Political Theory and the Agony of Politics Andrew Schaap The University of Melbourne Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political. Milton Park: Routledge. Walzer, M. (2005) Politics and Passion:Towards a More Egalitarian Liberalism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Arendt, H. (2005) The Promise of Politics, ed. J. Kohn. NewYork: Schocken Books. ... the criteria of the political ... is the friend/enemy discrimination. It deals with the formation of a ‘we’ as opposed to a ‘they’ and is always concerned with collective forms of identification; it has to do with conflict and antagonism and is therefore the realm of decision, not free discussion (Mouffe, 2005, p. 11). What is crucial for us here is to understand freedom itself as political and not as a purpose ... to be obtained by political means, and to realise that coercion and brute force are always a means for protecting or establishing or expanding political space, but in and of themselves are definitely not political (Arendt, 2005, p. 130). In an article in Political Theory, MichaelWalzer (1990) wrote that, like the fashion for pleated trousers in the 1980s, the communitarian critique of liberalism is transient but certain to return. 1 Walzer attributes the transience of communitari- anism to the fact that it cannot provide an alternative to liberalism but only a corrective to certain problematic tendencies within it towards instability,disasso- ciation and depoliticisation.Liberals are now widely understood to have won the debate with their communitarian critics of the 1980s due to liberalism’s accom- modation of communitarian concerns within autonomy-based theories such as Will Kymlicka’s (1989). However, what Walzer calls ‘standard liberalism’ did not emerge from this controversy unchanged. Rather, in challenging liberalism’s bifurcation and privileging of morality over ethics, reason over history and, generally, philosophy over politics, the communitarian critique succeeded in pushing liberalism in a more political direction.This was apparent in the devel- opment of John Rawls’ (1993) work and in the shift of interest among political theorists from justice to democracy and from rights to deliberation in the 1990s. The importance of each author reviewed here for contemporary political theory is in continuing the critique of liberal political theory in its current dialogical manifestation.The turn to dialogue in liberal theory provides the basis of its claim to have developed a more democratic political philosophy in contrast to its earlier POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW: 2007 VOL 5, 56–74 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Political Studies Association