About

Eric Fabri is a BAEF postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He wrote a Ph.D. on the justification of private property and democratic theory at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and now works on the right to give, bequest, and inherit property. He also works on democratic theory with a continental perspective. He has co-edited a book on the political philosophy of Castoriadis and authored several articles on Locke’s theory of appropriation, property-owning democracy, the history of property rights, or utopian socialism.

In this workshop, Fabri will discuss a paper that binds together two complementary and yet distinct questions: “Why should we prefer democracy to non-democratic forms of political organization?”; and “What instantiation of the democratic ideal (radical, indirect, deliberative, representative, participative democracy, etc.) better realizes the normative reasons justifying the normativity of the democratic ideal?”

Fabri will first try to identify what principles lie at the heart of the democratic project and make it normatively superior to other forms of political organization. To do so, he will build on Cornelius Castoriadis’ incredibly fruitful – and yet widely ignored - social ontology. After a brief presentation of this ontology, he will recall Castoriadis’ distinction between autonomy and heteronomy to identify the origin of the normativity we associate with democratic regimes. Particular attention will be paid to a) the ontological stakes of this argument, b) how it differs from classical liberal arguments, and c) the way in which the democratic principle requires an equal capacity for each individual to adopt an autonomous relation to the laws and norms organizing their life in society.