Dialogue and Universalism

Volume 32, Issue 3, 2022

New Faces of Democracy

Political Limit of Neoliberal Democracy: The Strategy of Inequality

The paper studies political consequences of the establishment of neoliberal democ-racy, which means the onset of a post-political state of the world. It is demonstrated that at the “end of politics,” the democratic principle of equal rights turns into its opposite—a radical inequality between transnational elites, personifying the power of “pure” capital, and the local population, representing the idea of “pure” life. Neoliberal democracy is studied as a limit concept, which shows the exhaustion of the democratic principle of equality. The paper shows that the return to democracy as the principle of equality becomes the driving ambition of modern politics of activism as a subjective process, unfolding in places where a situation of radical inequality arises.