Freedom as Self-risk and Happiness in Narration: A Feminist Quest for Non-Sovereign Horizons in Democratic Theory
by Giuseppe Aprile
pp. 190-209 Issue 17 (9,1) – January-June 2022 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14718/SoftPower.2022.9.1.9
Abstract
In spite of the nuances and different traditions in political theory, the idea of democracy seems to be consistently associated with very specific concepts like popular sovereignty, freedom, self-government and deliberation in a way which not always critically problematize this semantics. Although some thinkers have been avowedly aware of possible tensions, it seems nonetheless that their attempts at dealing with them have unearthed even more paradoxes in the process. This seems to be the case, for example, of Hannah Arendt who, when critically discussing the problematic relationship between freedom and sovereignty, highlights the potential of action to move towards a non-sovereign conception of freedom, while at the same time being arguably unable to fully abandon the tradition that she sets herself against. However, we argue, if we refer to feminist readings of Arendt’s theory of action, we might be able to envisage non-sovereign paradigms for a theory of democracy grounded on vulnerability and to elaborate notions such as freedom as self-risk and happiness in narration that can radically change our democratic semantics. This would be helpful first of all to disrupt the ‘horizon of expectation’ of the citizens of a democratic polity, and, in a second moment, to envisage alternatives to liberal deliberative models of democracy in favor of the setting of a Caring Democracy, as designed by Joan Tronto. A major change in paradigm that seems actually confirmed by the features of a ‘populist atmosphere’ that arguably signals its distress towards the features of liberal democracies.