Political Society and the Order of Advent

MARTIN PLOT

Providence

Congreso; The 2003 New England Political Science Association Conference; 2003

The New England Political Science Association

This paper is an attempt to further advance the theorization of democratic politics in the direction of Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato’s Civil Society and Political Theory. My goal is to show the need to introduce into the analysis outlined in their theory the fundamental—but prematurely neglected—dynamic of political action and the sphere of political society. Their “working definition” of civil society is that of a “sphere of social interaction between the economy and the state, composed above all of the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (especially voluntary associations), social movements, and forms of public communication.” Cohen and Arato´s re-elaboration of the concept of civil society turns out to be a three-part model of democratic societies (civil society-economy-state) in which civil society becomes the dynamic realm of mediation between and with the “subsystems” of the economy and the state. In this paper I want to show that 1) their model implies, and should be completed with, a second dynamic realm: that of political society, and 2) that Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy of the flesh and advent is actually better prepared than Habermas’ discourse ethics—the framework chosen by Cohen and Arato—to develop a normative approach to the dynamic, self-transformative dimension of democratic life.