Can Democracy Recover?

Auteur

Yaron Ezrahi (1940-2019) was an Israeli political theorist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Known for his work on the relations between modern science and the rise of the modern liberal democratic state, Ezrahi was a leading voice on Israeli politics and democracy on the Israeli and the international media.

Texte du rabat

'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.

Contenu

Preface Ruth HaCohen; Words from the author; Introduction; Part I. The Rise of Western Politics Following the Collapse of Monistic Medieval Cosmology: 1. Nature as the transcendental imaginary of modern secular society: preliminary considerations; 2. The rise of the western cosmological dualistic nature/culture imaginary from a comparative perspective; 3. Risks and innovations inherent in the unstable borderline between nature and culture; Part II. The Emergence of the Epistemological Constitution of Modern Democracy: 4. The imaginary of the modern voluntary individual as a democratic political agency; 5. Democratic political causality; 6. Objective public facts as political currency; 7. The visibility and accountability of political power; 8. Objectivity as a fictional limit of the political; Part III. The Dialectics of Objectification: Limiting Overt and Enhancing Hidden Politics: 9. The objectifying gaze of science and technology in the political context; 10. Economics as politics by other means; 11. The virtual objectification of the law; Part IV. The Erosion of the Epistemological Constitution of Modern Democracy: 12. The political disempowerment of the individual citizen; 13. The elusiveness of political causality; 14. The loss of self-evident public facts and the crisis of the common-sense conceptions of reality; 15. The decay of the epistemological norm of political visibility and accountability; 16. The fall of objectivity and objectification; Part V. Democracy Beyond Modernity: Can a Self-Fulfilling Democracy be Imagined in our Time?: 17. Early modernizers of politics; 18. Critics of modern democracy; Concluding reflections; Epilogue: 'Depth skepticism' and the roots of democratic crisis Dana Blander.