ABSTRACT
To conceive of the democratic polity as an agon is, first and foremost, to conceive of it as a site of plurality, as a stage on which the plural citizens of the polity deploy diverse perspectives to contest the terms, conditions, character, purpose and direction of the polity; of how, when, where and to what extent it should govern those subject to its rule. However, to adopt the approach that has come to be called ‘political agonism’ is to do more than conceive the polity in this way. It is also, on the account that I favour, to advance a normative orientation composed of the following four features. First, an acknowledgement of the ‘circumstances of politics’ (Waldron 1998): the condition that political disagreement may extend all the way down to fundamentals of justice and yet decisions-in-common need to be made. Second, an understanding of the agon as the field of political expression, where expression is intended here in the strong sense that entails viewing citizenship not primarily as civil status or office but as civic activity, as the working out of one’s civic identity. Third, an account of political belonging as not best conceived in terms of, say, identification with a political conception of justice that is the product of an overlapping consensus but, rather, as the by-product of participation in civic activity, that is, the exercise of civic freedom. Fourth, an argument that civic virtues are cultivated in and through civic activity, particularly deliberation understood as rhetorical speech, where the authority of an utterance is not fully separable from the question of who is speaking to whom about what.
