(False) Friends? On the Relationship between Political Realism and Agonistic Democracy

Abstract

This contribution probes the relationship between two prominent approaches in contemporary political theory – namely, the one between political realism and agonistic democracy – and its relevance for the (as the editors of this special section dub it) ‘new realities’ of our age. The point of this article is not to deny that agonism and realism share several core concepts. The point, rather, is that if we analyze these core concepts in more detail we will discover that they play out quite differently in the two approaches and pull agonism and realism in different directions. In many respects, then, agonism and realism are ‘false friends’: their parallels exist only on a superficial level, which renders an ‘assumption of friendship’ theoretically flawed and practically counterproductive. One aim of this paper, therefore, is to lay bare the divergences between realism and agonism on a deeper level. The second purpose, however, is to show that a ‘fusion of horizons’ of the two approaches is by no means impossible. Despite – or rather, because of – the fact that agonism and realism pull in different directions, we can bring them closer together and remedy the weaknesses of the superior approach (i.e. agonism) by supplementing it with elements of realism.