Sublime

Mais, loin de tout déterminisme ou de tout manichéisme, il en dévoile les dimensions multiples et contradictoires : la passion de l’égalité, qui fonde la démocratie, peut se retourner contre la liberté pour frayer la voie au despotisme.

il est le premier théoricien de la séparation des pouvoirs politique et religieux et le premier penseur moderne de nos démocraties libérales. Mais là où il me semble encore plus moderne que nous, c’est qu’il a parfaitement perçu, alors qu’elles n’existaient pas encore, les limites de nos démocraties :

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Where Balibar, as a consequence, sees our inconvertible cruelty as always about to undermine our politics, and our confidence in politics, Wendy Brown sees neoliberalism – which she defines in Undoing the Demos as ‘a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms’ – as ‘quietly undoing basic elements of democracy

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To justify democracy takes more work: we have to explain why some people should have the right to impose bad decisions on others. In particular, as I will show in later chapters, to justify democracy, we’ll need to explain why it’s legitimate to impose incompetently made decisions on innocent people.