Abstract
In a provocative essay published for the first time in English, Miguel Abensour questions the idea that there is an irreducible antinomy between utopia and democracy. He challenges the common misconception that utopianism can only lead to totalitarianism and instead attempts to restore the usefulness of the concept of utopia as a tool for transforming society. Exploring the contrast between the exuberance of utopia and the sobriety of democracy and inspired by the new utopian spirit that has appeared in many thinkers since the mid-nineteenth century, he argues that democracy and utopia need one another and calls us to democratize utopia and utopianize democracy. Abensour rethinks the relationship between democracy and utopia and argues that their point of contact is in their connection with the human, which is unpredictable and heterogeneous.
Miguel Abensour was deceased at the time of publication.
This text was first published in Raison Présente, no. 121 (1st Trimester 1997): 19–27, https://www.persee.fr/doc/raipr_0033-9075_1997_num_121_1_3379
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Notes
- 1.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). —Ed.
- 2.
Pierre Leroux, “Plus de Libéralisme Impuissant,” Le Globe, January 18, 1831. —Ed.
- 3.
Claude Lefort, Essais sur le Politique, XIXe-XXe Siècles (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986), 29.
- 4.
Claude Lefort, Un Homme en Trop, Réflexions sur l’Archipel du Goulag (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), 103–104.
- 5.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini: Essais sur l’Extériorité (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 51.
- 6.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pennsylvania, Duquesne University Press, 1969), 213. —Ed.
- 7.
Miguel Abensour, “Démocratie Sauvage” and “Principe d’Anarchie,” Les Cahiers de Philosophie 18 (Winter 1994/1995): 125–49.
- 8.
Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’Etre ou au-delà de l’Essence (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 32.
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Abensour, M. (2020). Utopia and Democracy. In: Frausto, O., Powell, J., Vitale, S. (eds) The Weariness of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19341-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19341-6_2
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