Mark Wenman’s book takes as its central theme “whether and in what ways agonistic democracy can address the politics of diversity as well as struggles for economic equality” (p. xi). Wenman defines the agonistic approach as one that seeks more than negative forms of liberty to maintain political freedom; “the more important objective,” he writes, “is to struggle against domination, dependence and arbitrary forms of power” (p. 5). And so, after situating agonistic democracy within the cultural context of Anglo-American debates around moral autonomy and politics of diversity, he distinguishes the agonists from liberals and deliberative democrats through their efforts to “sublimate … hostility by transforming it into more constructive forms of rivalry” (p. xiii).

Part I of Agonistic Democracy sketches some points of convergence across contemporary agonists (around, namely, pluralism, tragedy, and the value of conflict), while Part II examines variations across four theorists in greater detail (William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, Chantal Mouffe, and James Tully) and in light of other scholars’ work. Wenman seeks to gather together an eclectic group of thinkers, loosely working in the agonistic tradition of Nietzsche, in order to assess the political, ethical, and interpretive alternatives they offer to other strands of contemporary theory. And he further works to illuminate the differences that separate agonistic from radical democracy, so as to clarify the democratic challenges before us in the age of globalization. What would it mean to challenge the very nature of the practices, discourses, and institutions that we consider to be political—and do the agonistic theorists rise to meet such a challenge?

Readers’ answer to this question will depend largely on their evaluation of the changes that agonist theorists promise. Wenman argues forcefully that agonism offers a politics of augmentation rather than an account of revolution—indeed, “the strictly revolutionary moment is rendered inconceivable by the respective ontological frameworks presented by Connolly, Tully, Mouffe, and Honig” (p. 14). To defend this claim, Wenman argues that neither augmentation nor revolution ought to have a stranglehold on politics; instead, democrats of all stripes should consider the historical context of contemporary demands for transformation, and the extent to which these demands fall within or beyond the horizon of liberal democratic constitutionalism.

Wenman’s relatively sympathetic labors to characterize the agonistic tradition in Part I enable him to critique more sharply whether its advocates have, in fact, “invent[ed] new social and political forms that introduce radical dislocation in the present forms of domination” (p. 17) in Part II. His meticulous but pointed critiques fault Connolly for failing to adequately scale up an account of “agonistic respect” for collective action, such that his global politics is no more than weak transnationalism; Tully as rather caught between the hope for a reciprocal politics and the reality of globalized oppression (p. 179); Mouffe as offering a more radical critique of deliberative democracy, but one pulled to the Right through her reading of Carl Schmitt (pp. 215–16); and Honig’s iterative refoundings as domesticating the revolutionary potential of extraordinary politics (pp. 256, 258). These assessments are smart and evenhanded, and press on the nature and extent of contestation that each advocates—or, more significantly, forecloses. The cardinal weakness of the agonists, for Wenman, is their advocacy of a constituent power that concedes too much to liberalism and its influence on democratic institutions. Throughout, he consistently and persuasively argues that ressentiment needs to be revisited and rethought so as to sharpen its critical power against structural forms of domination (p. 263).

In light of this consistent charge, Wenman’s concluding elaboration and defense of a “militant cosmopolitanism” inspired by Arendtian judgment will strike readers as controversial and perhaps puzzling. Such a cosmopolitanism seeks “an act of radical initiative emerging from within the transnational social movements [that] might deliver an original principle that is subsequently judged to be of broader importance by a wide range of spectators, who then carry the new standard as a lived experience and as a set of values to multiple institutional settings” (p. 292). With this call, the author seeks something more material and radically transformative of the institutions and practices that comprise global politics. However, it remains unclear just how a different form of “enlarged mentality” could be anything more than liberal judgment trying to rationalize and preserve itself in the face of a violence far more strident, structural, and Nietzschean than that envisioned by the agonists. In this final chapter, Wenman’s argument reaches the limit of a contradiction at the heart of agonistic theory itself. For underlying his account is not the failure of revolutionary Ursprung but a doubled story of origins that conceals the historical conditions of agonistic theory’s own birth. The book’s Introduction situates agonist theorists of democracy within an Anglo-American context colored by a politics of diversity, fundamentalism, and globalization (p. ix). This post—Cold War political context was shored up by an academic context preoccupied with questions of moral autonomy and political agency—a context against which agonists defined their work (p. 3). Rather differently, Chapter 1 returns to agonistic theory’s roots in Nietzsche’s exaltation of agonic struggle in the Hellenic world (p. 28), where “[i]n this brooding atmosphere, combat is salvation and deliverance; the cruelty of victory is the pinnacle of life’s jubilation” (“Homer’s Contest,” in On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings, trans. Carol Diethe, 1994, p. 175). Across all accounts (including Wenman’s) the possibility that this violence might exceed the bounds of the nation-state remains underexamined. For all that the agonists central to Wenman’s account have grappled with Nietzsche in varying ways and to varying extents, most of them seriously revised the terms of what would count as struggle for Nietzsche, and softened its cruel vaunting. It is significant that even Wenman moves quickly from Nietzsche to Isaiah Berlin’s account of moral pluralism in his efforts to link agonistic contest and pluralism (p. 29).

In the 1990s, such adaptations helped to offer an account of ethical autonomy rooted in something other than rule-bound behavior; made collective standards of valuation a provisional achievement, not an assumption; and rendered politics as the expression of difference, rather than consensus. They did so, however, without revisiting dissatisfactions and tensions in Nietzsche’s own writing among the democratic free spirit (who blithely refused to problematize the value of equality), the decadent nationalist, and Nietzsche’s belief that the rot of Bismarckian imperialism was preventing an expiatory violence of great politics. Writing in a Cold War context that itself contained politics within an international state system suspended in time, agonists were able to presume the container of the nation-state, without revisiting the tensions among democracy, nationalism, and imperialism in Nietzsche’s thought. Contemporary thinkers, then, came to focus attention on questions of judgment, political practices (rather than rules), and (to a far lesser extent) the moralization of hierarchy. Subsequent, laudable efforts to account for global processes of power and domination only expanded these concerns to an international arena and preserved intact and unexamined the tensions within Nietzsche’s thought and so their own. Thus, the strain between these two origins of agonistic theory can only return in the book’s concluding chapter. Somewhat inadvertently, the efforts to bring judgment to bear on “glocal” politics only underscore the pressing need to rethink key categories of struggle, resistance, and ressentiment.

Although there is something paradoxical in presenting a “systematic account” of thinkers defined by their antipathy toward foundations or prescriptive politics, it also allows for more sustained reflection—perhaps rumination—on an intellectual exchange that has unfolded over 30 years. Even more, the effect of Wenman’s tour d’horizon is to challenge agonists to revisit key Nietzschean concepts and categories in light of the organizing hierarchies of international politics. The effect of iterating the same questions and challenges across a range of thinkers is to raise a single, troubling question above the idiosyncrasies of each account: If “empire sutures together complex forms of oppression into a composite system of domination” (p. 267), then what politics would work the interval between these forms of oppression, to critique and begin to dismantle it?