Thinking Radical Democracy is an introduction to nine key political thinkers who contributed to the emergence of radical democratic thought in post-war French political theory: Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, and Miguel Abensour.

The essays in this collection connect these writers through their shared contribution to the idea that division and difference in politics can be perceived as productive, creative, and fundamentally democratic. The questions they raise regarding equality and emancipation in a democratic society will be of interest to those studying social and political thought or democratic activist movements like the Occupy movements and Idle No More.

Martin Breaugh is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at York University.

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Christopher Holman is an assistant professor in the Public Policy and Global Affairs program at Nanyang Technological University.

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Rachel Magnusson is the director of the Vancouver office of MASS LBP and teaches at the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria.

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Paul Mazzocchi is an instructor and doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at York University.

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Devin Penner is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Studies at Trent University.

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‘Thinking Radical Democracy is an important intervention in contemporary debates concerning political thought; it demonstrates both the historical roots of radical democratic theory and the respective merits of the work of Abensour, Balibar, and Rancière.’

Symposium: Journal of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy vol 19:01:2015

‘Thinking Radical Democracy makes an important contribution to our understanding of recent French intellectual history. Its intervention in postulating a left wing of the French ‘return’ of political philosophy breathes new life into this historical interpretation.’

Politics, Religion, and Ideology; March 2016

‘As a series of surveys into discrete theories of radical democracy, this collected volume excels… Breaugh does a quite admirable job in explicating the underlying philosophy that informs radical democratic ideas.’

Contemporary Political Theory March 2017