Political Agency in Dewey and in Laclau and Mouffe

In a condensed moment quite typical of the overstated bombast appropriate to a philosopher who was in his heart very much a metaphysician, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that, “The creation of the world . . . is the victory of persuasion over force” (1933, 90). The metaphysics of Whitehead was a metaphysics of process, one variant of what I have called elsewhere a philosophy of transitions.1 If we can pay attention to Whitehead’s transitionalism long enough to ignore his metaphysical bombast, then we can perhaps bring into focus his emphasis on creation as a process. Focused in that way, what we have in this little sentence is a conception of the distinction between persuasion and force as processes, perhaps as kinds of doing or making. This raises immediately the question of what kinds of entities do the deeds of persuading or compelling. Seen in terms of actions of creation of political worlds, persuading and compelling are what we do to one another, or rather two distinct ways of politically interacting with one another. But who is the “we” here and how do “we” so act on, that is with or against, one another? Whitehead’s process-centered distinction between persuasion and force invites us to think about the locus of action in politics—that is, the sites and agencies through and in which processes of persuasion and compulsion are alternately played out. An exploration of this issue of the locus of politics raises crucial questions central for contemporary debates in democratic theory concerning the relative utility, and possible compatibility, of democratic radicalism and democratic liberalism. Published in Persuasion and Compulsion in Democracy, edited by Jacquelyn Kegley & Krzyszof Piotr Skowronski (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013).