Liberty, Equality, Receptive Generosity

Neo-Nietzschean Reflections on the Ethics and Politics of Coalition

Bibliographic Data

ID3765631
AuthorsRomand Coles (Duke University, corresponding author)
Year1996
Volume90
Issue2
Pages375-388
Publication date1996-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Political Science Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0554 • E-ISSN: 1537-5943
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2082891
OpenAlexW2109824491
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited30

Recently there has been a movement to embrace coalition politics both as an historically fundamental mode of action and as ethically desirable. Yet, as Bernice Johnson Reagon illustrates, coalition politics presents many profound difficulties, both in terms of its possible directions and the type of self capable of engaging in such activity. Laclau and Mouffe, embracing an open-ended development of equality and liberty, expand and clarify the possibilities that a radically democratic liberalism has available for envisioning and sustaining coalition politics. Yet, they illustrate the limits of such a project insofar as they are unable to address adequately the problems posed by Reagon. I argue that only by supplementing (and transfiguring) equality and liberty with an ethic of receptive generosity, suggested by an idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche's gift-giving virtue, would coalition politics likely be sustainable and ethically desirable. The gift-giving virtue allows us to formulate a vision of the possible grandness of plurality that is ethically more compelling than the logics of identity and difference offered by Laclau and Mouffe

Classical liberalism · Democracy · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Generosity · Law and economics · Liberalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Virtue · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics