Our political climate is increasingly characterised by hostility towards constructed others. Steven Gormley answers the question: what does it mean to do justice to others? He pursues this question by developing a critical, but productive, dialogue between deliberative theory and deconstruction. Two key claims emerge from this. First: doing justice to the other demands that we maintain an ethos of interruption. And secondly: Such an ethos requires a democratic form of politics. In developing this account, Gormley places deliberative theory and deconstruction into critical conversation with the work of Mouffe, Aristotle, Rorty, Laclau and different traditions of critical theory.

This book is the first book-length deconstructive study of the political philosophy of Jürgen Habermas. Inspired by the work of Jacques Derrida, the book applies deconstruction to key issues in Habermas’s work: rational discourse and rational consensus, constitutional democracy, tolerance and civil disobedience. The war in Iraq brought Habermas and Derrida together in defense of international law and in favor of a bigger role for a united Europe in international affairs. Yet, despite the rapprochement between Habermas and Derrida in the years prior to Derrida’s death, important differences remain between Habermas’s critical theory and Derrida’s deconstruction. These differences reflect differences between post-structuralism and critical theory and between postmodernists and the defenders of modernity.

"The democratic imagination is facing significant challenges. These challenges involve not only deep philosophical questions about the core values of democracy, but also pressing practical issues related to how we should understand and confront the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism. What should our stance be as defenders of democratic life? The two most prominent efforts to orient us here are the deliberative and agonistic models of democracy. The former emphasizes reasoned discussion, but some worry that this exclusive focus overlooks structures of injustice that distort civil deliberation. The latter prioritizes contestation and conflict, but its proponents struggle to explain why this prime orientation to defeating political opponents will not also corrode our commitment to normative democratic restraints, like fairness. This book develops an understanding of the moral core of democracy. In doing so, it illuminates how these two faces of democratic life, the deliberative and agonistic, each has a significant, but constrained, role to play in a more capacious comprehension of what our democratic commitments require of us. The "communicative model" of democracy we propose provides better grounds for facing the challenges of contemporary anti-democratic movements than either the deliberative or agonistic models alone"--

"Democracy and the Political Unconscious is rich in theoretical insights, but it is also grounded in the practical problems of those who are trying to process the traumas of oppression, terror, and brutality and create more decent and democratic societies."--Jacket.

‘No democracy without deconstruction': Deconstruction and Democracy evaluates and substantiates Derrida's provocative claim, assessing the importance of this influential and controversial contemporary philosopher's work for political thought. Derrida addressed political questions more and more explicitly in his writing, yet there is still confusion over the politics of deconstruction. Alex Thomson argues for a fresh understanding of Derrida's work, which acknowledges both the political dimension of deconstruction and its potential contribution to our thinking about politics. The book provides cogent analysis and exegesis of Derrida's political writings; explores the implications for political theory and practice of Derrida's work; and brings Derrida's work into dialogue with other major strands of contemporary political thought. Deconstruction and Democracy is the clearest and most detailed engagement available with the politics of deconstruction, and is a major contribution to scholarship on the later works of Jacques Derrida, most notably his Politics of Friendship.

These lucid and closely reasoned studies of the thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, J�rgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty provide a coherent analysis of major pathways in recent critical theory. They defend a position analogous to Kant's - that ideas of reason are both unavoidable presuppositions of thought that have to be carefully reconstructed and persistent sources of illusions that have to be repeatedly deconstructed.McCarthy examines the critique of impure reason from the complementary viewpoints of the attackers and defenders of Enlightenment rationality. He first analyzes the work of Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida to determine what these radical critics have contributed to our understanding of reason and where they have gone wrong. He explores Habermas's theory of communicative rationality, focusing on the attempt to go beyond hermeneutics, the incorporation of systems theory, the implications of discourse ethics for our understanding of political debate and collective decision making, and the relation of political theology to critical social theory.Thomas McCarthy is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and the editor of The MIT Press series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. The analysis and assessment of Habermas's recent work in Ideals and Illusions serves as a sequel to his earlier study The Critical Theory of J�rgen Habermas.

Leading scholars discuss ideology and hotly contested post-structuralist theory.