The Right to Politics and Republican Non-Domination

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Against pronouncements of the recent demise of both democracy and the political, I maintain that there is, rather, something amiss in our societies with the process of politicization in which social grievances are translated into matters of political concern and become object of policy making. I therefore propose to seek an antidote to the depoliticizing tendencies of our age by reanimating the mechanism transmitting social conflicts and grievances into politics. To that purpose, I formulate the notion of a ‘fundamental right to politics’ as the opposite of the techne of policy-making. I articulate this right via a reconstruction of the logical presuppositions of democracy as collective self-authorship. I then recast the concept of non-domination by discerning two trajectories of domination – ‘relational’ and ‘systemic’ ones, to argue that in a viable democracy that takes full use of the right to politics, dynamics of politicization should take place along both trajectories; currently, however, matters of systemic injustice get translated in relational terms and politicized as redistributive concerns.