is crucial , if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges , i ncluding: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change
; emerging threats to international stability
in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure.
More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill

and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with
the existential challenges
to democracy
[in an] increasingly complex world.
Themba
In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation
. Policies are the rules of the world we live in.
Changing the world means changing the rules
. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies
?
Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers
? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking
. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. What
Do We Stand For? Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work.
The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors.
Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in
Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps
.
Our members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being pushed over the edge by the new policies
.
Policy doesn't get more relevant than this.
And so we got involved in policy-as defense
. Yet we have to do more than block their punches.
We have to start the fight with initiatives of our own
. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for communitydriven initiatives. -
Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry
. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. -
Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991
. - Milwaukee, Boston, and
Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty.
These are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled
by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success
. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics
. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection.
For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all
400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized environment.
Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach.
To do so will require careful attention to the

mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for
. Getting It in Writing Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level.
Our demands can become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken
. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word
. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers
.
Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing
-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore.
Making policy work an integral part of organizing will require a certain amount of retrofittin g.
We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, and experience into stories that are designed to affect the public conversation. Perhaps most important, we will need to move beyond fighting problems and on to framing solutions that bring us closer to our vision of how things should be
. And then we must be committed to making it so.
Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, U of London, Saul, Theory & Event Volume 13, Issue 2
The ambiguity of Critchley’s position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the state is here to stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state?.... Why limit oneself to a politics which , as Critchley puts it,
‘ calls the state into question and calls the established order to account, not in order to do away with the state, desirable though that might be in some utopian sense, but in order to better it or to attenuate its malicious effects’?
These words simply demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society.16 Instead of working outside the state , Žižek claims that a more effective strategy - such as that pursued by the likes of
Hugo Chavez, or, indeed, Lenin - is to grasp state power and use its machinery ruthlessly to achieve one’s political objectives . In other words, if the state cannot be done away with, then why not use it for revolutionary ends?
There is, in this exchange, an echo of the old debate between the Bakunin and Marx in the First International. This is not to suggest that
Critchley is an anarchist in the classical sense. Nevertheless, this resurrection of the controversy over the state throws into sharp relief the dilemma confronting radical politics today: to take over the mechanisms of the state and use it to revolutionise society, or to work outside the state with the ultimate aim of transcending it through the development of alternative communities and practices. We have, with Žižek, the neo-
Leninist vanguard approach, and with Critchley, an alternative approach that tends in the direction of anarchism. Despite the obvious pitfalls of the Leninist vanguard strategy, we should nevertheless take Žižek’s challenge to Critchley seriously: that, in other words, the problem with the strategy of working outside the state is that it may essentially leave the state intact, and entail an irresponsible and even self-indulgent politics of demand which hides a secret reliance on the state to take care of the everyday running of society . Is there some truth to this claim?

Robert Hoppe is Professor of Policy and knowledge in the Faculty of Management and Governance at
Twente University, the Netherlands. "Argumentative Turn" Science and Public Policy, volume 26, number 3, June
1999, pages 201–210 works.bepress.com
ACCORDING TO LASSWELL (1971), policy science is about the production and application of knowledge of and in policy. Policy-makers who desire to tackle problems
on the political agenda successfully, should be able to mobilise the best available knowledge. This requires high-quality knowledge in policy. Policy-makers and, in a democracy, citizens,
also need to know how policy processes really evolve
.
This demands precise knowledge of policy.
There is an obvious link between the two: the more and better the knowledge of policy, the easier it is to mobilise knowledge in policy
.
Lasswell expresses this interdependence by defining the policy scientist's operational task as eliciting the maximum rational judgement of all those involved in policy-making. For the applied policy scientist or policy analyst this implies the development of two skills. First, for the sake of mobilising the best available knowledge in policy, he/she should be able to mediate between different scientific disciplines.
Second, to optimise the interdependence between science in and of policy, she/he should be able to mediate between science and politics. Hence Dunn's
(1994, page 84) formal definition of policy analysis as an applied social science discipline that uses multiple research methods in a context of argumentation, public debate
[and political struggle] to create, evaluate critically, and communicate policy-relevant knowledge
.
Historically, the differentiation and successful institutionalisation of policy science can be interpreted as the spread of the functions of knowledge organisation, storage, dissemination and application in the knowledge system (Dunn and Holzner, 1988; van de Graaf and Hoppe, 1989, page 29). Moreover, this scientification of hitherto 'unscientised' functions, by including science of policy explicitly, aimed to gear them to the political system. In that sense, Lerner and Lasswell's (1951) call for policy sciences anticipated, and probably helped bring about, the scientification of politics. Peter Weingart (1999) sees the development of the science-policy nexus
as a dialectical process of the scientification of politics/policy and the politicisation of science. Numerous studies of political controversies indeed show that science advisors behave like any other self-interested actor (Nelkin, 1995). Yet science somehow managed to maintain its
functional cognitive authority in politics. This may be because of its changing shape, which has been characterised as the emergence of a post-parliamentary and post-national network democracy (Andersen and Burns, 1996, pages 227-251). National political developments are put in
the background by ideas about uncontrollable, but apparently inevitable, international developments; in Europe, national state authority and power in public policy-making is leaking away to a new political and administrative elite, situated in the institutional ensemble of the
European Union. National representation is in the hands of political parties which no longer control ideological debate.
The authority and policy-making power of national governments is
also leaking away towards increasingly powerful policy-issue networks, dominated by functional representation by interest groups and practical experts
.
In this situation, public debate has become even more fragile than it was. It has become diluted by the predominance of purely pragmatic, managerial and administrative argument, and under-articulated as a result of an explosion of new political schemata that crowd out the more conventional ideologies. The new schemata do feed on the ideologies; but in larger part they consist of a random and unarticulated 'mish-mash' of attitudes and images derived from ethnic, local-cultural, professional, religious, social movement and personal political experiences.
The marketplace of political ideas and arguments is thriving; but
on the other hand, politicians and citizens are at a loss to judge its nature and quality. Neither political parties, nor public officials, interest groups, nor social movements and citizen groups, nor even the public media show any inclination, let alone competency, in ordering this inchoate field
.
In such conditions, scientific debate provides a much needed minimal amount of order and articulation of
concepts, arguments and ideas
. Although frequently more in rhetoric than substance, reference to scientific 'validation' does provide politicians, public officials and citizens alike with some sort of compass in an ideological universe in disarray
.
For policy analysis to have any political impact under such conditions, it should be able somehow to continue
who are ideologically uprooted, but cling to power; to the elites of administrators, managers, professionals and experts who vie for power in the jungle of organisations populating the functional policy

domains of post-parliamentary democracy; and to a broader audience of an ideologically disoriented and politically disenchanted citizenry.

Steven
Doublas
, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, 1991 pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/pomo/index.html
In general, while Foucault has developed an interesting new perspective that overcomes some of the problems of his genealogical stage, such as speaking of political resistance on one hand and rejecting the category of the subject on the other, he creates for himself a whole new set of problems. In particular, he does not adequately mediate the shift from technologies of domination to technologies of the self and fails to clarify the connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. He did not, therefore, accomplish his task ‘to show the interaction between these two types of self
(Foucault 1982c: p. 10), between the constituted and constituting self.
Thus, he leaves untheorized the problem of how technologies of the self can flourish in our present era which, as he claims, is saturated with power relations
.
His attempts to situate discursive shifts within a social and historical setting remain vague and problematic
(for example, his attempt to ‘explain’ the social and political forces behind the Roman cultivation of the self; see 1988a: pp. 71-95). Moreover, Daraki notes (1986), there is a symptomatic displacement of politics and democracy in Foucault’s study of the Greeks. His focus is solely on sexuality and the techniques of self-constitution rather than on the Greek practices of democratic self-government. Foucault stresses that mastery of the self is essential for mastery of others, but nowhere discusses the constitution of the self through democratic social practices. This omission points to a typical ignoring of democracy, a word he rarely employs, which points to his decentring of politics and his individualistic tendencies, since democracy is a socially constituted project
. And
Foucault downplays the importance of the demise of the city state in the transition from Greece to Rome, as if the disappearance of democracy was not a key factor in the ‘with­drawal into the self
’ in Rome which Foucault himself presents as a key feature of the era.
Foucault’s continued refusal to specify alternative modes of subjectivity and social organization to those of modernity, and to develop a normative standpoint from which to criticize domination and project alternative forms of social and individual organization undermines the critical import of his work
. Against conventional Foucault scholarship, Gandal (1986) persuasively argues that Foucault resists specifying his values and normative beliefs not because he feared reproducing power (
Foucault understood that everything is more or less cooptable
), but because he was con­cerned strictly with the strategic uses of his ideas, rather than their justifications. While Gandal provides a lucid account of Foucault’s politics, his apologetics fail to grasp that
Foucault’s refusal to specify his normative commitments, whatever the practical efficacy of his positions, forces him into vague formulations, as when it prevents him from clarifying what our freedom should be from and for
.

Assistant Professor of Law, University of San Diego, Orly, Harvard Law Review, 120 Harv. L. Rev. 937,
Vitz
The concerns about the nature of civil society and non-governmental actors illuminate the need to reject the notion of opting out to a non-regulated sphere and avoiding the legal system in
alternative social activism
. Rather, when we understand these different realities and processes as similarly formed and sustained by law, we can continue to explore new ways in which legality relates to social reform
.
Some of these new ways include efforts to design mechanisms of accountability
that address the concerns of the new political economy, such as treating private entities as state actors
by revising the tests of joint participation and public function as applied to the state action doctrine; extending public prohibitions such as non-discrimination, due process, and transparency requirements
to private actors; and developing procedural rules for such activities as standard-setting and certification by private groups
.169 They may also include using the non-delegation doctrine to prevent certain processes of privatization and rethinking tax exemption criteria of non-profits.170
All of these possible avenues continue to understand the law as serving significant roles in the quest for reform and accountability
, while recognizing that new realities require creative rethinking of existing courses of action.
Rather than opting out of the legal arena, it is possible to accept the need to diversify modes of activism and legal categories, while continuing to use legal reform in multiple ways that are responsive to new realities
.
Focusing on function and architecture
, rather than
on labels
or distinct sectors requires legal scholarship to consider the desirability of new legal models of governmental and non-governmental partnerships, as well as the direct regulation of non-state actors. In recent years, there has been an emerging body of literature, rooted primarily in the administrative law field, in which scholars and policy makers are interested in improving the ways in which government can harness the potential of private individuals to contribute to the project of governance.171 These new insights develop the idea that administrative agencies must take cognizance of and actively involve the particular private actors that they are charged with regulating. These studies, in such fields ranging from occupational risk prevention, through environmental policy to financial legality, draw on the understanding that groups and individuals will better comply with state norms once they internalize them
.172 For example, in the context of occupational safety, there is a growing body of evidence that focusing on the implementation of a culture of safety,
rather than on the promulgation of rules, can enhance compliance
and induce effective self-monitoring by private firms. Consequently, social activists interested in raising the conditions of safety and health f or workers can benefit from advocating the involvement of employees in cooperative compliance regimes that involve both top-down agency regulation and firm and industry- wide risk management techniques. Importantly
, in all of these new governance fields of inquiry, the government agency and the courts must preserve their authority to discipline those who lack the willingness or the capacity to actively and dynamically participate in collaborative governance
. Thus, unlike the contemporary message of extra-legal activism which robustly privileges private actors
and non-legal techniques to promote social goals
, the new governance scholarship is engaged in developing a broad menu of law reform strategies that involves private industry and nongovernmental actors in a variety of ways while assuming the necessary role of the state to aid weaker groups to promote greater welfare and equity.
A responsive legal architecture has the potential to generate new forms of accountability and social responsibility and to link between hard law and “softer” practices and normativities.
Legal reform
in the contemporary era retains the potential to increase power and access of vulnerable individuals

and groups and to develop tools to increase fair practices and knowledge building within the new market
Assistant Professor of Law, University of San Diego, Orly, Harvard Law Review, 120 Harv. L. Rev. 937,
Vitz
In the following sections, I argue that in the effort to avoid the risk of legal cooptation, the current wave of suggested alternatives produces a mirror result of practical and conceptual cooptation.
Three central types of difficulties exist with contemporary extra-legal scholarship. First, in the former contexts of the labor movement and the civil rights era, arguments about legal cooptation often developed in response to a perceived gap between the conceptual ideal toward which a social reform group struggles and its actual implementation. Paradoxically, in the contemporary message of opting out of traditional legal reforms avenues
, this problem is in fact accentuated
.
As the move to such concepts as informalization
-- moving to non-legal strategies, civil society
– moving to extra-legal spheres, and pluralism -- the proliferation of norm-generating actors
, has been developed and appropriated by supporters from a wide range of political commitments, these concepts have had unintended implications that are in conflict with the very social reform ideals from which they stem
. Second, the idea of opting-out of the legal arena becomes self-defeating as it conceals the on-going importance of law and the possibilities of law reform in seemingly unregulated spheres.
A model of exit and rigid sphere distinctions further fails to recognize a reality of increasing interpenetration and blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres;
profit and non-profit sectors; and formal and informal institutions.
It therefore loses the critical insight that understands law as operating in the background of seemingly unregulated relationships.
Finally, the romantic notion of a privileged sphere, mode and means of action fails to develop tools for evaluating its success
. If the critique of legal cooptation has involved the argument that legal reform, even when viewed as a victory, is never radically transformative, we must ask what are the criteria for assessing the achievements of the suggested alternatives? As shall be illustrated in the following sections, much of the current scholarship obscures the lines between the descriptive and the prescriptive in its exploration and formulation of social activism
. If current suggestions present themselves as an alternative to formal legal struggles, we must question whether the new extra-legal politics that are proposed and celebrated are capable of producing a constructive theory and meaningful channels for reform, rather than passive status quo politics
The rejection of legal means move towards extra-legal means of resistance reifies and is utilized by conservatives Lobel, 7 Assistant Professor of Law, University of San Diego, Orly,
Harvard Law Review, 120 Harv. L. Rev. 937, Vitz
Practical Failures: When Extra-Legal Alternatives Are Vehicles For
Conservative Agendas
We don’t want the 1950s back. We want to edit them. We want to keep the safe streets, the friendly grocers, and the milk and cookies, while blotting out the political bosses, the tyrannical headmasters, the inflexible rules, and the lectures on 100% Americanism and the sinfulness of dissent.135
A basic structure of cooptation arguments as developed in relation to the labor and civil rights movements has been to show how in the move from theory to practice, the ideal that was promoted by a social group receives unintended content, thus failing to realize the original vision.
This is particularly true when concepts are framed in broad terms that are open to multiple interpretations
. The pitfalls of the range of risks presented under the umbrella of cooptation are in fact accentuated in current proposals. Paradoxically, current suggestions that are framed by way of opposition to formal law reform paths risk precisely such cooptative meanings
. Extra-legal paths are depicted mostly in negative terms, as resorting to alternative forms of action than former models.
Accordingly, because the ideas of organizing, civil society and legal pluralism are framed in open-ended contrarian terms, they do not translate into specific visions of social justice reform .
The case of civil society, which has been embraced by people from a broad array of, and indeed often conflicting, ideological commitments, is particularly demonstrative. As Alan Wolfe has

argued, “some ideas fail because they never make the light of day. The idea of civil society…failed because it became too popular.”136 In former eras, the claims about the legal cooptation of the transformative visions of workplace justice and racial equality was that through legal strategies the vision became stripped from the initial depth;
fragmented and framed in ways that were narrow and often merely symbolic. In the contemporary political map
, the idea civil society revivalism has been evoked by progressive activists and subsequently reduced to symbolic acts with very little substance
. On the left, progressive advocates envision the idea of decentralized activism in a third, non-governmental sphere as a way of reviving democratic participation and rebuilding the state from the bottom up
. By contrast, the idea of civil society has been embraced by conservative politicians as a means for replacing government funded programs and steering away from state intervention
. Subsequently, recent uses
of civil society have subverted the ideals of progressive social reform
and replaced them with conservative agendas that reject egalitarian ideals of social provision.
In particular, recent calls to strengthen civil society have been advanced by politicians interested in the dismantling the modern welfare system
.
Conservative civil society revivalism often equates the idea of self-help through extra-legal means with traditional family structures
, and blames the breakdown of those structures (e.g., the rise of the single parent family) for the increase in reliance and dependency on government aid.137 This recent depiction of the third sphere of civic life is averse to legal reform precisely because state intervention may support newer, non-traditional social structures.
For conservative thinkers, legal reform also risks reifying increased dependency on social services by groups who have been traditionally marginalized
, including disproportionate reliance on public funds by people of color and single mothers. Indeed, the end of “welfare as we knew it,”138 as well as transformation of “work as we knew it,”139 has led thinkers from all sides of the political spectrum to seek a third space that could replace the traditional functions of work and welfare.
Paradoxically, a range of liberal and conservative visions have thus converged into the same agendas, such as the recent welfare-towork reforms, which rely on a myriad of non-governmental institutions and activities to support these new arrangements
.140 Drawing on the range of unbundled cooptation categories, it becomes evident that the limits of the contemporary extra-legal currant are multiple. First, there have been significant problems with resources and zero sum energies in recent campaigns surrounding community development and welfare. For example, the initial vision of welfare to work supported by liberal reformers was that of a multifaceted, dynamic system that would reshape the roles and responsibilities of welfare bureaucracy. President Clinton’s 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
(PRWORA)141 was designed to convert various welfare programs, including the Assistance for Family with Dependent Children (AFDC), into a single block grant program and to convert passive cash assistance into a more active welfare system, where individuals are to be better assisted, by both government and the community, to return to the labor force and find opportunities to support themselves.142 Yet, from the broader vision to actual implementation, the program quickly became limited in focus and in resources. PRWORA placed new limits on welfare provision by eliminating eligibility categories and by placing rigid time limits on provision of benefits. The need to frame the questions of poverty in institutional arrangements, professional jargon, and to comply with various funding block grants has made some issues such as statistical reduction of welfare recipients more salient in the reform, while other issues, such as the quality of jobs offered, have been largely eliminated from the policy thinking. Even those of aspects of the reform were hailed as empowering for those groups they were designed to help,
141 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, 1996, Public law 104-193, 110 STAT. 2105 (converting the Assistance for Family with
Dependent Children (AFDC), the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills program, and other welfare programs into a single block grant program to be used by states to provide cash and other benefits to individuals and families in need). 142 Barbara L. Bezdek, Contractual Welfare: Non-Accountability and Diminished Democracy in
Local Government Contracts for Welfare-to-Work Services, 28 Fordham Urb. L.J. 1559, 1589 (2001). 48 like individual private training vouchers, there have been serious questions raised about the adequacy of the particular policy design when resources and institutional support are found lacking. As in the areas in the case of child care, health care, and educational vouchers, critiques worry that the most disadvantaged workers in the new market will not be able to take advantage of these reforms and that poverty will become the justification, rather than the goal, of these arrangements. In terms of classical cooptation critique, once reforms are envisioned, even when they need not be frame in legalistic terms, they in some ways become reduced to a handful of issues, while fragmenting, neglecting, and ultimately naturalizing other possibilities.
At this point, the paradox of extra-legal activism unfolds. While public interest thinkers are increasingly embracing an axiomatic rejection of law as the primary form of progress
, an embrace of a non-legal alternative presents parallel risks
.
The rejection of the
“myth of the law/rights” is replaced by a “ myth of activism ” or the “myth of exit,” romanticizing a distinct sphere that can better solve social conflict.
Yet, the myth, like other myths, comes complete with its own perpetual perils.
The myth of exit exemplifies the myriad of concerns of cooptation
. For feminist agendas for example, the separation of the world into distinct spheres of action has been a continuous impediment. Efforts to bring better possibilities for women to balance work and family responsibilities, including efforts to relax home work rules and to support stay-at-home parents in federal childcare legislation, have been couched in terms of support of individual choice and private decision making.143 Indeed, recent initiatives to support stay-at-home parents in federal childcare legislation have been clouded with preconceptions of the separation of spheres and the need to make one-or-the-other life choices. Most importantly, the 143 Nancy E. Dowd,
Work and Family: Restructuring the Workplace, 32 Ariz. Law Rev. 431 (1990). 49 emergence of a sphere-oriented discourse abandons a critical perspective that

distinguishes between valorizing traditionally gendered characteristics and celebrating feminine difference in a universalistic and essentialist manner.144 Not surprisingly then, some feminists writers have responded to civil society revivalism with great skepticism, arguing that efforts to align feminine values and agendas with classical republican theory of civil society activism should be understood at least in part as a way of legitimizing historical social structures in which women were traditionally subordinated
.145 The feminist lesson surrounding the law/exit pendulum reveals a broader pattern.
In a classic schematic analysis of cooptation, activists should in effect be concerned about the infusion
(or indeed confusion
) of nonlegal strategies with conservative privatization agendas
. In significant social policy contexts, legal scholarship oriented toward the exploration of extra-legal paths reinforces the exact narrative that is originally resisted
-- that the state cannot and should not be accountable for sustaining and improving the lifeworld
of individuals in the 21st century economy and that we must seek alternative ways to bring social reform. Whether described as a pathdependent process, an inevitable downward spiral, a transnational prisoner’s dilemma, or a necessary global race-to-the-bottom, in practice current analyses often suggest a lack of control vis-à-vis the forces of new economic realities. Rat her than countering the story of lack of control, pointing to the on-going role of government
, and showing the contradictions between that which is being kept regulated and that which is privatized, alternative extra-legal scholarship accepts these developments as natural and inevitable
.
Similarly to the 144 Judith Stacey, IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY: RETHINKING FAMILY VALUES IN THE POSTMODERN AGE (1995). See also, Frances Olsen, The Family and the Market, Harv. L. Rev. 145 Nancy E. Dowd, WORK AND FAMILY: RESTRUCTURING THE WORKPLACE, 32 Ariz. L. Rev. 431, 486 (1990); Suzanna Sherry, Civic
Virtue and the Feminine Voice in Constitutional Adjudication, 72 Virginia Law Rev. 543 (1986). 50 arguments developed in relation to the labor movement, where to focus on a limited right to collective bargaining demobilized workers and stripped them from their demands of voice, participation and decision making powers, contemporary agendas are limited to very narrow and patterned sets of reforms. A striking example has been the focus on welfare reform as the single frontier of economic redistribution without relating these reforms to on-going commitments to social services in which the middle class has a strong interest, such as Social
Security and Medicare. Similarly, on the legal pluralism frontier, when activists call for more corporate social responsibility, the initial expressions are those of broad demands for ssustainable development and overall obligations of industry for the social and environmental consequences of their activities.146 The discourse however quickly becomes coopted with a shift to a narrow focus on charitable donations and corporate philanthrophy or private reporting absent an institutionalized compliance structure. Moreover, because of institutional limitations and crowding out effects, the focus quickly becomes thinking of the benefits of
CSR to businesses, as a marketing, recruitment strategy, public relations and “greenwashing” strategies. Critics thereby become deeply cynical about the real commitments by industry actual motivations for ethical conduct. A similar process can be described with regard to the literature on globalization.
Globalization scholarship often attempts to produce a unifying narrative and an image of unitary struggle when in fact such unity does not exist
. Embodied in the aforementioned irony of a “global antiglobalization” movement, social reform activism that resides under the umbrella of global movements is greatly diverse, some of it highly conservative .
An “anti-globalization movement” can be a defensive nationalist movement 146
World Business Council for Sustainable Development, CSR: Meeting Changing Expectations, 1999. 51 infused with xenophobia and protective ideologies
.147 In fact, during central instances of collective action, such as those in Seattle, Quebec, Puerto Alegre, and Genoa, competing and conflicting claims have been frequently encompassed in the same momentary protest.148 Nevertheless, there is a tendency to celebrate and idealize these protests and infuse them with a world-altering image. Similarly, at the local level, grassroots politics often lack a clear agenda and are particularly ripe for cooptation processes whereby activists produce far lesser results than what may have been expected by the groups they represent. In a critical introduction of the Law and
Organizing model, Cummings and Eagly, describe the ways in which new community-based approaches to progressive lawyering privilege grassroots movement politics over law reform efforts and privilege the facilitation of community mobilization over conventional lawyering
.
When the ways the ways in which law and organizing are currently embraced by community lawyers are carefully unpack,
Cummings and Eagly rightfully warn against “exaggerating the ineffectiveness of traditional legal interventions” and
“closing off potential avenues for redress.”
149 Significantly, the strategies
embraced by new public interest lawyers have not been demonstrated to produce effective change in the communities and
certainly there has been no assurance that these strategies fair comparatively better than legal reform
. Moreover, what are meant to be progressive projects of community action and community economic development can frequently entail an underlying effect of excluding worse-off groups, such as migrant workers, from their limited geographical 147 See Cecilia Lynch, Social Movements and the Problem of Globalization, 23 Alternatives 149 (1998); 148
Frederick M. Abbott, TRIPS in Seattle: The Not-So-Surprising Failure and the Future of the TRIPS Agenda, 18 Berkeley J. Int'l L. 165 (2000). 149 Id at 491. 52 scope.150 Again, like with the corporate social responsibility movement, and similarly to the ways critical scholars have assessed the decline of the labor movement framework through the embrace of a legal framework, a feature of the community economic development, which has become since the early 1990s a dominant approach to poverty relief, is its appeal to diverse ideological agendas.151 In all of these cases, it is the act of engagement, not law, which holds the risks of cooptation and the politics of compromise. It is not the particularities

of lawyers as a professional group that creates dependency.
Rather, it is the dynamics
between skilled, networked and resourced components in the organization and those who need them that may submerge goals and create reliance.
It is not the particularities of the structural limitations of the judiciary that threaten to limit the progressive vision of social movements
. Rather, it is the essential difficulties of implementing theory into practice
. Life is simply messier than any abstract ideals. Cooptation analysis exposes the broader risk of assuming ownership over a rhetorical and conceptual framework. Subsequently, when, in practice, others factions in the political debate embrace the language and frame their projects in similar terms, groups experience a sense of loss of control or possession of “their” vision. In the contemporary context, in the absence of a more programmatic concrete vision of what alternative models of social reform activism need to achieve, the conclusions and rhetoric of the contemporary critical legal consciousness are appropriated by a wide range of political commitments. Understood from this 150 Audrey G. McFarlane, Race, Space, and Place: The Geography of Economic Development, 36 San
Diego L. Rev. 295, 318-19 (1999). 151 Scott Cummings, 54 Stan. L. Rev. 399, supra note_; William H. Simon, THE COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
MOVEMENT: LAW, BUSINESS AND NEW SOCIAL POLICY (2002); Daniel S. Shah, Lawyering for Empowerment: Community Development and Social Change, 6 Clinical
L. Rev. 217, 218 (1999); Patricia A. Wilson, Empowerment: Community Economic Development from the Inside Out, 33 Urban Studies 617 (1996); Louise A. Howells,
The Dimensions of Microenterprise: A Critical Look at Microenterprise as a Tool to Alleviate Poverty, 9 J. Affordable Housing & Community Dev. L. 161(2000). 53 perspective, cooptation is not the result of the turn to a particular reform strategy
. Rather, cooptation occurs when imagined ideals are left unchecked and seemingly progressive rhetoric is produced by a conservative agenda.
Dominant meanings such as privatization and market competitiveness come ahead, while other meanings, such as progressive ideals including group empowerment and redistributive justice, serve to facilitate and stabilize the process
.1
Stefan, Prof @ Brock U, In Praise of Ressentiment: OR, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
Glen Beck, APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1642232
Ressentiment is not jealous: It is not necessary to maintain consistency of political message across time and context.
Ressentiment can be cultivated
via the assignment of blame to political enemies while simultaneous speaking of a politics of reconciliation, bipartisanship, and aisle-crossing. Ronald Reagan coupled an insouciant optimism and personal charm with deft demonization of evil empires, welfare queens, and their fellow travelers. Left politicians misunderstand the Rightist criticism of “flip-flopping” because they take the critic to literally mean what he or she says . The Rightists do not mean this, and they know it. The flipflopping of one’s political allies is as meaningless as the flip- flopping of one’s foes is evidence of hypocrisy, weakness, indecisiveness, etc. Thus one sees plenty of politicians who play to opposite registers (resentment now, reconciliation later) and who are not punished; the ones who are , like John Kerry, are punished not for 25 fli p-flopping but for being too dull-witted to understand the nature of the game they are playing. Ressentiment should be cultivated at the most general level possible, though without ruling out the use of specifics: Personalized narratives of woe are crucial to the refinement of ressentiment, but this should not be taken as license to “go specific” at all costs. In particular, examples of particular people should be used carefully, as the most important element of the exemplar is that a general audience be able to their own story mirrored in the spectacle of misery being displayed before them. While there are numerous possible foci for such a generalized ressentiment, the corporation and the government agencies beholden to corporate capitalism still seems the most likely and most fruitful targets of opportunity . It is crucial, however, to maintain the rhetoric of equality of opportunity and the defense of the small businessman amidst the critique of the corporation. If this seems like an impossible feat, consider that it is no more inherently difficult than Reagan’s rhetorical evisceration of “Big
Government” while simultaneously creating the creating the largest American federal government in history. Of course there was a contradiction at the heart of his program – but does identifying this as a debating point have any real effect? Ressentiment is inevitable as long as consumer capitalism holds sway, according to the theorists most prized by the Left, so we had better make our peace with her : This is not to reify ressentiment, as I have stated before, but it is to say that the Left more so than the Right has reason to utilize ressentiment with a good conscience. It is from the Left that 26 we hear the narrative of capitalism as a ressentiment-producing engine
of amazing power (Connolly 1988; Brown 1993), and unless capitalism is about to pass from the scene, which seems wishful thinking of the most extreme nature, the Left should be harnessing the energy of this current rather than simply criticizing it.
There are many filaments that comprise the fiber of the American Left, but whether indebted to the theories of Marx, Nietzsche, or Rawls , most of these strands implicitly link their political programs to the ressentiment-producing apparatuses of contemporary society . Indeed, Wendy Brown implies that ressentiment is responsible for “welfare-state liberalism” as such in the form of “attenuations of the unmitigated license of the rich and powerful on behalf of the
‘disadvantaged’” (Brown 1993, 400). Perhaps I am being unfair here to Brown, but it sounds as if the welfare state is a rather tawdry achievement. While I have no interest in further propping up the status quo, it seems worth noting that

ressentiment’s acknowledged role in the creation of liberal democracy, here scoffed at by Brown, is no small thing.
Ressentiment is patient, but not infinitely so. If, as Melissa Lane observes in her study of Plato’s Statesman, a sense of timing is the sine qua non of the political ruler (Lane 1998), then we must be sensitive to the kairos, the right moment for the deployment of a ressentiment -filled rhetoric. It would be difficult to imagine a more opportune moment than the present recession for cultivating a sense of working-class victimage , yet, oddly enough, it is the Right rather than the Left which has been carrying the banner of anti- finance capital. How is this possible? When one is the party in power in the United States it is difficult to govern without the consent of the barons of Wall Street, and the 27 Democrats must be particularly solicitous of the favor of the financial elites since a collapsing Dow Jones, ever skittish of “statist” Democratic interference, is prone to regard even the mildest brand of Democratic populism as the equivalent of the
October Revolution. Democratic elites have felt it necessary to go the extra mile around a horse as shy as this one, and coupled with the particular friendships and connections between Obama and his economic advisors, who read like a who’s who of Goldman Sachs alums, and it is easy to understand why it is Glenn Beck rather than Barack Obama who has taken up the populist mantle. That said, opportunities like this do not come along often, and pivotal electoral moments can reshape the political landscape for decades.
The crucial question to ask is how the needs of the resentful many can be squared with the need to placate corporate power (i.e. to prevent stock markets from crashing, capital fleeing overseas, international economic sanctions , etc.). Populists from South America to Europe have found multiple answers to this question, so the dilemma is not an insoluble one. But in order to address this tension the Left must first give up its utopian hope that the Beloved
Community is around the corner, and that all that is needed to get there is one final psychological purge. The resentful are going to be here for a long time to come , as Brown and Connolly ably demonstrate, s o Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their successors must begin to think more creatively about how to combine the politics of hope with the politics of blame . After Ressentiment In closing I would suggest that my praise of ressentiment is also in line with the more deliberatively conceived multiculturalism of the Left than is the current puritanical disdain. As Monique Deveaux argues, it is a failure of political imagination when we 28 fixate on liberal principles as preconditions to multicultural dialogue, and in particular it is necessary to move toward a deeper level of intercultural respect rather than mere toleration (Deveaux 2000).10 But if it is appropriate to go beyond simply tolerating non- liberal peoples abroad and in immigrant communities, if we must go beyond toleration to do justice to the rich tradition of cultural pluralism, then perhaps we can also open our hearts and minds to the possibility that the ressentiment-suffused need to be heard out as well.
Perhaps rather than demonizing ressentiment as a toxin to politics, as the worst of the worst for subjects whom we purport to free, we must accept that ressentiment is for many inseparable from their conception of their own freedom
. Perhaps rather than pitying these poor fools, in ways that we would never pity a plural wife in the global
South, we should ponder whether ressentiment as a precondition of subjectivity is as much a gift as a curse.
And are we so sure, after all, we late Nietzscheans, that our crusade against ressentiment is not itself suffused with ressentiment? Is not itself fully in the grips of it? How would we know if it were or weren’t? Perhaps we are, in our own way, as spiteful, vain, petty, weak, subjected, enraged against the past, capitalized, consumerized, unfree, as those we purport to want to free from the chains of slave morality. Perhaps it is ourselves that we need to give a break to, that we need to get over, when we first look to purge the other of ressentiment. Perhaps we all swim in this current, perhaps we are all
Ressentiment’s children, and perhaps that is OK – even to the extreme of the using ressentiment unconsciously in the effort to rid the world of ressentiment
. Though just in saying so I wouldn’t expect that to do much to overturn
Ressentiment’s reign. No, she is far too puissant for that. But we do not need to rage against the weakness in others because we fear the dependence and weakness in ourselves . As Vetlesen puts it, defending Amery: “ Against Nietzsche, who despised victims because he saw them as weak, as losers in life’s struggles, Amery upholds the dignity of having been forced by circumstances beyond one’s control into that position, thus reminding Nietzsche that as humans we are essentially relational beings, dependent, not self-sufficient. In hailing the strong and despising the weak, in denying that vulnerability is a basic ineluctably given human condition, a condition from which not only the role of victim springs but that of the morally responsible agent too, Nietzsche fails to be the provocateur he loves to believe he is: He sides with the complacent majority and so helps reinforce the existential and moral loneliness felt by Amery, the individual victim who speaks up precisely in that capacity” (Vetlesen 2006, 43). Perhaps we can begin to see how we have been using the weak
, the viewers of Glenn Beck and others, as the targets for our need to find blameworthy agents. And that too is fine. The trouble comes when we think we’ve gone beyond Ressentiment when in fact we’re just listening to her whisperings without realizing it.
We think that we can well and truly look down on the Rush
Limbaughs, these destroyers of civilization, because they are possessed by something that we are above. And far be it from me to suggest that we should not resent, should not blame; I merely suggest we direct our blame toward more useful ends than where it is currently located.

2NC

Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, U of London, Saul, Theory & Event Volume 13, Issue 2
There are two aspects that I would like to address here. Firstly, the notion of demand: making certain demands on the state – say
for higher wages, equal rights for excluded groups
, to not go to war, or an end to draconian policing – is one of the basic strategies of social movements and radical groups. Making such demands does not necessarily mean working within the state or reaffirming its legitimacy.
On the contrary, demands are made from a position outside the political order, and they often exceed the question of the implementation of this or that specific measure. They implicitly call into question the legitimacy and even the sovereignty of the state by highlighting fundamental inconsistencies between
, for instance, a formal constitutional order which guarantees certain rights and equalities, and state practices which in reality violate and deny them
.
Jacques Rancière gives a succinct example of this when he discusses Olympe de Gouges, who, at the time of the French Revolution, demanded that women be given the right to go to the Assembly. In doing so, she demonstrated the inconsistency between the promise of equality – invoked in a general sense and yet denied in the particular by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen – and the political order which was formally based on this: “They acted as subjects that did not have the rights that they had and had the rights that they had not.”17
While this was a demand for inclusion within the political order, it at the same time exposed a fissure or inconsistency in this order that was potentially destabilising, thus seeking to transcend the limits of that order . Let’s take another example: the demand to end draconian border control measures and to guarantee the rights of ‘illegal’ migrants. While this is also a demand, to some extent, for the inclusion of those currently excluded from the nation state order, it nevertheless comes from a place outside it – challenging the sovereign prerogative of the nation state to determine its borders. It also highlights central contradictions and tensions within global capitalism and its relation to the nation state: while global capitalism claims to promote the free movement of people
(as well as capital and technology) across borders, it appears to be having precisely the opposite effect - the intensification of existing borders and the erection of new ones,
not to mention the more general control and restrictions placed on the movement of people within national territories.
In demanding an end to increasingly brutal border control and surveillance measures , and in mobilising people around this issue, activist groups are engaging in a form of politics which ultimately calls into question the very principle of state sovereignty.
The question of the excessiveness or ‘irresponsibility’ of such demands should be turned around: they are demands that are driven by an ‘anarchic’ responsibility
for the liberty and equality of others. While a radical politics of today would not be limited to the articulation of demands, and indeed would seek to go beyond this by building viable alternatives to the state, we should nevertheless acknowledge the radical potential of making demands and the position of autonomy already implicit within this practice.
The second aspect of Žižek’s critique is the question of the extent to which an anarchist politics outside the state implicitly relies on the continuity of the state. To what extent does this sort of politics signify a retreat or withdrawal from the responsibilities of wielding state power, allowing things to continue as normal, or even to get worse if, for instance, far right forces manage to gain control of the state? In response to this, it could be argued that far right forces have, in the past, used both parliamentary and non-parliamentary means to gain power – and indeed, the formal, parliamentary left has often been entirely ineffective in preventing this. Resistance to far right forces can only be effective if a genuine political alternative is conceivable , and this would require

the mobilisation of people not so much at the state level – i.e. elections – but at the level of civil society .
Moreover, one of the ways of demonstrating the capacity of non-state political alternatives is the development of autonomous communities, collectives and organisations which exist beyond the control of the state. The countless experiments in autonomous politics taking place everywhere
– squatters’ movements, social centres , indigenous collectives, land re-occupation movements, blockades , worker occupations,
alternative media centres, communes, numerous activist networks, and so on – are evidence of this possibility.
It is here that I would want to push Critchley’s argument beyond its own limits. Critchley is right to suggest that the state today is too powerful for full scale assaults, and that a more effective strategy is working around it, at the interstices of state power. However, this does not mean that the state is a permanent, inevitable feature of political life
– as Critchley seems to suggest.18
If autonomous communities and organisations are increasingly able to perform the functions traditionally carried out by the state
– for example, the way that in the wake of the economic crisis in
Argentina in 2001, cooperatives and local assemblies provided basic social services in the absence of a functioning government – then the future of the state is by no means guaranteed.
(Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory, Goldsmiths, University of London, “Anarchism and
Law: Towards a Post-Anarchist Ethics of Disobedience,” Griffith Law Review (2012) Vol. 21 No. 2
I do not want by any means to rule out the possibility of a stateless society without law, nor suggest that people are incapable of organising their lives on a voluntary and cooperative basis. Indeed, there can be no conception of anarchism without taking this possibility seriously.
What may be questioned, however, is the idea that this order is somehow immanent within social relations and based on natural foundations.
Instead, I would propose a shift of ground – or, better yet, a shifting ground or groundless ground – on which to base the possibilities of disobedience, resistance and insurrection. One way to think about this is through a reconfiguring of the idea of anarchy.
I have thus far discussed two contrasting figures of anarchy: one is that which forms the background to the law, the Hobbesian anarchy of lawless violence which provides, in legal theory, the justification for the law (here we could also include the anomic condition of the state of exception, which is a kind of anarchy of the law); the second is the anarchist reading of anarchy, which refers to society’s capacities for independent, peaceful and autonomous self-organisation beyond the state and the law. The problem with these two conceptions – as different as they are – is that they are both essentialist and assume a certain image of social relations, one dark and violent, the other harmonious and rational. Instead of this, we could think about a form of ontological
anarchism or ‘an-archy’, referring to a deconstruction or displacement of absolute foundations and essential identities – including those that found the order of law, and those that found the order of post-law. Here, Reiner Schurmann refers to the ‘withering away’ of arche invoked in Heidegger’s idea of the closure of metaphysics. Unlike in metaphysical thinking, where action has always to be derived from and determined by a first principle,
‘“anarchy” ... always designates the withering away of such a rule, the relaxing of its hold’.
56
Importantly,
Schurmann distinguishes this
notion of ‘anarchy’, or the ‘anarchy principle’, from
the classical anarchism
of Proudhon,
Kropotkin, Bakunin and others, who sought ‘to displace the origin, to substitute
the “ rational power
”, principium, for the power of authority
, princeps – as metaphysical an operation as there has been’.57 In other words, classical anarchists sought to abolish legal-political authority, yet they proclaimed another kind of authority in its place: the epistemological authority of science and the moral authority of society. Thus, in place of the state, there emerges a more rational form of social organisation. By contrast, according to Schurmann: The anarchy that will be at issue here is the name of a history affecting the ground or foundation of action, a history where the bedrock yields and where it becomes obvious that the principle of cohesion, be it authoritarian or ‘rational’, is no longer anything more than a blank space deprived of legislative, normative, power.29
An-archy, in this sense, would destabilise the ontological ground of legal authority
, but it would also displace the scientific, rational authority of the anarchist critique of law.
An-archy thus involves a questioning of the sovereignty of all guiding principles. Absolute foundations are deprived of normative power, and they can no longer easily serve as a natural basis for the establishment of a new system of rules and institutions. This does not mean that post-sovereign, post-legal forms of organisation are impossible, simply that in posing the question of political alternatives we

cannot necessarily rely on what we believe to be the authority of
natural laws
, absolute moral principles, biological foundations or
a universally understood rationality.
Conclusion: Post-Anarchism, Law and the Politics of Disobedience The an-archic displacement of ontological foundations gestures towards a post-anarchism – by which I understand not a movement beyond anarchism, but a deconstructive movement within anarchism, which at the same time asserts the ontological contingency of politics as an ongoing contestation of structures and practices of power.
Post-anarchism
, as I have discussed above, draws upon
certain insights of post-structuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (as well Heideggerian thinkers like Schurmann) – in particular, the displacement of stable, unified identities, the discursively constructed limits of social reality and the productive and pervasive functioning of power
. I suggest that, despite the problems this analysis poses for the naturalism and rationalism of nineteenth-century anarchism, post-structuralism shares with anarchism an anti-authoritarian ethos, characterised by a desire to interrogate power and to unmask the violent and hierarchical relations hidden within not only institutions
(certainly the law), but also everyday discourses, practices and social norms that we often regard as apolitical .
59 Therefore, poststructuralism can be seen as a form of anarchism, one that continues and extends the terms of the anarchist critique of authority
(even to the ontological grounds that underpinned classical anarchism), and that converges with other strands of radical thought
and politics that emerged with
May ’68, broadly characterised as the
New Left
, including Situationism, the Provos and Autonomists.
Central here is a decentralised politics of spontaneous
revolt and autonomous direct
action – an anarchic politics of flux and desire – as opposed to the Marxist and
Leninist paradigm of class struggle centrally coordinated by the party.
Yet, where a post-structuralist-inspired (or post-
)anarchism differs from classical anarchism is in its recognition that the struggle against power cannot be an all-or-nothing event that expresses the totality of social forces and promises the universal liberation of humanity . Rather, it has to be seen in terms of localised, differentiated, partial, fragmented forms of resistance taking place within and against the order of power, on a field of multiple struggles, strategies and localised tactics – an ongoing antagonism without the promise of a final victory or universal emancipation.
As Foucault puts it:
Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested or sacrificial; by definition they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations
.31 But what implications does this have for thinking about law and about practices of resistance and disobedience? I would highlight, briefly, two key points that emerge with a post-anarchist approach. The first concerns the relationship between law and power relations
. One of the limitations of classical anarchism was to see power largely in terms of sovereign legal and political authority
– namely, the state – and therefore to not be able to take sufficient account of the complexity of power relations. As is well known, Foucault argued that what he called the ‘juridicosovereign’ image of power, where power was understood in terms of law, prohibition and repression – the power to say ‘no’ – obscured the pervasive, multiple and productive nature of power
in the modern age, particularly in its disciplinary and biopolitical forms.
Law is by no means displaced or replaced by power
, according to Foucault; rather, under the ‘regime’ of disciplinary and biopower, law increasingly functions to produce the norm. Yet this realisation at the same time suggests a more nuanced approach to the law
on the part of those who rebel: the absolute rejection of the law and authority does not necessarily solve the problem of power or provide us with any language to contest the limitations and constraints, the new forms of normalisation that may emerge in a post-legal society, limitations that may perhaps in their own way be just as coercive as law
, precisely insofar as they are not explicitly stated or codified.
What is required, then, is an ongoing, agonistic contestation of both power and law, in which their limits are continually
tested and interrogated . In other words, anarchists can

never rest assured that just because they have transcended legal authority in a new form of community life, they have forever removed the potential for domination
; the radical horizon of the transcendence of the law opened up by
Benjamin’s ‘divine violence’ at the same time demands a continual reflection on the ethical limits of the power and the invention, as Foucault would put it, of new ‘practices of freedom’ as a
‘patient labour giving form to our impatience for liberty’.33 Moreover, if liberty is more productively seen as an ongoing practice or agonistic ‘labour’, rather than an eternal state, then we should consider the possibility of strategic mobilisations of particular laws – for instance, human rights laws, as inadequate as they are – against particular relations of power and practices of domination.34 If an anarchist ends up in front of a judge, presumably they will want a good lawyer.
It is possible that, at times, laws can be used to defend existing spaces of freedom and even open up new ones. This suggests a certain
‘pragmatism’ with regards to practices of resistance and disobedience
: working both against the law and, at times, with it; working inside and outside, and opening up heterogeneous and unruly spaces of resistance within the law itself
.35 Second, such practices of
resistance and freedom take place on the ethical terrain of justice, which can be seen in terms of an anarchic displacement of the law.
36
Here, the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas is useful for developing a critique of the sovereignty of legal and political institutions. For Levinas, anarchy describes the ethical encounter with the Other – an encounter that disturbs the sovereignty of selfcontained identities, and particularly of sovereign institutions. However, Levinas distinguishes his concept of ethical anarchy from anarchism – which, as a form of politics, establishes a new arche; as we have seen, it established the principle of rationality – the rational organisation of the social order – in the place of the irrational political authority of the state.
Levinas’s understanding of anarchy points once again to the idea of the disturbance of ontological foundations.
It is a notion of anarchy that unsettles the natural foundations of the anarchist community, but it also unsettles the arche of the state and the law. Thus it is radically different from the ‘anarchy’ of the state of nature, which foreshadows the emergence of state authority
, or from the anomic condition of the exception, whose lawlessness (mythic violence in Benjamin’s terms) shores up the law.
Levinasian anarchy, in other words, is something that transcends the binary between law and anarchy. The notion of anarchy as we are introducing it here has a meaning prior to the political (or anti-political) meaning currently attributed to it. It would be self-contradictory to set it up as a principle
(in the sense that anarchists understand it).
Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State
– but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.
The State then cannot set itself up as a Whole. But, on the other hand, anarchy can be stated.
37
So anarchy is not in itself a politics; it does not propose a particular form of social organisation, nor even any specific political strategy. Rather, it is only what disturbs the state and the law from the outside. Indeed, anarchy is that which disturbs any political order. But this does not mean that it has no political effects.
38
It is a kind of ethical distance from politics which nevertheless disturbs the political order, opens it up to the Other that exceeds it, and this is a political gesture. Anarchy keeps alive the very necessary tension or moment of suspension between ethics and politics, preventing one from being eclipsed by the other. In this sense, it is the very condition for doing politics in an ethical way . It is what opens political practices and discourses to an ethical questioning as to their own limits, exclusions and authoritarian potentiality
. I am not suggesting that anarchy – understood in this way – should replace anarchism. On the contrary, I would say that this deconstructive ‘spirit’ of anarchy is implicit in the anti-authoritarianism of anarchism itself, even if it does at the same time exist in tension with its own foundationalism. Moreover if, as Derrida suggests, justice is what exceeds the law, what opens its structures up to the Other, that which unsettles legal authority or the law’s self-authorisation, then we can say that anarchism is the political philosophy most closely aligned with justice .

(David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster,
“Questioning Global Political Activism”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 81-2)
However, politics is no less important to many of us today
. Politics still gives us a sense of social connection and social rootedness and gives meaning to many of our lives.
It is just that the nature and practices of this politics are different. We are less likely to engage in the formal politics of representation - of elections and governments - but in post-territorial politics, a politics where there is much less division between the private sphere and the public one and much less division between national, territorial, concerns and global ones. This type of politics is on the one hand ‘global’ but, on the other, highly individualised: it is very much the politics of our everyday lives – the sense of meaning we get from thinking about global warming when we turn off the taps when we brush our teeth, take our rubbish out for recycling or cut back on our car use - we might also do global politics in deriving meaning from the ethical or social value of our work, or in our subscription or support for good causes from Oxfam to Greenpeace and Christian Aid. I want to suggest that when we do ‘politics’ nowadays it is less the ‘old’ politics, of self-interest, political parties, and
concern for governmental power, than the ‘new’ politics of global ethical concerns
. I further want to suggest that the forms and content of this new global approach to the political are more akin to religious beliefs and practices than to the forms of our social political engagement in the past. Global politics is similar to religious approaches in three vital respects: 1) global post-territorial politics are no longer concerned with power, its’ concerns are free-floating and in many ways, existential, about how we live our lives; 2) global politics revolve around practices with are private and individualised, they are about us as individuals and our ethical choices; 3) the practice of global politics tends to be non-instrumental
, we do not subordinate ourselves to collective associations or parties and are more likely to give value to our aspirations, acts, or the fact of our awareness of an issue, as an end in-itself. It is as if we are upholding our goodness or ethicality in the face of an increasingly confusing, problematic and alienating world – our politics in this sense are an expression or voice, in Marx’s words, of ‘the heart in a heartless world’ or ‘the soul of a soulless condition’. The practice of
‘doing politics’ as a form of religiosity is a highly conservative one. As Marx argued, religion was the ‘opium of the people’ - this is politics as a sedative or pacifier: it feeds an illusory view of change at the expense of genuine social engagement and transformation. I want to argue that global ethical politics reflects and institutionalises our sense of disconnection and social atomisation and results in irrational and unaccountable government policy making .
I want to illustrate my points by briefly looking at the practices of global ethics in three spheres, those of radical political activism, government policy making and academia. Radical activism
People often argue that there is nothing passive or conservative about radical political activist protests, such as the 2003 anti-war march, anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protests
, the huge march to Make Poverty History at the end of 2005, involvement in the World Social Forums or the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda.
I disagree; these new forms of protest are highly individualised and
personal ones -
there is no attempt to build a social or collective movement. It appears that theatrical suicide, demonstrating, badge and bracelet wearing are ethical acts in themselves: personal statements of awareness, rather than attempts to engage politically with society
.
This is illustrated by the ‘celebration of differences’ at marches, protests and social forums. It is as if people are more concerned with the creation of a sense of community through differences than with any political debate, shared agreement or collective purpose
. It seems to me that if someone was really concerned with ending war or with ending poverty or with overthrowing capitalism
, that political views and political differences would be quite important
. Is war caused by capitalism, by human nature, or by the existence of guns and other weapons? It would seem important to debate reasons, causes and solutions, it would also seem necessary to give those political differences an organisational expression if there was a serious project of social change. Rather than a political engagement with the world, it seems that radical political activism today is a form of social disengagement – expressed in the anti-war marchers’ slogan of ‘Not in My Name’, or the assumption that wearing a plastic bracelet or setting up an internet blog diary is the same as engaging in political debate. In fact, it seems that political activism is a practice which isolates individuals who think that demonstrating a personal commitment or awareness of problems is preferable to engaging with other people who are often dismissed as uncaring or brainwashed by consumerism.
The
narcissistic aspects of the practice of this type of global politics are expressed clearly
by individuals who are obsessed with reducing their carbon footprint, deriving their idealised sense of social connection from an ever increasing awareness of themselves and by giving ‘political’ meaning to every personal action
. Global ethics appear to be in demand because they offer us a sense of social connection and meaning while at the same time giving us the freedom to construct the meaning for ourselves, to pick our causes of concern, and enabling us to be free of responsibilities for acting as part of a collective association, for winning an argument or for success at the ballot-box. While the appeal of global ethical politics is an individualistic one, the lack of success or impact of radical activism is also
reflected in its
rejection of any form of
social movement or organisation
. Strange as it may seem, the only people who are
keener on global ethics than radical activists
are political elites
. Since the end of the Cold War, global ethics have formed the core of foreign policy and foreign policy has tended to dominate domestic politics. Global ethics are at the centre of debates and discussion over humanitarian intervention, ‘healing the scar of Africa’, the war on terror and the ‘war against climate insecurity’. Tony Blair argued in the Guardian last week that ‘foreign policy is no longer foreign policy’ (Timothy
Garten Ash, ‘Like it or Loath it, after 10 years Blair knows exactly what he stands for’, 26 April 2007), this is certainly true. Traditional foreign policy, based on strategic geo-political interests with a clear framework for policymaking, no longer seems so important. The government is down-sizing the old Foreign and Commonwealth Office where people were regional experts, spoke the languages and were engaged for the long-term, and provides more resources to the Department for International Development where its staff are experts in good causes. This shift was clear in the UK’s attempt to develop an Ethical Foreign Policy in the 1990s – an approach which openly claimed to have rejected strategic interests for values and the promotion of Britain’s caring and sharing ‘identity’. Clearly, the projection of foreign policy on the basis of

demonstrations of values and identity, rather than an understanding of the needs and interests of people on the ground, leads to ill thought-through and short-termist policymaking, as was seen in the ‘value-based’ interventions from Bosnia to Iraq
(see Blair’s recent Foreign Affairs article, ‘A
Battle for Global Values’, 86:1 (2007), pp.79–90).
Governments have been more than happy to put global
ethics at the top of the political agenda for - the same reasons that radical activists have been eager to shift to the global sphere – the freedom from political responsibility that it affords them
.
Every government and international institution has shifted from strategic and instrumental policymaking based on a clear political programme to the ambitious assertion of global causes – saving the planet, ending poverty, saving Africa, not just ending war but solving the causes of conflict etc – of course, the more ambitious the aim the less anyone can be held to account for success and failure
. In fact, the more global the problem is, the more responsibility can be shifted to blame the US or the UN for the failure to translate ethical claims into concrete results. Ethical global questions, where the alleged values of the UN, the UK, the ‘civilised world’, NATO or the EU are on the line in ‘wars of choice’ from the war on terror to the war on global warming lack traditional instrumentality because they are driven less by the traditional interests of Realpolitik than the narcissistic search for meaning or identity. Governments feel the consequences of their lack of social connection, even more than we do as individuals; it undermines any attempt to represent shared interests or cohere political programmes. As Baudrillard suggests, without a connection to the ‘represented’ masses, political leaders are as open to ridicule and exposure as the
‘Emperor with no clothes’ (In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, for example).
It is this lack of shared social goals which makes instrumental policy-making increasingly problematic
. As Donald Rumsfeld stated about the war on terror, ‘there are no metrics’ to help assess whether the war is being won or lost. These wars and campaigns, often
alleged to be based on the
altruistic claim of the needs
and interests
of others, are demonstrations and performances, based on ethical claims rather than responsible practices and policies
. Max Weber once counterposed this type of politics – the ‘ethics of conviction’ – to the ‘ethics of responsibility’ in his lecture on ‘Politics as a Vocation’. The desire to act on the international scene without a clear strategy or purpose has led to highly destabilising interventions from the Balkans to Iraq and to the moralisation of a wide range of issues from war crimes to EU membership requirements. Today more and more people are ‘doing politics’ in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom in International Relations (IR) study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would argue that the attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practise global ethics. The boom in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of power and interests and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I would argue that this rejection has not been a product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an ethical act of rejection of Realism’s ontological focus. It seems that our ideas and our theories say much more about us than the world we live in. Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the global ethical turn arguing that we should not be as concerned with ‘what is’ as with the potential for the emergence of a global ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which political elites espouse rather than the practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the discipline today are those frameworks which have taken up Critical Theory and argue that focusing on the world as it exists is conservative problem-solving while the task for critical theorists is to focus on emancipatory alternative forms of living or of thinking about the world.
Critical thought then becomes a process of wishful thinking rather than one of engagement
, with its advocates arguing that we need to focus on clarifying our own ethical frameworks and biases and positionality, before thinking about or teaching on world affairs.
This becomes ‘ me-search’ rather than research
. We have moved a long way from Hedley
Bull’s (1995) perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to put our values to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead.
The inward-looking and narcissistic trends in academia, where we are more concerned with our reflectivity
– the awareness of our own ethics and values – than with engaging with the world
, was brought home to me when I asked my IR students which theoretical frameworks they agreed with most. They mostly replied Critical Theory and Constructivism. This is despite the fact that the students thought that states operated on the basis of power and self-interest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their choices said about them as ethical individuals, than about how theory might be used to understand and engage with the world. Conclusion I have attempted to argue that there is a lot at stake in the radical understanding of engagement in global politics.
Politics has become a religious activity
, an activity which is no longer socially mediated; it is less and less an activity based on social
engagement and the testing of ideas in public debate or in the academy. Doing politics today, whether in radical activism, government policy-making or in academia, seems to bring people into a one-to-one relationship with global issues in the same way religious people have a one-to-one relationship with their God. Politics is increasingly like religion because when we look for meaning we find it inside ourselves rather than in the external consequences of our ‘political’ acts.
What matters is the conviction or the act in itself: its connection to the global sphere is one that we increasingly tend to provide idealistically.
Another way of expressing this limited sense of our subjectivity is in the popularity of globalisation theory – the idea that instrumentality is no longer possible today because the world is such a complex and interconnected place and therefore there is no way of knowing the consequences of our actions. The more we engage in the new politics where there is an unmediated relationship between us as individuals and global issues, the less we engage instrumentally with the outside world, and the less we engage with our peers and colleagues at the level of political or intellectual debate and organisation.

– Marissa Ann Mayer, vice-president for search products and user experience at Google, February 13,
2006, “Creativity Loves Constraints,” online: http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/06_07/b3971144.htm?chan=gl
When people think about creativity, they think about artistic work -- unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. But
if you look deeper, you'll find that some of the most inspiring art forms, such as haikus, sonatas, and religious paintings, are fraught with constraints. They are beautiful because creativity triumphed over the "rules." Constraints shape and focus problems and provide clear challenges to overcome
.
Creativity thrives best when constrained .¶
But constraints must be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible. Too many curbs can lead to pessimism and despair. Disregarding the bounds of what we know or accept gives rise to ideas that are non-obvious, unconventional, or unexplored. The creativity realized in this balance between constraint and disregard for the impossible is fueled by passion and leads to revolutionary change
.
¶ A few years ago, I met
Paul Beckett, a talented designer
who makes sculptural clocks. When I asked him why not do just sculptures, Paul said he liked the challenge of making something artistically beautiful that also had to perform as a clock. Framing the task in that way freed his creative force
. Paul reflected that he also found it easier to paint on a canvas that had a mark on it rather than starting with one that was entirely clean and white
. This resonated with me.
It is often easier to direct your energy when you start with constrained challenges
(a sculpture that must be a clock) or constrained possibilities
(a canvas that is marked).

Northwestern Professor, Prof. Morson's work ranges over a variety of areas: literary theory
(especially narrative); the history of ideas, both Russian and European; a variety of literary genres (especially satire, utopia, and the novel); and his favorite writers -- Chekhov, Gogol, and, above all, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He is especially interested in the relation of literature to philosophy. http://www.flt.uae.ac.ma/elhirech/baktine/0521831059.pdf#page=331
A belief in truly dialogic ideological becoming would lead to schools that were quite different
. In such schools, the mind would be populated with a complexity of voices and perspectives it had not known, and the student would learn to think with those voices, to test ideas and experiences against them, and to shape convictions that are innerly persuasive in response. This very process would be central
. Students would sense that whatever word they believed to be innerly persuasive was only tentatively so: the process of dialogue continues.
We must keep the conversation going
, and formal education only initiates the process. The innerly persuasive discourse would not be final, but would be, like experience itself, ever incomplete and growing. As Bakhtin observes of the innerly persuasive word: Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that is, freely, developed, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. . .
. The semantic structure of an innerly persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean. (DI, 345–6)
We not only learn, we also learn to learn
, and we learn to learn best when we engage in a dialogue
with others and ourselves. We appropriate the world of difference, and ourselves develop new potentials. Those potentials allow us to appropriate yet more voices.
Becoming becomes endless becoming.
We talk, we listen, and we achieve an open-ended wisdom. Difference becomes an opportunity (see Freedman and Ball, this volume). Our world manifests the spirit that Bakhtin attributed to Dostoevsky: “nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is in the future and will always be in the future.”3
Such a world becomes our world within, its dialogue lives within us, and we develop the potentials of our ever-learning selves.
Letmedraw some inconclusive conclusions, which may provoke dialogue. Section I of this volume, “Ideologies in Dialogue:
Theoretical Considerations” and Bakhtin’s thought in general suggest that we learn best when we are actually learning to learn.
We engage in dialogue with ourselves and others, and the most important thing is the value of the open-ended process itself.
Section II, “Voiced, Double Voiced, and Multivoiced Discourses in Our Schools” suggests that a belief in truly dialogic ideological becoming would lead to schools that were quite different. In such schools, the mind would be populated with a complexity of voices and perspectives it had not known, and the student would learn to think with those voices, to test ideas and experiences against them, and to shape convictions that are innerly persuasive in response. Teachers would not be trying to get students to hold the right opinions but to sense the world from perspectives they would not have encountered or dismissed out of hand.
Students would develop the habit of getting inside the perspectives of other groups
and other people. Literature in particular is especially good at fostering such dialogic habits. Section III, “Heteroglossia in a Changing World” may invite us to learn that dialogue involves really listening to others, hearing them not as our perspective would categorize what they say, but as they themselves would categorize what they say, and only then to bring our own perspective to bear. We talk, we listen, and we achieve an open-ended wisdom. The chapters in this volume seem to suggest that we view learning as a perpetual process.
That was perhaps Bakhtin’s favorite idea: that to appreciate life, or dialogue, we must see value not only in achieving this or that result, but also in recognizing that
honest and open striving
in a world of uncertainty and difference is itself the most important thing.
What we must do is keep the conversation going.

1NR

John Dryzek is Professor of Political Science and Australian Research Council Federation Fellow at the Australian
National University. “Deliberative Democracy and Climate Change,” http://www.humansandnature.org/democracy---john-dryzek-response-55.php
Systems that lack deliberative capacity tend to do badly on climate change
. In particular, the climate issue clearly reveals the pathologies of adversarial democracies such as the United States and Australia, where all issues are processed in terms of partisan advantage. Over the past two years, Australia has witnessed a struggle over the introduction of a very modest carbon tax. The leader of the conservative opposition saw an opportunity to use the issue to beat up the government (while still paying lip service to the need to do something to reduce greenhouse gas emissions). Labeling the carbon tax “a great big tax on everything,” his campaign was successful in damaging the government’s public standing. The government, for its part, continued to push the tax only because of its parliamentary dependence on Green Party support, itself conditional on the tax going through. The carbon tax is now in operation—though in highly compromised form, full of exemptions and compensation packages for big and powerful polluters.
Why might a more deliberative democracy do better? There are a number of theoretical claims that can be made on behalf of deliberative democracy
when it comes to intractable social-ecological issues like climate change. It can generate coherence across the perspectives of actors concerned with different facets of complex issues
.
It can organize feedback on the condition of social-ecological systems into politics.
It can lead to the prioritization of public goods
(such as ecosystem integrity) and general interests over material selfinterest.
It may even expand the thinking of its participants to better encompass the interests of future generations, distant others, and non-human nature.
These theoretical claims find empirical support, especially in citizen forums designed to deliberate climate change (and other environmental issues). The biggest such exercise to date took place on September 26, 2009, in 38 countries following a common model coordinated by the Danish Board of Technology. This “World Wide Views” process yielded recommendations that, in just about every country, favored stronger action on climate change than the national government in question was at the time prepared to support.
The results were presented at the December 2009 Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen (to little effect).
Other sorts of deliberative forums involving partisans from different sides on environmental issues can also yield positive results, though there is little evidence from partisan forums on climate change per se.
Evidence from citizen forums goes only so far because they, for the most part, lack any link to actual governance. But there are other sorts of evidence. If we look at the comparative performance of different countries when it comes to tackling pollution,
in general, and climate change
, in particular, we find that consensual democracies of the sort found in Northern Europe do better than adversarial ones (with the important exception of the United Kingdom, which, for a few years, seemed to have broken the mould by showing that an adversarial democracy could generate a relatively effective response to climate change until, more recently, climate skeptics gained the upper hand in the Cameron government). Consensual democracies also feature somewhat higher deliberative quality than adversarial ones, at least in their legislatures.
All this is relative: no consensual democracy has yet turned in a performance on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions that can be regarded as adequate. In addition, there may be a problem inherent to consensual democracies. They are good at incorporating moderate versions of environmentalism and acting accordingly. They are not so good when it comes to generating and accepting more radical critique, which consequently has to be generated elsewhere. There is a subtle dynamic in operation here that points to the need for both moments of consensus and moments of contestation, which can be joined in the idea of a “deliberative system.”
Moments of consensus may be appropriate in the formal institutions of government
— while moments of contestation should be cultivated in the broader public sphere.
This deliberative system
idea can
also be applied beyond the
boundaries of the nation-state
.
Climate change is
, of course, in large part a global issue, requiring coordinated global action
. Electoral democracy is a nonstarter in the global system. But we can think of the global governance of climate change as a potentially deliberative system—however far it

might currently be from deliberative ideals. That system as a whole can then be analyzed in terms of its deliberative capacity—and how it might be enhanced. The result would be collective outcomes with higher legitimacy, and so greater likelihood of getting compliance from states, corporations, and others. Equally important
, outcomes could be much more effective than those currently generated in the global governance of climate change, whose performance over two decades is dismal. That effectiveness depends
, of course
, on the degree to which the
environmental promise of deliberative democracy could be redeemed at the global level
(where it has never seriously been tried).
What would such a global deliberative system look like? It would have room for multiple forms of governance beyond the multilateral negotiations of the UNFCCC. Many such forms—networks to organize clean technology transfer, emissions trading, or the sharing of information and commitment, for example—are emerging, though in practice they are not very deliberative. Currently, the global public sphere on climate issues is lively and contestatory
— but its activity tends to have minimal connection to governance, especially when it comes to these new forms
.
Both transmission of concerns generated in this public sphere and accountability to global civil society can be strengthened.
There are numerous reform proposals for global governance now on the agenda, and all could benefit from a deliberative aspect.
In short, failure to act effectively on climate change is not a failure of democracy.
Rather, it results from the fact that so far we haven’t done democracy right . And a big part of doing democracy right is doing democracy deliberatively .

Stephanie M.
, University of Rhode Island, “Care of the Self and the Will to Freedom: Michel
Foucault, Critique and Ethics” University of Rhode Island Digital Commons, 2011
The “art of voluntary inservitude” and “ reflective indocility” require one to cultivate a certain critical awareness of oneself and one’s surroundings
.
Critique is a matter of examining the status quo and maintaining the freedom to question it
. For Foucault, this freedom manifests and perpetuates itself through the ancient practice called care of the self
. Foucault often turns to the ancient Greeks in his work, and this concept remains a central theme in his analysis of the individual as subject to various power dynamics.
Care of the self constitutes lifelong work on one’s body, mind, and soul, in order to better relate to other people and live an ethically-driven life
.
Jensen, PhD student in Philosophy, 2009
(Tim, “Bridging Micro and Macro :: Setting the Stage”, 4-6, http://candidcandidacy.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/bridging-micro-and-macro-setting-the-stage/)
Oliver Marchart asks the same question in his essay, “Bridging the Micro-Macro Gap: Is There Such a Thing as a Post-subcultural Politics?“ “
What criteria
,” he asks, have to be met by micro-practices in order to ‘go macro’
? Do we need a new concept of ‘organization’? Can there be a subcultural politics of pure particularism or does it take a dimension of universalism?’
Marchart begins by debunking what he sees as a heroism myth that dominates subcultures
and those who study them academically. While others have certainly critiqued the narrative of “co-optation,” it’s still necessary to do so, and Marchart does it swiftly and with eloquence. I say that it’s still necessary because there are
still plenty of folks
(punks, activists, liberals) who believe they can “drop-out” of capitalism in many ways and narratives of “selling out” continue to proliferate
.
In this set-up, a subculture is designated as “authentic” to the degree that it remains unappropriated by the mainstream
. The group or set of practices remains heroic in relation to how much it resists commodification and recuperation.
Marchart notes that this narrative of the process of subculture’s incorporation into the mainstream construes
“subcultures as some sort of substance–noise from the viewpoint of the dominant system, and the precedes any cooptation by the latte r” (author’s emphasis 87).
This myth is used to show how the “defending of micro-political
practices eo ipso” obviates any move to the macro-political , since those micropractices are always already political, “simply by virtue of resisting cooptation” (88). Some theorists laud this indirect, style-driven form of dissent and its oblique challenge to exploitative powers. Not Marchart, for sure. And I have some pretty serious reservations about it, too.
Who has time to take direct action when one is busy looking like they’re constantly dissenting
? (This also becomes an issue, as we shall see in later posts, when dealing with internet cultures of protest.)
Much of postmodernism and cultural studies in particular has done excellent–and needed–work in revealing the political nature of our everd ay
acts. The cultural and the political have been blurred for some time now.
But you can see where this may stunt the move to macro action
: if we’re always already political, how do we judge a scale of action? I agree with Marchart that, “What is needed today is an analysis of the passage between culture and macro-politics, that is, an analysis of the process of ‘becoming macro’” (90).
We’re missing an understanding of the links between ever day life and organized, collective action, especially with regard to the communicative process.
So we must ask, is an answer to be found in the micro-politics of everyday life or in the marco-political movements of collective will and deep structural and cultural reorganization
? Where do we start in attempting to make sense of this line between micro and macro; and what role do information communication technologies play in the communication process of this movement between micro and macro? Marchart lists four preconditions for the passage of micro going macro: 1) A situation of explicit antagonization; 2) The emergence of a collectivity; 3) The function of organization; 4) A movement towards

universalization. So, for Marchart, what is necessary is a swing towards the macro, a recognition that as long as resistance to hegemony remains at the level of symbolic rituals of the micro-political, we’re in trouble
.
Only when these tactics form a collective will they become politicized.
Despite using a term like micropolitical, Marchart argues there is no politics of the individual; politics is collective.
And that is why he argues for theorization to begin at macro-levels