3---Only problem driven approaches that confront specificity can account for gender violence – “one link” isn’t determinative

What other features might a radical democratic theory possess that takes seriously the critique of social suffering? It may be more fruitful to adopt an approach that, at least in the first instance, is problem- rather than model-oriented. Radical democrats might do better to develop principles from an initial focus on specific issues of social inequality, rather than embark at the outset on a quest to distil the essence of the political and from this derive models into which all concrete struggles are subsequently shoehorned. Of course, any problem-oriented approach will unavoidably be 'influenced' by theoretical presuppositions, but it won't necessarily be as ‘driven’ by the rigid logic of the model that seems to flow from a one-sided focus on political ontology (see Shapiro 2007). It is, after all, a problem-oriented approach that has informed many other types of radical theorizing, such as feminism, and has made them suspicious of the formal abstractions of theory that disregard the distinctiveness of certain group experiences (e.g. Martineau and Squires 2012). Partly because of its established links with activism, feminist theorizing has more often than not been propelled, in the first instance, by particular problems relating to gender inequality and the marginalized experiences of women. Feminist political theorizing about justice, for instance, starts with the problem of the gendered division of labour, and the undervaluing of women's care work. It uses this sociological perspective to expose the conceptual deficiencies of asocial individualism as a device for deriving principles of justice because of the way it obscures human vulnerability and dependency and thereby fails to recognize care as a fundamental element of social justice (Bubeck 1995; Fraser 1997; Kittay 1999). Others feminists think through issues of democratic participation starting from the problem of the underrepresentation of women in [END PAGE 214] established democratic structures, their effective political invisibility, which is a consequence of their vulnerable position as workers in transnational production processes (e.g. Fraser 2008; Phillips 1991).

The hope is that a problem-oriented approach to radical democratic theorizing is less likely to result in the marginalization of the actual and disregard of distinctive group experiences than are approaches oriented to the issue of ontology. The difficulty with the latter approaches is that the strategy of temporarily bracketing off social relations in order to capture the essence of the political turns into a theoretical inability to reintroduce excluded issues of power without violating the pristine foundational logic that they claim to have identified. Consxequently, the logic of political ontology is given an unwarranted primacy that effectively occludes the autonomy and specificity of social relations and practices. Differently put, in so far as it lacks a sense of mediation, this political anti-essentialism becomes an essentialism. Thus, Mouffe is unable to address substantive issues about power that have a direct bearing on her model of democratic agonism because of a misplaced fear of falling into an essentialism that would violate her rigid linguistic constructivism. Arendtian ideas of political action as creative inauguration are famously empty, proscribing many issues of subordination and oppression by relegating them to the realm of social necessity and, therefore, privacy. Although his ontology of abundance is more materialist in nature, Connolly finds it hard to incorporate types of social experience or practice that do not conform to his notions of creative becoming and dynamic assemblages. In all these cases, social being is treated in a tokenistic and cipher-like fashion as simply yet another empirical exemplification of foundational dynamics of indeterminacy. Although it is not abstraction per se that causes socially weightless thinking, it may be that radical democratic theory may be better placed to think about oppression by deploying abstractions that are, at least in the first instance, sociological rather than philosophical in nature. The aim of grounding political theory in sociological reconstruction rather than ontological construction would be to, in Charles W. Mills’s words, 'reflect the specificities of group experience, thereby potentially generating categories and principles that illuminate rather than obfuscate the reality of different kinds of subordination' (2005: 173; also Honneth 2012: 46-8).