Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political / Edition 1

by Seyla Benhabib

Overview

The global trend toward democratization of the last two decades has been accompanied by the resurgence of various politics of "identity/difference." From nationalist and ethnic revivals in the countries of east and central Europe to the former Soviet Union, to the politics of cultural separatism in Canada, and to social movement politics in liberal western-democracies, the negotiation of identity/difference has become a challenge to democracies everywhere. This volume brings together a group of distinguished thinkers who rearticulate and reconsider the foundations of democratic theory and practice in the light of the politics of identity/difference.


In Part One Jürgen Habermas, Sheldon S. Wolin, Jane Mansbridge, Seyla Benhabib, Joshua Cohen, and Iris Marion Young write on democratic theory. Part Two—on equality, difference, and public representation—contains essays by Anne Phillips, Will Kymlicka, Carol C. Gould, Jean L. Cohen, and Nancy Fraser; and Part Three—on culture, identity, and democracy—by Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, Fred Dallmayr, Joan B. Landes, and Carlos A. Forment. In the last section Richard Rorty, Robert A. Dahl, Amy Gutmann, and Benjamin R. Barber write on whether democracy needs philosophical foundations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691044781
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/28/1996
Series:	Princeton Paperbacks
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Seyla Benhabib is Professor of Government at Harvard University. She is the author of Critique, Norm, and Utopia; Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics; and The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Difference

Pt. 1 Democratic Theory: Foundations and Perspectives

1 Three Normative Models of Democracy

2 Fugitive Democracy

3 Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity

4 Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy

5 Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy

6 Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy

Pt. 2 Equality, Difference, and Public Representation

7 Dealing with Difference: A Politics of Ideas, or a Politics of Presence?

8 Three Forms of Group-Differentiated Citizenship in Canada

9 Diversity and Democracy: Representing Differences

10 Democracy, Difference, and the Right of Privacy

11 Gender Equity and the Welfare State: A Postindustrial Thought Experiment

Pt. 3 Culture, Identity, and Democracy

12 Democracy, Power, and the "Political"

13 Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home

14 Democracy and Multiculturalism

15 The Performance of Citizenship: Democracy, Gender, and Difference in the French Revolution

16 Peripheral Peoples and Narrative Identities: Arendtian Reflections on Late Modernity

Pt. 4 Does Democracy Need Foundations?

17 Idealizations, Foundations, and Social Practices

18 Democratic Theory and Democratic Experience

19 Democracy, Philosophy, and Justification

20 Foundationalism and Democracy

List of Contributors

Index