What is the difference between consensus and democracy

All these democratic institutions, principles, and practices become superfluous. People are constantly sharing the same needs, policy preferences, values, and world-views. Such conformity renders meaningless a decision-making mechanism designed to ensure competition over interest maximisation and the good life remain egalitarian and inclusive.

Marx and Engels famously envisioned such a conflict free world. They predicted that one day the government of people would give way to the administration of things, freeing us to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and criticise after dinner. Resources can never be so abundant as to allow everyone to always attain what they desire.

Differing values can never be so compatible as to always permit their unimpeded realisation. Conditions of finitude and value-pluralism are an unavoidable feature of human life. Given this, incompatibilities over how to allocate goods and which idealisations to uphold ahead of others will always define the life of political communities. If persistent disagreement characterises the social world, how should democratic engagement ideally ensue?

For agonistic democrats, the answer is a resounding yes. In their view, the egalitarian and inclusive ethos of democracy is best secured by upholding disagreement as an end in itself and not treating it as a social pathology that must be overcome. As agonists see it, avoiding the closure of a consensus prevents the entrenchment of particular ideas, symbols and values as transcendent to the exclusion of others, which may also have a rightful place in society.

However, there are good reasons to be circumspect about this wholesale rejection of consensus-oriented politics while still appreciating the democratic value of adversarial engagement. On the one hand, adversarial engagement serves democratic goals when it is adopted under conditions of domination, as disorderliness and civil disobedience may be the only way of inducing the social changes necessary for one to be treated as equal and free.

Disruption calls to attention the unreasonableness of others, and can make it politically costly for them to continue excluding from politics those with a stake in the issue debated. On the other hand, while disruptive and offensive behaviour to overcome domination is not immediately associated with the search for consensus, its ultimate aim is still to achieve the conditions that make consensus more likely.

After all, those who engage in civil disobedience to overcome their political exclusion do so with the aim of engaging others in a project of explaining and justifying their positions. Beckstein, Martin Galston, William A. Gutmann, Amy, and Thompson, Dennis Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge — London, Belknap Press. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. Honig, Bonnie Kerferd, G. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knops, Andrew Mill, John Stuart On Liberty.

Edited by David Bromwich and George Kateb. Mouffe, Chantal The Return of the Political. London, New York: Verso. The Paradox of Democracy. On the Political. New York, London: Routledge. Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, p. Agonistics: Thinking the world politically. Norval, Aletta J. Norval, Yannis Stavrakakis Eds. Citizens play the role of, primarily, spectator and, secondarily, that of consulted party.

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