Jacob Abolafia, American University
“A New Theory of Democratic Interest”
This paper aims to reestablish a theory of democratic interest, the idea that an objective interest in democracy can be linked to one or more populations within a polity. Following Ernesto Laclau, the paper argues that we cannot project an interest in supporting a democratic regime onto any group based only on its formal qualities or social position. But against Laclau’s political agonism, the paper argues that democratic interest has objective content, insofar as the interest claims of groups can only be said to be democratic if they preserve the contingency of the democratic process itself and encourage the circulation of power across society. Therefore, a theory of democratic interest requires both that group interests and group identities be understood “incompletely and provisionally” and that anything claim to democratic interests be aligned with the circulation of power as broadly as possible within the democratic boundary. According to this theory, democratic interest as the overlap between the interests of the majority and an interest in democratic government should be thought of as a principle of institutional design and a regulative ideal and not as a social fact.
Jacob Abolafia is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at American University. He studied Philosophy and Classics at Yale and Cambridge before receiving his doctorate in Political Theory from Harvard. Jacob held post-doctoral appointments in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and at Stanford before joining the Philosophy Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev as a Senior Lecturer. He has published widely across both the history of political philosophy, ancient and modern, as well as in critical and democratic theory. His first book, The Prison Before the Panopticon: Incarceration in the History of Political Philosophy, was published by Harvard University Press in 2024.