Die Normativität agonaler Politik

Agonistic democracy assumes that politics fundamentally consists of disagreement and conflict rather than consensus and harmony. This book shows that this idea can establish and justify the requirements of democratic responses to conflicts, and it makes suggestions on institutional design. Hence, the book can overcome the often lamented institutional deficit of agonistic democracy. On the basis of the works of Chantal Mouffe, James Tully and William Connolly, the author develops a theory of agonistic conflict regulation, which assumes that conflicts can be processed politically without their underlying disagreements being solved. Two case studies demonstrate that this perspective provides new impetus for reflection on democratic institutional design: constitutions and ‘mini-publics’ would play a different role in an agonistic democracy than they do in the established models of political liberalism and deliberative democracy.