| Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Movement Contributor(s): Abensour, Miguel (Author) |
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ISBN: 0745650104 ISBN-13: 9780745650104 Publisher: Polity Press OUR PRICE: $24.70 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: February 2011 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Political Science | History & Theory - General - Philosophy | Political - Political Science | Political Ideologies - Democracy |
| Dewey: 321.8 |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 5.9" W x 8.9" (0.83 lbs) 200 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," the young Marx elliptically alludes to a true democracy whose advent would go hand in hand with the disappearance of the state. Miguel Abensour's rigorous interpretation of this seminal text reveals an "unknown Marx" who undermines the identification of democracy with the state and defends a historically occluded form of politics. True democracy does not entail the political and economic power of the state, but it does not dream of a post-political society either. On the contrary, the battle of democracy is waged by a demos that invents a public sphere of permanent struggles, a politics that counters political bureaucracy and representation. Democracy is won by a people forewarned that any dissolution of the political realm in its independence, any subordination to the state, is tantamount to annihilating the site for gaining and regaining a genuinely human existence. In this explicitly heterodox reading of Marx, Miguel Abensour proposes a theory of insurgent democracy that makes political liberty synonymous with a living critique of domination. |