Democratic underlabouring in times of emergency: The case of climate litigation

There is a growing tendency to diagnose political crises that democracies are supposedly unable to address, such as the climate emergency or the rise of right-wing authoritarianism. I ask how political theorists who see themselves as democratic underlabourers should deal with claims of emergency. Rejecting the two options of either switching into an activist mode or sticking to the normal mode of theorizing, I defend a specific role of public political theorizing. Emergency underlabouring consists in counteracting the problematic tendencies emergency politics has on public discourse. Upholding the democratic underlabourer's commitment to improving public deliberation requires specific actions in times of emergency. To illustrate the idea of emergency underlabouring, I turn to the debate about climate litigation.