Democratic Theory in the Face of Economic Inequality.

Rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, democracy has proven unable, or unwilling, to deliver political equality in the face of seemingly inevitable economic inequality. This paper synthesizes the responses to Karl Marx by thinkers Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, and Benjamin Barber, including Arendt's notions of the political as action and cyclical revolution, Wolin's dualistic distinction between politics and the political, and Barber's call for a global confederacy of civil societies. From these ideas I build a conception of democracy that might address political inequality without attempting to solve economic inequality first. The challenge remains to find a way to motivate the necessary levels of participation by the demos, and I suggest that aligning political participation to the same interests that make global capitalism so effective might also prove helpful in motivating greater civic participation. This claim would be stronger were the connection between political and economic inequality empirically demonstrated,and this recognition leads me to call for more study in that area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]