Examining the Conflictual Political: Alternative Agonisms for Democratic Designs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Democratic theory struggles to understand the conflictual quality of the democratic experience. Agonist literature has better achieved this recognition, founding democracy on a political dimension that is irreducibly conflictual. Yet, the study of agonist thinkers has often excluded much of the diversity in agonistic thought. Further, widely-accepted models such as deliberative democracy have ignored conflict, pointing the field towards unity and peace by rational deliberation. Therefore, this thesis reapproaches agonist literature, presenting three cases of 'alternative agonists', to examine what the agonistic tradition still can offer to the perils of democracy. This thesis contributes to the discourse on democratic conflict by engaging with Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancire, and Claude Lefort who each offer a definition of the political that rests in conflict. It argues that a comparative analysis of their writings reveals unique meanings of the 'conflictual political' that impact the way we think and do democracy. It offers new potentials for understanding the fundamental meaning of democracy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".