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Depoliticisation refers to the narrowing of the boundaries of democratic politics. It is therefore intertwined with concerns about ‘the end of politics’ and the emergence of technocratic post-democratic forms of governance. This chapter provides a broad theoretical and conceptual canvas upon which the various contributions to this special edition can be located and their interrelationships exposed. It achieves this by exploring the relevance of Carl Schmitt's concept of 'the political', and particularly his analysis of 'the age of neutralisations and depoliticisations', to contemporary debates concerning depoliticisation, (re)politicisation and even hyper-depoliticisation.

Stagnating political participation, the growth of delegated agencies and the prevalence of rationalistic-technocratic discourse all represent interlinking aspects of what can been termed 'the depoliticised polity'. Existing research has overwhelmingly focused on institutional or governmental depoliticisation strategies and fails to acknowledge repoliticisation as a critical counter-trend. This chapter argues that these weaknesses can be addressed through 'a three faces' approach that embraces societal and discursive depoliticisation strategies as complementary statecraft dynamics that often underpin more tangible governmental strategies. By revealing the existence of multiple forms of depoliticisation this approach also offers new insights in terms of politicisation and socio-political change.

This concluding chapter puts forward a Lacanian responseto the de-democratising or ‘post-democratic’ trends in late capitalistsocieties. A Lacan-inspired re-activation of the democratic revolution – always alert to the continuous interpenetration of negative and positive, lack and excess – can combine a consistently democratic ethics of the political with a passion for real transformation, able to stimulate the body politic without reoccupying the dangerous utopian fantasies of the old Left. Nevertheless, the prospects of such a project also depend on its ability to couple its institutionalisation of lack with another, non-phallic jouissance, capable of gradually displacing or limiting dominant administrations of enjoyment (such as the ones discussed in previous chapters) and of opening up the space for the pursuit of a better future beyond utopian fantasies of wholeness and completeness.

This chapter examines the process of ‘consulting’. It notes that consultation has become an essential component of the repertoire of political administration in post-democracy society. It examines the role of social science in consultation with reference to: the delivery of existing evidence to those who are being consulted; the use of quantitative survey methods in consultation; the use of qualitative modes including such participatory mechanisms as citizens's juries; and the reality or otherwise of dialogical engagement in participatory processes.

In recent years a growing body of literature has begun to theorise contemporary depoliticisation in terms of post-politics, post-democracy, and the post-political. This chapter provides an introduction to this literature, in preparations for the more involved debates that form the substance of the book. We conceptualise the post-political as a ‘Borromean Knot’ comprising the Imaginary – the ideology of ‘the end of history’; the Symbolic – the institutional mechanisms through which politics is reduced to the consensual management of economic necessity; and the Real – the ontological erasure of ‘the political difference’ between a given social order and the establishment of that order on an always absent ground. We then introduce the conceptualizations of the post-political in the work of Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek. We argue that Mouffe is concerned with the post-political as the repression of antagonism, Rancière with post-democracy as the disavowal of equality, and Žižek with post-politics as the foreclosure of class struggle. These distinct theoretical approaches provide the grounds for divergent understandings of ‘the return of the political’. We conclude by outlining the key arguments that are played out in the book.

International climate and sustainability politics seem inescapably locked into a technocratic politics of unsustainability. This chapter explores what the literature on post-democracy and post-politics contributes to a more detailed understanding of this politics of unsustainability. It develops the notions of post-democracy and post-politics in a way that moves beyond existing work in the post- or neo-Marxist tradition. A brief account of the perspective that views contemporary eco-politics as a neo-liberal ploy is followed by the analysis of an emancipatory shift in social values and culture that has, arguably, given rise to a new eco-political governmentality. Today’s post-democratic and post-political politics of unsustainability is then interpreted as the product of this new governmentality. Thus, the diagnosed lock-in can no longer be seen exclusively as the result of ideological neo-liberalism but is, at least partially, also the outcome of an emancipatory process.

The chapter is the first of three chapters introducing the argument concerning the emergence of parental narcissism as a critical feature of 'neoliberal times'. The chapter provides a select overview of some of the major realignments that have contributed to our culture of narcissism. It begins by acknowledging that late modernity is characterized by a precarious identity, an uncertain future, and a 'widespread sense of 'demands frustrated and desires unmet'. It then considers the tribulations of 'post democracy'(marked by political disenchantment), the advent of neoliberalism, and the interconnections between feminism, neoliberalism, and the social liberationist agenda - particularly in relation to the family, mothering and childcare. The chapter argues that these forces, certainly with respect to parenting, have come to exert a malign influence on our late modern selves.

This chapter extends the preceding discussion about environmental democracy to the question of the “green state.” Debates about the possibility of green democratic states raise relevant issues for an assessment of democratic environmental prospects. For this reason, the chapter examines the theories of three leading environmental political theorists: Eckersley, Dryzek, and Barry. Although their works largely fall far short of identifying practical political openings for restructuring existing state institutions and practices, the issues and problems they raise remain instructive. The second half of the chapter assesses these concerns against broader contemporary political trends, in particular concerns about “democratic deficits” and the theories of “post-democracy” that have accompanied them. It examines the “ecological paradox” that a post-democratic politics poses for a sustainable transformation. These issues suggest that the pursuit of environmental democracy might best look for alternative locations outside of the state.

This concluding chapter describes how the Europe of the 1990s was for the first time in its history both united and democratic. But the sudden turning point of 1989 lacked something of the global significance of the other European post-war moments of the twentieth century in 1918 and 1945. Europe no longer stood at the centre of its own history, as demonstrated by the ineffective response of the European Union to the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia during the 1990s, and by the divisions that emerged among European states during the American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In economic terms, too, the ascendancy of a new global capitalism obliged Europe to accept the economic weather generated by more distant or universal forces. In addition, however, Europe had lost confidence in the democratic model that it had developed and, to a large degree, patented. The more fractured and fluid politics that had emerged in Europe by the end of the twentieth century might be more appropriately described as post-democracy: a politics still conducted through the language and institutional structures of democracy, but which lacked much of the former substance of democratic politics.