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In this introductory essay, we outline the relationship between political dissensus and radical democracy, focusing especially on how such a politics might inform the study of business ethics. This politics is located historically in the failure of liberal democracy to live up to its promise, as well as the deleterious response to that from reactionary populism, strong-man authoritarianism, and exploitative capitalism. In the context of these political vicissitudes, we turn to radical democracy as a form of contestation that offers hope in an affirmative, inclusive and sustainable alternative. On this basis we introduce the papers in the special issue as a collective exploration of the ethics and politics of radical democracy as manifesting in dissensus and the subversion of corporate and elite power by alternative democratic practices and realities.

This paper analyses the right to repair (R2R) movement through the lens of radical democracy, elucidating the opportunities and limitations for advancing a democratic repair ethics against a backdrop of power imbalances and vested interests. We commence our analysis by exploring broader political-economic trends, demonstrating that Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are increasingly shifting towards asset-based repair strategies. In this landscape, hegemony is preserved not solely through deterrence tactics like planned obsolescence but also by conceding repairability while monopolizing repair and maintenance services. We further argue that the R2R serves as an ‘empty signifier’, whose content is shaped by four counter-hegemonic frames used by the R2R movement: consumer advocacy, environmental sustainability, communitarian values, and creative tinkering. These frames, when viewed through Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of radical democracy, reveal different potentials for sustaining dissent and confronting OEMs' hegemony in the field of repair. Analysed in this way, an emerging business ethics of repair can be understood as driven by the politics of repair beyond repair. This notion foregrounds the centrality of non-violent conflict and antagonism for bringing radical democratic principles to repair debates, looking beyond narrow instrumentalist conversations, where repairability is treated as an apolitical arena solely defined by concerns for eco-efficiency and resource productivity.

This essay analyzes Fred Moten’s “antipolitical” romance with the “fugitive black sociality” that he radically opposes to “politics,” defined as inescapably tied to antiblack modernity. By comparing Moten’s argument to other voices in the black radical tradition, and by triangulating Moten with Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin, this essay opens inherited conceptions of the political to risk and reworking but also complicates figurations of fugitivity and resists the antagonism Moten posits between black fugitivity and democratic politics.

Die Umsetzung der Energiewende begleiten viele Konflikte um das Gemeinwohl, in denen sich zunehmend Phänomene einer Demokratiekrise zeigen. Das deliberative Demokratiemodell stößt hier an Grenzen. Der Schlüssel für eine konstruktive Bearbeitung von Klima- und Demokratiekrise liegt darin, die Konfrontation zwischen konkurrierenden Energiewende-Visionen zu forcieren. Es gilt, den pluralistischen Kern moderner Demokratien und die Legitimität von Konflikten anzuerkennen (conflictual consensus) und auf dieser Basis Konflikte um Gemeinwohlziele auszutragen.In government policy, security of supply, affordability and the protection of the climate and the environment are postulated as equal goals of the German energy transition (Energiewende). There is no explicit prioritization of these supposed goals. This leads to problems both in terms of the success of the Energiewende itself, and in terms of its effects on the political culture. Conflicts over the implementation of the Energiewende increasingly reveal a crisis of democracy, which cannot be adequately responded to in negotiations over concrete energy projects. A one-sided focus on the deliberative model of democracy further exacerbates the symptoms of a democratic crisis. From a radical democratic perspective, the key to constructively addressing both climatic and democratic challenges is to encourage a confrontation between competing Energiewende visions in a way that is compatible with a pluralistic understanding of democracy.

The article theorizes the sovereign in recent digital democratic experiments. It demonstrates how the prevailing perspective is based on a liberal-technocratic understanding that overlooks important questions of organized collective power and identity. To address these limitations, the article contrasts the liberal-technocratic framework with a radical democratic approach. This alternative allows for reimagining the digital sovereign in two ways. First, it shifts the focus from the sovereign as a mere aggregation of networked individuals with fixed identities to one that opens up opportunities for ongoing identity construction and transformation. Second, a radical democratic approach emphasizes that the digital sovereign emerges from the individual and collective capacity to organize power.

This essay goes beyond the dominant conception of constituent power developed by Emmanuel Sieyès and Carl Schmitt by excavating an alternative through the practices of twentieth-century workers’ councils and the interpretations of council democracy by Cornelius Castoriadis and Hannah Arendt. Interpreters of the constituent power often agree on its fundamentally antagonistic relation to constituted power, hereby making constituent politics a momentary experience, which cannot be sustained in constituted politics. Council democracy, instead, discloses a modality of politics, which bridges the gap between constituent power and political form in order to provide institutional means through which the spirit of revolution can survive the founding moment. With this alternative concept of council democratic constituent power, this essay contributes to radical democratic theory by stipulating ways in which institutions can be rethought radically democratic as a way in which constituent power (creativity, novelty, freedom) can be institutionally approximated and continually reexperienced.

We investigate the rural resistance of one of the world's largest social movements, La Via Campesina, as a powerful enactment of radical democracy in practice. More than this, the paper describes how the movement challenges the framework of radical democracy by pointing towards the ethical importance of recognizing the relationship of human dignity with nature and considering ethico-political values inherent in the peasants' way of living. Their resistance is a rejection of depoliticizing silencing, and their everyday life is a commitment to a \"more than human\" radical democracy in its most radical sense, as they are always already \"in parliament with land\". We conclude by outlining a perspective which is both more than radical and more democratic, considering those who have not yet been heard but also that which, in the light of radical democracy, has never been counted as part of the political body at all: nature.

America has a long tradition of middle-class radicalism, albeit one that intellectual orthodoxy has tended to obscure.The Radical Middle Classseeks to uncover the democratic, populist, and even anticapitalist legacy of the middle class. By examining in particular the independent small business sector or petite bourgeoisie, using Progressive Era Portland, Oregon, as a case study, Robert Johnston shows that class still matters in America. But it matters only if the politics and culture of the leading player in affairs of class, the middle class, is dramatically reconceived. This book is a powerful combination of intellectual, business, labor, medical, and, above all, political history. Its author also humanizes the middle class by describing the lives of four small business owners: Harry Lane, Will Daly, William U'Ren, and Lora Little. Lane was Portland's reform mayor before becoming one of only six senators to vote against U.S. entry into World War I. Daly was Oregon's most prominent labor leader and a onetime Socialist. U'Ren was the national architect of the direct democracy movement. Little was a leading antivaccinationist. The Radical Middle Classfurther explores the Portland Ku Klux Klan and concludes with a national overview of the American middle class from the Progressive Era to the present. With its engaging narrative, conceptual richness, and daring argumentation, it will be welcomed by all who understand that reexamining the middle class can yield not only better scholarship but firmer grounds for democratic hope.

This paper mobilises the psychoanalytic concepts of desire and enjoyment to better understand how processes of education aimed at extending and defending democratic life might respond to and engage with populist politics. I approach this task by engaging with a particular vector of Mouffe and Laclau’s political philosophy, moving from a critique of liberal democracy’s rationalist pretensions to their insistence that left populism and its passionate construction of a ‘people’ is the central task facing radical politics. This attention to the libidinal basis of political identification locates them in a community of Left Lacanian thinkers who reframe the problems of democratic politics in terms of desire and enjoyment rather than miseducation or its lack. Whilst this position might suggest a binary choice between different analytical frames, I inquire into what insights are generated by theorising left populism as an ‘education of desire’. The paper is organised into four main parts: the opening discussion clarifies my understanding of education by engaging with the literature on educational agonism. The second section lays the groundwork for a critique of the way in which education is fetishized, in different ways, by liberals and radicals as a panacea for populist politics. The third section reframes democratic crisis as an enjoyment problem in order to better grasp the relationship between the liberal democratic disavowal of its own irrationality and the structure of right-wing populist enjoyment. The fourth section applies these insights to develop a critical analysis of what is at stake when we explicitly consider the left populist construction of a ‘people’ as an educational task. I conclude by drawing together and summarising the main features and considerations of left populism understood as an education of desire.

In 2012, Vuyani Vellem made a brief proposal for a deeper engagement with political theorists and activists working around the notion of radical democracy, a proposal he reaffirmed in 2013 in articulating the challenge for the church in the face of an inability to contribute to meaningful change amidst vast economic inequality in South Africa. Despite extensive engagement with the work of Vellem in recent years, this particular proposal has so far not been explicitly picked up. This article places Vellem’s proposal within the more recent debates around public theology and political theology in South Africa, proposing the possibility of a constructive dialogue between political theologies and South African theologies of liberation in picking up Vellem’s suggestion.ContributionAfter an overview of the very recent attempts at engaging political theology in the South African context, and an overview of Vellem’s proposal around radical democracy, two more recent theological attempts at engaging with radical democracy are introduced and elements that might extend Vellem’s call for a conversation with radical democracy are outlined.