The Drama in the Political

That the political order of modernity is tragically constitute is a diagnosis that runs like a thread through the history of ideas of political philosophy; but it has hardly ever been contrasted with the other paradigmatic dramatic genre, comedy. Hegel regarded comedy as the highest form of drama. Based on a reading of his theory of poetic genres informed by the theory of democracy, the tragic structure of political liberalism is revealed in order to move the possibility of its comic overcoming following Marx into the spotlight of a democratic poetics of the future.