The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins

This original analysis of modern Greece's political culture attempts to present a total social facta coherent and complex representation of Greek socio-political cultureto identify the cultural causes of Greece's recent disastrous economic crisis. Using a culturalist frame inspired by the Yale Strong Program, Marangudakis argues that the core cultural orientations of Greece have determined its politicsGreek secular culture flows out of the religion of Eastern Orthodoxy with its mysticism, icons, and general ortherworldly-nesses. This theoretical discussion, bringing together Eisenstadt, Michael Mann, Banfield, and Taylor, is complemented by an innovative use of survey data, processed by political scientist and statistician Theodore Chadjipadelis. The carefully deployed quantitative data demonstrate that the culture previously described is actually shared by people living in Greece today. In his sweeping conclusion to this thorough cultural analysis, Marangudakis reflectson the prospects of Greek cultural recovery through the construction of a non-populist civil religion.

Employs a cultural sociological framework to provide a comprehensive examination of Greek political culture from medieval to contemporary times Traces the social and political developments that led to the 2010 Greek economic crisis Weaves theoretical discussion and quantitative and statistical analysis together to present a comprehensive framework to explore the civil conscience of a country

Autorentext

Manussos Marangudakis is Professor of Comparative Cultural Sociology at the University of the Aegean, Greece.

Theodore Chadjipadelis is Professor of Applied Statistics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

Klappentext

This is the first serious book-length, comprehensive treatment of the role of society and the cultural imperatives that undergird the Greek sovereign debt drama and the country's inability to climb out of it. Deftly mixing relevant sociological literature with key concepts from anthropology, psychology, religion, and political science, this volume is a sophisticated, strongly substantiated, theoretically and empirically grounded work that will fill a void in the literature on Greece and beyond.

Constsantine P. Danopoulos, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and President's Scholar, San Jose State University, USA

This original analysis of modern Greece's political culture attempts to present a total social facta coherent and complex representation of Greek socio-political cultureto identify the cultural causes of Greece's recent disastrous economic crisis. Using a culturalist frame inspired by the Yale Strong Program, Marangudakis arguesthat the core cultural orientations of Greece have determined its politicsGreek secular culture flows out of the religion of Eastern Orthodoxy with its mysticism, icons, and general ortherworldly-nesses. This theoretical discussion, bringing together Eisenstadt, Michael Mann, Banfield, and Taylor, is complemented by an innovative use of survey data, processed by political scientist and statistician . The carefully deployed quantitative data demonstrate that the culture previously described is actually shared by people living in Greece today. In his sweeping conclusion to this thorough cultural analysis, Marangudakis reflects on the prospects of Greek cultural recovery through the construction of a non-populist civil religion.

Inhalt

Part 1. An Historical Analysis of the Greek Political Culture .-Chapter 1. An Analytic Model of Culture and Power.-Chapter 2. The Greek Self in Social Analysis.-Chapter 3. Clientelistic Social Structures and Cultural Orientations.-Chapter 4. Religion and Collective Representations of Communitas .-Chapter 5. Civil Religions of a Secular Communitas .-Chapter 6. The Metapolitefsis Civil Religion (19741989).-Chapter 7. The Discourses of the Second Metapolitefsis and of the Deep Crisis (19892015).- Part 2. The Symbolic Structure of the Greek Public Sphere .-Chapter 8. Data and Methods.-Chapter 9. Constitutive Goods.-Chapter 10. Internalized Code Orientations.-Chapter 11. The Patterned Orders of Ethics.-Chapter 12. The Ethics of the Collectivist Self and Conclusions of Part II.- Part 3. The Formation of the Greek Political Self .-Chapter 13. Analysis of the 'Democratic Self '.-Chapter 14. Analysis of the 'Democratic Relations'.-Chapter 15. Civil-liberal and Populist Collectivist Democratic Institutions.-Chapter 16. The Semantic Map of the Greek Political Culture and Conclusions of Part III.-Chapter 18. Conclusions: Greek Political Culture and the Theory of Multiple Modernities.