Democracy Against the State

Marx and the Machiavellian Movement

By: Miguel ABENSOUR (University of Paris VIII)

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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.

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* Exam copies only available to lecturers for whom the book may be suitable as a course text.
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Reviews

"Democracy is not a state-form. The power of the people is even the antithesis of the Statist principle. By maintaining - with Marx, and against the Marxist tradition - this radical thesis, Miguel Abensour makes an essential contribution to the now urgent task of returning the words politics and democracy to their original meaning."
Jacques Rancière

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Table of Contents

Translator's Introduction: "To Think Emancipation Otherwise" by Max Blechman
Preface to the Italian edition (2008)
Preface to the second French edition (2004): "Of Insurgent Democracy"
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Utopia of the Rational State
Chapter 2: Political Intelligence
Chapter 3: From the 1843 Crisis to the Criticism of Politics Chapter 4: A Reading Hypothesis
Chapter 5: The Four Characteristics of True Democracy Chapter 6: True Democracy and Modernity
Conclusion
Annex: "Savage Democracy" and the "Principle of Anarchy"

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