Politics of Dialogue

Leszek Koczanowicz is Professor of Philosophy and Political Science in the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Wroclaw, Poland. He is the author of Anxiety and Lucidity: Reflections on Culture in Times of Unrest. Routledge, 2020, Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland Berghahn Books, 2008, Analyses of Human Action (Wroclaw University Press, 1990), G.H. Mead (Wroclaw University Press, 1992), Individual - Activity - Society: The Concept of the Self in American Pragmatism (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of Polish Academy of Science Press, 1994), Community and Emancipations. The Discussion of the Post-conventional Society (Lower Silesia University Press, 2005) and Politics of Time. Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland (Berghahn Books, 2008) [in English]. He is co-editor, with Beth J. Singer, of Democracy and Totalitarian Experience (Rodopi, 2005) [in English].

• IntroductionDemocracy and Everyday LifePragmatism as a Response to the Crisis of DemocracyGeorge Herbert Mead’s Concept of Language as DialogueGeorge Herbert Mead: The Political, Democracy, and Everyday LifeGeorge Hebert Mead: The Self and Democracy – Between Conflict and IntegrationJohn Dewey: Individual, Community, and DemocracyConclusion: The Pragmatist Concept of Democracy and its Role in the Contemporary Debate on Democratic SocietyDialogue, Carnival, Democracy: Mikhail Bakhtin and Political TheoryPolitics and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Notion of LanguageThe utterance as a Unit of LanguageIdeology and the UtteranceUnderstanding and the UtteranceDialogue, Understanding, and the UtteranceDialogue and the SocialCarnival and DemocracyConclusion: Dialogue, Carnival, and DemocracyCritical CommunityDemocracy and CommunityModernity and Community: A GenealogyAre Liberalism and Community Eternal Enemies?Communitarian Challenge: Community and IdentityCreation, Self-creation, and CommunityEmbodied CommunitiesCritical CommunityCoda: Nonconsensual Democracy as a Political Form of Critical CommunityDemocratic Community between Consensus and DisagreementNon-consensual Democracy: Dialogue, Solidarity and Democratic PoliticsNon-consensual Democracy: Dialogue and UnderstandingNon-consensual Democracy: Culture, Institutions and UnderstandingIndex

Drawing on the resources of the American pragmatist tradition, Bakhtin’s dialogic notion of interaction, and his own experiences in post-Communist Eastern Europe, the distinguished Polish political theorist Leszek Koczanowiz enters the current conversation about the nature of democracy with a new and arresting argument. Contesting wan proceduralism and the telos of deliberative consensus, he offers instead a model of a critical community that emerges out of the practices of everyday life and fosters the understanding of difference rather than the demand for full agreement.