The Politics of Postmodernity

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The distinctive feature of Madison's political theory is the Merleau-Pontyan sense of contingency that pervades his writings on the subject and, indeed, is visible throughout his entire oeuvre. The perspicacity of Madison's view of con- tingency was first noted by Paul Ricoeur. In his foreword to the English transla- tion of Madison's now classic study of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur wrote: More than anything, the most penetrating view which Gary Madison proposes of Merleau-Ponty's final ontology concerns the paradox of contingency. ! Twenty-eight years after the original French publication of his dissertation, we may look back over Madison's work and interpret it as working out Merleau-Ponty's insights into the implications of contingency for human political reality within the framework of a hermeneutical theory of democracy. The spirit of Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the emergence of Being at the heart of contingency and of contingency at the heart of Being is carried forward in Madison's articulation of a nondogmatic politics of communicative rational- ity. Madison's postmodern liberalism is unique in seeking to articulate a specifi- cally and explicitly hermeneutical politics, one that attempts to draw out the ul- timate praxial consequences of phenomenological hermeneutics. As might be expected from a political-economic theory of communicative rationality, Madi- son's thinking takes shape through a dialectical confrontation with a number of prominent contemporary writers-Derrida, Rorty, and Habermas, in particular.