The Trouble with Liberal Democracy

The current state of representative democracy and possible alternatives

Workshop organised by Horizon REDIRECT and the Centre for Political Thought

Wednesday 18 March 2026, 14:00-17:00, Digital Humanities Seminar Room One

 

Chair: Alex Prichard (Exeter)
Introduction: Dario Castiglione (Exeter)

The trouble with Liberal Democracy

14:20 – 15:00: Ruth Kinna (Loughborough)

Rose Pessotta’s anarchist critique of representative government revisited (+ Q/A)

15:00 – 15:40: Stuart White (Oxford)

To win the battle of democracy: republican politics and democratic Marxism (+ Q/A)

Tea/Coffee Break

16:00 –16.40: Clementina Gentile Fusillo (UCL)

Seeing like a representative: the hidden demands of liberal democracy (+ Q/A)

16:40 - 17:00: General discussion

Available soon

Alex Prichard’s research lies at the intersection of International Relations, political theory and anarchist studies. His work focuses on anarchist thought and anarchist constitutional politics in particular, as well as points at intersections and disagreements in anarchist and Marxist philosophies. In addition to this, he is interested in the ethics and phenomenology of war and violence, republican political theory, and co-production methods in political philosophy. He is co-author, with Ruth Kinna (Loughborough), of Constitutionalising Anarchy, forthcoming in the LSE International Studies series, published by Cambridge University Press.

Dario Castiglione’s main areas of research comprise democratic theory and the history of early modern political philosophy. He has written on representation, citizenship and constitutionalism; theories of civil society and social capital; the constitutional nature of the European Union; the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume and Mandeville; and 18th-century theories of the social contract and of their crittiques, and early modern scepticism. His main current research interests are on representation and political legitimacy; and the way in which political and conceptual discourses translates across linguistic and cultural divides.

Ruth Kinna is a political theorist and historian of ideas with interests in historical and contemporary anarchism, nineteenth and early twentieth-century socialist thought, utopianism and political militancy. Ruth graduated from Queen Mary, University of London with a 1st class degree in History and Politics. She completed her doctoral research at Nuffield College, Oxford. She is co-founder of Loughborough’s Anarchism Research Group and co-founder and co-convenor (2005-2018) of the Anarchist Studies Network (a specialist group of the Political Studies Association) and with Matthew S. Adams, co-editor of the peer review journal Anarchist Studies.

Ruth’s first monograph William Morris: The Art of Socialism, was published in 2000 with University of Wales Press. In 2016, she published Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition with University of Edinburgh. Her most recent book, co co-authored with Alex Prichard (Exeter), provisionally titled, Constitutionalising Anarchy: Individual Sovereignty, Association, Non-Domination, is forthcoming in the LSE/CUP International Studies Book Series.

Ruth is editor of the Continuum/Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism (2012/14) and co-editor of Anarchism and Utopianism (Manchester University Press, 2009 with Laurence Davis), Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red (Palgrave & PM Press, 2012/2017 with Alex Prichard, Saku Pinta and David Berry), Anarchism 1914-18: Internationalism, Anti-militarism and War (Manchester University Press, 2017 with Matthew S. Adams), Handbook of Radical Politics (Routledge, 2019 with Uri Gordon) and Cultures of Violence (Routledge, 2020 with Gillian Whiteley).

Stuart White’s research focuses centrally on democracy, citizenship and property rights and the question of what rights to resources we should have as members of a democratic community. A unifying theme is the concern to explore visions of society that are at once anti-capitalist and opposed to authoritarian forms of socialism. He explores this theme in studies that range across political philosophy, public policy and the history of political thought. Recent publications include: (co-ed. with Bruno Leipold and Karma Nabulsi) Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage (2020); With Debra Satz, he recently co-wrote What's Wrong with Inequality? for the Institute for Fiscal Studies' Deaton review of economic inequality; His new book is The Wealth of Freedom: Radical Republican Political Economy (OUP, 2025)

Clementina Gentile Fusillo received her PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Warwick in 2021 with the dissertation titled »On the Virtues of Truth: Generativity and the Demands of Democracy«. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Fusillo obtained a MA in International Politics from SOAS, University of London, and a MA in Development and International Cooperation from the University of Naples. Her academic career included positions as a Lecturer in PPE at the University of Sheffield, and various teaching roles at the University of Warwick and the University of London. Her main areas of research include Political Theory, Normative Analysis, History of Ideas, Truth and Politics, Representation, Hannah Arendt, Aldo Moro.