ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the theory of democratic political tragedy. It explores briefly the Hegelian foundation upon which the theory builds and raises the two case studies (Michael Manley’s Jamaica and Nelson Mandela’s South Africa) that will be offered for demonstrative purposes later in the book. Democratic political tragedy as introduced here takes place in the socio-political and economic context that Achille Mbembe labels the postcolony. It unfolds around a dialectic of opposition between the radical imperatives that reflect in popular, progressive projects that concern themselves with restitutive as well as distributive forms of justice, on the one hand, and, on the other, that imperative which takes shape in the pursuit of national development conceived of as possible only within the parameters of a neoliberal ideology for which questions of social justice and national sovereignty are dispensable. At the center of the thwarting of the progressive project by an ascendant neoliberalism is the plight of the tragic democratic leader who comes to embody the former and to whose political fortune it becomes wedded.
