Decizionistički modeli politike
Decisionist Models of Politics

Summary/Abstract: It is with good reason that decisionism stresses the crucial importance of decisions in the political process. But it is necessary to evaluate critically its dramatic pretension (from Schmitt to Agamben), according to which the normality of life is juxtaposed with the pathos of the state of exception and crisis. This erases not only every distinction between normality and the state of exception, but even between democracy and dictatorship. The proper framework from which an explanation of decisionism and its dramatizing forms can be derived is the modern age as a whole. The birth of decisionism from the crisis of tradition and commonality can be observed already in the beginning of modernity: with Machiavelli and Hobbes. We find the peak of dramatisation in Schmitt’s decisionism, in the use of political theology for the dramatization of politics as drama of the subject which obtains his self-willed freedom through a secularist disempowerment of God. The other strand of political philosophy advocates the political priority of discussion and discourse, as opposed to the priority of decision. The author is interested in forms of discourse which revolve in a Habermasian or Rawlsian way around the concept of deliberative democracy. The theories of deliberative democracy are mostly characterized by the following postulates: demand for equality and inclusion, for non-coercion and communicativeness, oriented towards mutual understanding. The author points out that these demands reflect too great expectations, which cannot be fulfilled by discourse and discussion (expectations of consensus and rationality, underestimating of pre-discursive assumptions). In the final section, the author concludes that both decisionism and theory of discourse resulted from the modern-age loss of tradition and commonality. Decision and discussion could be perceived as feuding brothers, although they are doing their best to negate their kinship. A mediation of opposition is possible insofar as the feuding brothers recognize the fact that they are related. Unification at least protects them from the danger of irrationalism and excessive expectation of rationalism.

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