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This chapter is the second of six on the question of political representation in the EU, and the second of four that put the five requirements of the Responsible Party Model (outlined in Ch. 6) to an empirical test. The question investigated here is whether voters adequately perceive the substantive political differences between the parties. Specifically, the chapter sets out to assess to what extent European electorates met this requirement at the time of the 1994 elections for the European Parliament, using data from the European Election Study 1994 and the European Candidates Study 1994. Three types of such policy differences are distinguished: differences between party positions on three specific dimensions of EU policy (the position issues of the common European currency, border control, and unemployment); differences in the priorities parties wish to give to solving various problems (valence issues); and ideological differences in terms of left–right. The analyses showed that in 1994 voters in most European countries were not well aware either of the positions that political parties take on the three EU policy dimensions, nor did they have an adequate perception of the parties’ competence to handle political problems; however, they did perceive parties accurately in terms of left–right ideology.

One of this book's initial assumptions was that, if we want to delineate the contours of current post-foundational political thought, it is not sufficient to develop the conceptual history of the emerging concept of the political. This chapter focuses on theories that employ the term within the post-foundational framework of what was described as left Heideggerianism. It once again recapitulates the thesis: in most such theories, ‘the political’ in its difference vis-à-vis ‘the social’ and ‘politics’ serves as an indicator of precisely the impossibility or absence of an ultimate foundation of society. As an indicator (but only by way of being differentiated from politics), ‘the political’ can assume the phenomenal or conceptual form of ‘event’, ‘contingency’, ‘antagonism’, ‘freedom’, or ‘undecidability’. In some theories, the political also indicates the moment of partial closure and founding: the moment of institution of society. This chapter first discusses post-foundationalism and democracy before turning to the political displacement of politics, political thought as first philosophy, and the political difference as political difference.

Every inquiry into social post-foundationalism and the conceptual difference between politics and the political will have to take into account the work presented and elaborated at the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political between 1980 and 1984. The Centre, founded by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, turned out to be the location for the most intense and influential reelaboration so far of the notion of the political, or of the difference between politics and the political. The way Claude Lefort and Alain Badiou, for instance, frame their own versions of the political difference (oftentimes in contradistinction to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's version) is certainly influenced by the debates at the Centre. Using a ‘comparative’ approach it will be possible to acquire a broader understanding of the way in which the political difference unfolds within a diverse and yet related set of theoretical approaches from ‘post-structuralism’ or ‘left Heideggerianism’. This chapter explores Nancy's thought of community and the political difference, his notion of event, the danger of philosophism and the necessity of a ‘first philosophy’.

Claude Lefort has elaborated one of the most powerful theorisations of the political, of democracy and totalitarianism, which can help us to grasp better the primacy of political thought in relation both to science and to the ‘pure’ thought of philosophism. His theory is invaluable for a thorough analysis of the political difference because, apart from an ‘ontologic’ theory of the political, Lefort offers a historical genealogy of the Machiavellian moment — the moment of society's ungrounding and political regrounding. This chapter shows why and how Lefort's theory is located within the post-foundational paradigm, to what extent it is centred around a strong notion of antagonism (as originary division), and how the difference he makes between politics and the political — ties in with his post-foundationalism. It explores the way in which this difference is an indication or ‘symptom’ of the groundless nature of society. The way Lefort defines the political — as distinguished from politics — is closely related to his idea of philosophy as distinguished from science.

This chapter responds to persistent calls to reflect on the depoliticized nature of many current political practices. We do so by engaging with post-foundational political thought, a perspective perhaps most known for the concept ‘post-politics’. The post-foundational perspective claims that society is inherently divided and posits a fundamental distinction between politics and the political. We build on this distinction to develop an analytical framework able to capture the full complexity of actually existing forms of depoliticisation. Our aim is to move beyond the ubiquitous and often only descriptively applied notion of the ‘post-political’ towards a more relational understanding of the dynamic tensions between politics and the political. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, this chapter discusses multiple tactics for postponing politicization. We propose a matrix of four different figures of depoliticization and distinguish between archi-, meta-, para-, and ultra-politics. To illustrate how this analytical framework can be applied empirically, we use examples from the governance of multiculturalism by contemporary Western states.

This chapter examines the political and conceptual differences in Herbert Hart's theory of law and Ronald Dworkin's legal theory. It explains that Dworkin's legal theory is justificatory in that it aims to show law in its best light while Hart claims that his theory is not justificatory and morally neutral. However, it appears that Hart's decision not to show law in its best light is one partly made on explicitly political grounds. This chapter explains that the political disagreement between Hart and Dworkin relates to a question generated by people's disagreement about the role played by moral and political considerations in determining what the law is, as opposed to what it ought to be.

Katherine Philips's coterie circle and the aid it provides to James Philips after the restoration raises the following question: how can their marriage persist despite their political differences? This chapter suggests that part of the answer lies in Philips's ability to transform two problems — the husband and wife's divergent political loyalties and the historical upheavals that put first one, then the other, on the victors' side — into the relation of friendship. In translating conflicts of marriage and political obligation into the language of friendship, Philips makes use of a discourse that addresses these problems from its earliest instantiations in Aristotle and Cicero. In amicitia, Philips appropriates a tradition that articulates an ideal, acknowledges the failures to meet it, and then recreates the bonds of obligation.

This chapter suggests that the holiday opened space for the construction and enactment of social and political difference, and notes that in the late nineteenth century, German Jews, Social Democrats, and working-class Germans shaped their own versions of Christmas. It explains that the alternative narratives and celebrations devised by these outsider groups drew on but also challenged the assumptions of bourgeois festivity. The chapter notes that sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies believed that celebrations such as Christmas could heal the fractures in the German body politic by recovering a sense of authentic Gemeinschaft (community) in the midst of an alienated modern Gesellschaft (society).