Anti-Politics as a Quasi-Regulative Idea

Abstract

The notion of anti-politics resists a straight-forward definition due to the complexity and heterogeneity of the phenomena it encompasses. Discussions of anti-politics rarely aim to identify its essence directly; rather, they describe individual phenomena that constitute it, hoping that its meaning will emerge through such descriptions. Another possible methodological stance – drawing on Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance – would be to assume that antipolitics lacks a fixed nature and that the phenomena associated with it are only loosely connected. I propose a different solution: to treat anti-politics as a quasiregulative idea in the Kantian sense. In this view, anti-politics does not possess a substantial character (it is not a phenomenon or institutional fact) but a regulative one. It would thus be a construct of reason aimed at imposing unity on our cognition. This allows for phenomena such as the crisis (or revaluation) of democracy; the crisis of (neo)liberal ideology; processes of de-democratization or autocratization; depoliticization; the emergence of ‘uncivil’ society; contestation and political rebellion; indifference or apathy; and political disaffection or de-ideologization2 to be linked under a single idea that provides regulative coherence – without forcing them into a reductive, uniform framework that erases their internal differences. I suggest a change in the way of thinking about antipolitics, namely, instead of thinking about it as a certain socio-political phenomenon, I propose to think about it as an idea that unites these phenomena without being constituted by them. In the first part of this paper, I examine how selected authors conceptualize anti-politics; in the second, I outline Kant’s concept of regulative ideas; and in the third, I propose how this framework can be applied to the analysis of contemporary political phenomena.