Kevin Olson

Legitimate Speech and Hegemonic Idiom: The Limits of Deliberative Democracy in the Diversity of its Voices

This article locates tensions at the heart of deliberative democracy by contrasting insights of Pierre Bourdieu and Jürgen Habermas. It argues that deliberation contains implicit presuppositions of two opposing sorts. Universalising presuppositions lead people to treat one another as equals. Differentiating ones lead people to treat one another as of greater or lesser worth in political dialogue. They undercut deliberative democracy by rendering some points of view less valuable than others. These contrary tendencies cannot be reconciled in a purely theoretical way; they are contextually specific challenges that must be negotiated in politics itself. In response, this article seeks to clarify the difficulties faced by deliberative regimes and better understand their relation to other forms of politics.

Governmental rationality and popular sovereignty

This essay investigates the meaning of rationality in Michel Foucaults notion of “governmental rationality,” both in what he takes rationalities to be and in how they relate to practices of governing. I try to resolve these questions in a sympathetic manner by detailing some of the social dynamics implicit in practices of governing. Pierre Bourdieu provides means to connect such practices with a detailed understanding of social struggle and resistance to power. These insights reveal strong lines of continuity between governmental rationality and collective political resistance to it. On this basis, I suggest a new path of investigation into forms of popular sovereignty as relatively neglected examples of governmental rationality.

WELFARE, DEMOCRACY, AND THE REFLEXIVE LEGITIMACY OF THE LAW

The United States adopted a new welfare regime in 1996. The centerpiece of this legislation is a notion of personal responsibility that redefines the relation between individuals and the state. I use this law as a foil to outline a new paradigm of legal research. We must understand welfare, I argue, as part of a self-referential legal system. Law is legitimated by particular kinds of fair, democratic political agreement. When material inequalities undermine political participation, however, the law must insure the bases of its own legitimacy through welfare. Welfare law is thus vital to a nation’s legal system as a whole. Seen from this perspective, the current American welfare system fails to fulfill the basic presuppositions of legal legitimacy.

Epistemologies of Rebellion The Tricolor Cockade and the Problem of Subaltern Speech

This essay follows Michel Foucault’s inspiration to develop an archaeology of subaltern politics. In the archives left from the Haitian Revolution, we find occasional references to slaves wearing the tricolor cockade, the famous symbol of French republicanism. The archives are silent on what wearing the cockade “meant,” however, or why whites found it so threatening. Rich layers of meaning are packed into these silences. They reveal a great deal about the performative character of the public sphere and the epistemological complexity of mixing race with revolutionary politics. Wearing the cockade was a screen of projection for all kinds of ideas, including the paranoid fears and guilty conscience of white slaveholders. It probed tensions implicit within Enlightenment colonialism, making those tensions explicit to white elites. By eliciting this self-critical response, the cockade served as a disruptive enigma well suited to the critical and political needs of people not allowed to speak.