Beyond the search for the subject: An anti-essentialist ontology for liberal democracy
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885118763881 |
| Author | Samuel Bagg |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
EJPT
Article
Beyond the search for the
subject: An anti-essentialist
ontology for liberal
democracy
Samuel Bagg
Department of Political Science, McGill University, Canada
Abstract
Reading Foucault’s work on power and subjectivity alongside ‘‘developmentalist’’
approaches to evolutionary biology, this article endorses poststructuralist critiques of
political ideals grounded in the value of subjective agency. Many political theorists
embrace such critiques, of course, but those who do are often skeptical of liberal
democracy, and even of normative theory itself. By contrast, those who are left to
theorize liberal democracy tend to reject or ignore poststructuralist insights, and have
continued to employ dubious ontological assumptions regarding human agents. Against
both groups, I argue that Foucault’s poststructuralism must be taken seriously, but that
it is ultimately consistent with normative theory and liberal democracy. Linking post-
structuralist attempts to transcend the dichotomy between agency and structure with
recent efforts by evolutionary theorists to dissolve a similarly stubborn opposition
between nature and nurture, I develop an anti-essentialist account of human nature
and agency that vindicates poststructuralist criticism while enabling a novel defense of
liberal democracy.
Keywords
Agency, evolutionary biology, Foucault, freedom, poststructuralism, power, subjectivity
Introduction
Though it is seldom openly discussed, few would deny that a profound schism
structures the practice of contemporary political theory. Scholars with broadly
‘‘liberal’’ commitments and ‘‘analytic’’ methods share journals, conferences, and
departments with colleagues working in ‘‘critical’’ and ‘‘continental’’ traditions, yet
meaningful engagement across paradigms is strikingly rare. This is perhaps
European Journal of Political Theory
2021, Vol. 20(2) 208–231
!The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885118763881
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Corresponding author:
Samuel Bagg, Department of Political Science, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke West, Montreal, Quebec
H3A 2T7, Canada.
Email: samuel.bagg@gmail.com
nowhere more evident than in the case of the so-called ‘‘death of the subject’’
proclaimed by poststructuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault. Where many in
critical traditions (and the humanities more broadly) understand this development
as foundational,
1
‘‘analytic liberals’’ typically dismiss it as a self-defeating species
of relativism. As a result, they continue to employ (implicitly and sometimes expli-
citly) an account of human agency that is understood by their colleagues as thor-
oughly discredited.
2
The present article seeks to bridge this divide. My strategy—unorthodox, if not
entirely unprecedented
3
—is to clarify and extend one of Foucault’s key insights
with reference to recent work in evolutionary biology. This synthesis enables an
account of human agency that is consistent with poststructuralist critiques, yet
serviceable for constructive normative theories of liberal democracy. Against
many ‘‘analytic liberals,’’ then, I insist that Foucault’s poststructuralism has
important implications for normative theory. Unlike many of its adherents, how-
ever, I maintain that it is consistent with the sort of generalized normative theory
typical of the analytic tradition, and can even provide an alternative basis for
endorsing liberal ideals and institutions.
4
My key innovation is to draw parallels between two familiar conceptual oppos-
itions—agency vs. structure and nature vs. nurture—which persist despite decades
of attempts to transcend them. Both dichotomies are widely acknowledged as
misconceived, yet both continue to structure popular as well as academic discourse,
and in my view, their stubborn persistence has a common culprit. Along with many
related oppositions—such as freedom vs. power and biology vs. culture—both rely
on a more fundamental dichotomy between ‘‘internal’’ and ‘‘external’’ sources of
human action; whereby internal sources like ‘‘agency,’’ ‘‘freedom,’’ ‘‘nature,’’ and
‘‘biology’’ are understood as more essential to human beings than external sources
like ‘‘structure,’’ ‘‘power,’’ ‘‘nurture,’’ and ‘‘culture.’’ Theorists disagree vehe-
mently, of course, about the proper location of the boundary between internal
and external. In accepting the terms of this dichotomy, however, they retain a
more basic ontological essentialism: a deeply intuitive sense that human beings
must have some bounded and coherent core—whether it is an autonomous will,
a capacity for reason, or an ‘‘uberbiological’’ genetic code (Frost, 2016)—which
defines humanness and grounds the diversity among us.
What poststructuralism shares with recent developments in evolutionary theory,
then, is that both seek to finally transcend this boundary rather than redrawing it
once again—i.e. to develop a genuinely anti-essentialist ontology. However, alter-
native accounts of the sources of human action developed by poststructuralists
have not been broadly compelling. As a result, many observers have concluded
that rather than escaping the dichotomy, poststructuralism simply dissolves agents
into deterministic power structures. By contrast, researchers in ‘‘developmental
systems theory’’ (DST) and related biological paradigms (including the more
recent ‘‘extended evolutionary synthesis’’ or EES) have achieved greater success
in replacing the equally stubborn opposition between nature and nurture with a
Bagg 209
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