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JAC Volume 19 Issue 1

Editor:
Sidney I. Dobrin
and Thomas Kent

Back to 19.1 ToC

Hegemony and the Future of Democracy: Ernesto Laclau's Political Philosophy

Interview by Lynn Worsham and Gary Olson

From the interview: "Now, when we pass from individual to collective decisions, one group of people will prefer one decision, and another group will prefer a different one. The result of this is that there is no ultimate algorithm which can arbitrate between them, the mechanism by which one decision is imposed at the expense of the others is going to involve power in some sense, even in the limited sense of winning an election. People will have things imposed on them that they do not want. In this sense, taking decisions and establishing relations of power necessarily go together. I would argue that this is not bad. This is violence, power, but it's not bad. Why? Because the other alternative would be that all decisions are algorithmic, and in that case we would have no freedom at all."

 
   
Copyright 2006 by ATAC