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Post-politics


Post-politics refers to the critique of the emergence, in the post-Cold War period, of a politics of consensus on a global scale: the dissolution of the Eastern Communist bloc following the collapse of the Berlin Wall instituted a post-ideological consensus based on the acceptance of the capitalist market and the liberal state as the organisational foundations of society. Generated by a cohort of radical philosophers – namely Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek – and their concern with politics as the institution of radical, active equality, this critique claims that the post-ideological politics of consensus has occasioned the systematic foreclosure of the properly political moment: with the institution of a series of new “post-democratic" governmental techniques, politics proper is reduced to social administration. Meanwhile, with the rise of the postmodernist "politics of self" comes a concomitant new "politics of conduct", in which political values are replaced by moral ones (what Chantal Mouffe terms "politics in the register of morality").

The disintegration of the Eastern communist bloc following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 announced the end of the Cold War era, and with it the great ideological stand-off between East and West, between the communist and capitalist worlds. Capitalism emerged the victor, with liberal democracy as its corresponding political doctrine. With the fall of state-communism as the final blow to an already crisis-ridden system, the latter abandoned its social democratic, Keynesian form; and so, under the aegis of a triumphant neoliberalism, entered its advanced, global phase. With Francis Fukuyama's End of History as its founding statement, this was the birth of the post-political, post-ideological "Zeitgeist". The Third Way politics of British New Labour and other parties of the so-called "radical centre" are its most emphatic symptom.


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