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Dealing with Extremists in Public Discussion: Front National and ‘Republican Front’ in France
Author(s) -
Fennema Meindert,
Maussen Marcel
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
journal of political philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.938
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1467-9760
pISSN - 0963-8016
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9760.00108
Subject(s) - democracy , front (military) , politics , perspective (graphical) , performative utterance , relation (database) , focus (optics) , political science , process (computing) , epistemology , sociology , law and economics , law , computer science , mechanical engineering , philosophy , physics , optics , database , artificial intelligence , engineering , operating system
In this article we investigate the way modern democracies can deal with extremists in public discussion. The first part of the article conceptualizes political discussion insofar as it makes a contribution to the democratic process. We focus upon the democratic process as a way of dealing with conflicts between citizens that stem from differences in moral outlook. We reflect upon this process mainly in relation to its capacity to overcome possible political deadlocks, in the perspective of collective decision making. In the second part we concentrate on the question of how public discussion in a modern democracy should look. Here, then, we take a similar perspective as Gutmann and Thompson (1996) in saying that we should try and define some central ‘rules of the game’ for public discussion. We make a distinction between entrance rules that are proscriptive and performative rules that are suggestive.