Peter Hallward

The Politics of Prescription

The assassinations of Salvador Allende and Amílcar Cabral in 1973 mark the end of the last truly transformative sequence in world politics, the sequence of national liberation associated with the victories of Mao Tse-tung, Mohandas Gandhi, and Fidel Castro. It may be that this end is itself now coming to an end, through the clarification of what Mao might have called a new ‘‘principal contradiction’’—the convergence, most obviously in Iraq and Haiti, of ever more draconian policies of neoliberal adjustment with newly aggressive forms of imperial intervention, in the face of newly resilient forms of resistance and critique. 1

Lyonel Trouillot, or The Fictions of Formal Democracy

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was re-elected president of Haiti in 2000, with a massive parliamentary majority. My book Damming the Flood (2007) tried to explain how and why his government overthrown, several years later, in an internationally-sponsored coup-d’état. Novelist Lyonel Trouillot helped prepare the ground for this coup by deriding Aristide as a corrupt and brutal dictator with no popular support, and in his contribution to this Small Axe forum he dismisses Damming the Flood as racist and dishonest propaganda. My response to Trouillot aims to refute these accusations, and to demonstrate that Trouillot’s apparent commitment to ‘formal democracy’ is a contradiction in terms.

The one or the other - French philosophy today - Editorial introduction

This is a special issue of the journal, edited by Hallward. The editors contribution includes a 32-page general introduction, the selection of articles and interviews, participation in 6 interviews, and the writing of 5 short (1500-word) article introductions.

Concentration or Representation : The Struggle for Popular Sovereignty

Abstract There is a tension in the notion of popular sovereignty, and the notion of democracy associated with it, that is both older than our terms for these notions themselves and more fundamental than the apparently consensual way we tend to use them today. After a review of the competing conceptions of “the people” that underlie two very different understandings of democracy, this article will defend what might be called a “neo-Jacobin” commitment to popular sovereignty, understood as the formulation and imposition of a shared political will. A people’s egalitarian capacity to concentrate both its collective intelligence and force, from this perspective, takes priority over concerns about how best to represent the full variety of positions and interests that differentiate and divide a community.