Joint CHS and REPS Seminar: Alexander Kirshner (Duke University): The Future of “Un”Democratic Theory

Organized by CHS group Power, Statecraft, and the History of Political Experiences and the RUG European Politics & Society (REPS).

Most people live in autocracies. And over the past two decades, the study of autocracy has boomed across a variety of fields. But not in political philosophy. Relatively few recent works examine non-democracy. This presentation tackles this lacuna. It does so by thinking through how political philosophy can contribute to the study of autocracy. In other words, I try to imagine a future for (un)democratic theory.

Here is the main idea: it is helpful to divide the normative analysis of autocracy into three buckets. The first bucket includes works, like my own, that consider autocracy to better understand democracy. These works instrumentalize the study of autocracy. The second bucket includes both defenses of democracy and autocracy. These works are competitive; they aim to show the superiority of one system over the other. Most recent normative analyses of autocracy are instrumental and/or competitive.

There is nothing wrong with those works. But they don’t deal with many of the most interesting and important normative questions that are raised by autocratic government. Works that fall into the third bucket—works that focus on autocracy for its own sake—can tackle such questions and fill important scholarly gaps. For instance, how do autocracies shape social relations? Is the need to compromise one’s integrity part of the nature of autocracy? What should we make of autocratic courts and systems of separated powers? What is the normative status of political representation in non-democracies? There is currently little contemporary work focusing on questions of this sort. This presentation makes the case that there should be more.

Moderated by dr. Francesco Buscemi