August 5, 2007
Some political theoriests hold that all politics, properly conceived, must be agonistic. The "political" for names a field of struggle where contesting groups with opposing interests vie for hegemony. Rather than being the rational conversation of modern liberalism, politics involves a battle where a recognizable "we" fight against a likewise identifiable "they."
Yet many political theorists today would deny the antagonistic character of the political. There is a pervasive sense among social theorists that, since the end of the Cold War and the advent of globalization, we are living in a "post-political" world, a world in which the problems of societies are resolved by recourse to universal human values, liberal consensus, and human rights.
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