Pragmatism, non-consensual democracy and populism

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dc.abstract.enIn this paper, I offer a reinterpretation of populism as viewed through the lens of political pragmatism and my pragmatist concept of non-consensual democracy. My argument takes its starting point from a critique of the currently dominant approach in which populism is primarily described as a threat to liberal-democratic institutions. While such an assessment of populism is legitimate, it is also incomplete since it fails to explain why populist mobilizations prove to be convincing to the public. I argue that populism should also be regarded as an expression of real deficits of liberal democracy, including an enfeeblement of representation, a yawning gap between institutional politics and everyday experience, a crisis of representation, and the reduction of conflict to a technocratically managed consensus. In the first part, I build on John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and also Mikhail Bakhtin to outline the pragmatist understanding of politics as rooted in practices of everyday life. In the second part, I discuss my idea of non-consensual democracy, which proposes an alternative to both the deliberative model of consensus and the agonistic affirmation of conflict. In the third part, I draw a distinction between the common good and common interests to show that pragmatism furnishes us with a language capable of capturing democratic integration without recourse to the notion of community. This promotes construing populism as both a symptom and a challenge because while it reveals actual failings of liberal democracy, it responds to them in an anti-pluralist manner. Thus, the democratic response must not come down to a condemnation of populism; instead, democratic institutions must be restructured to accommodate permanent disagreement, conflicts of interest, and non-consensual dialogue.
dc.affiliationInstytut Nauk Społecznych
dc.contributor.authorKoczanowicz, Leszek
dc.date.access2026-10-10
dc.date.accessioned2026-10-19T11:08:19Z
dc.date.available2026-10-19T11:08:19Z
dc.date.created2026
dc.date.issued2026-10-10
dc.description.accesstimeat_publication
dc.description.grantnumber2019/35/B/HS2/01187)
dc.description.granttitleEstetyka populizmu: Walka polityczna i doświadczenie estetyczne w Polsce po 1989 roku (
dc.description.issue1
dc.description.physical41-47
dc.description.sdgPeaceJusticeAndStrongInstitutions
dc.description.versionfinal_published
dc.description.volume17
dc.identifier.eissn1338-2799
dc.identifier.urihttps://share.swps.edu.pl/handle/swps/2638
dc.identifier.weblinkhttps://www.pragmatismtoday.eu/index.php?id=2026summer1
dc.languageen
dc.pbn.affiliationnauki o polityce i administracji
dc.rightsOther
dc.rights.questionYes_rights
dc.share.articleOTHER
dc.subject.encommon good
dc.subject.encommon interests
dc.subject.enliberal democracy
dc.subject.ennon-consensual democracy
dc.subject.enpluralism
dc.subject.enpop- ulism
dc.subject.enpragmatism
dc.swps.sciencecloudsend
dc.titlePragmatism, non-consensual democracy and populism
dc.title.journalPragmatism Today
dc.typeJournalArticle
dspace.entity.typeArticle