Can democracy recover? : the roots of a crisis / Yaron Ezrahi ; edited by Dana Blander.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ezrahi, Yaron, author.

Contributor:

Blander, Dana, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Democracy--Philosophy.

Democracy.

Democracy--Western countries.

Political culture--Western countries.

Political culture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 254 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Summary:

'Can Democracy Recover?' explores the roots of the contemporary democratic crisis. It scrutinizes the evolution and subsequent fragmentation of modern political epistemology, highlighting citizens increasing inability to make sense of the political universe in which they live, their loss of confidence in political causality, distinguishing facts from fiction and objective from partisan attitudes. The book culminates in a speculative discourse on democracy's uncertain future. This work is the final part in Yaron Ezrahi's trilogy. The first, 'The Descent of Icarus' (1990), explored the scientific revolution's role in shaping modern democracy. The second, 'Imagined Democracies' (2012), examined the collective political imagination's impact on the rise and fall of political regimes, emphasizing the modern partnership between science and democracy. 'Can Democracy Recover?' traces the political implications of the erosion of the Nature-Culture dichotomy, the bedrock of modernity's cosmological imagination, and anticipates the emergence of new political imaginaries.

Contents:

Nature as the transcendental imaginary of modern secular society : preliminary considerations

The rise of the Western nature/culture dualistic cosmology from a comparative perspective

Risks and opportunities inherent in the unstable demarcation lines between nature and culture

The imaginary of the modern democratic individual as a political agency

Democratic political causality

Public facts as political currency

The visibility and accountability of political power

Objectivity as a fictional limit of the political

The objectifying gaze of science and technology in the political context

Economics as politics by other means

The virtual objectification of the law

The political disempowerment of the modern democratic citizen

The elusiveness of political causality

The loss of self-evident public facts and the crisis of the common-sense conceptions of reality

The decay of the epistemological norm of political visibility

The fall of objectivity and objectification

Early modernizers of politics

Modern critics of democracy

Can democracy recover : concluding reflections

Epilogue : "Depth skepticism" and the roots of democratic crisis.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 10 Jan 2025).

ISBN:

9781009350891

1009350897

9781009350914

1009350919

9781009350907

1009350900