This essay seeks to untangle some of the issues that arise in multi-generational conversations. Doing so uncovers the traps set by time and place. These include how to recognize changing ...vocabularies, shifting interests, interpretive strategies, and multiple perspectives. It explores how speaking for, to, about, and beyond others without distortions can honestly co-exist with new things to say. It highlights Voparil's goal of promoting active engagement with others for everyone's benefit.
Who Governs in Deep Crises? Merkel, Wolfgang
Democratic theory (Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)),
12/2020, Letnik:
7, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The Berlin Republic of today is neither Weimar (1918–1932) nor Bonn (1949–1990). It is by all standards the best democracy ever on German soil. Nevertheless, during the COVID-19 crisis there was a ...shift from democracy as a mode of governance to what the controversial legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1922) affirmingly described as a “state of exception”; a state that is desired and approved by the people (through opinion polls). It was the hour of the executive. The parliament disempowered itself. There was very little, if any, contestation or deliberation during the first eight weeks of the COVID-19 crisis. This article reflects on the implications of this mode of governance on institutions and actors of democracy in Germany, and offers a way of assessing the wellbeing of democracies in times of deep crisis.
The Crisis of Democracy Archive Cairns, James
Canadian journal of communication,
03/2024, Letnik:
49, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Background: It is now commonplace to say that democracy is in crisis. What exactly does that diagnosis mean? Analysis: Examining an archive of Google Alerts over the past three years, this commentary ...addresses themes and contradictions in the public debate about the so-called crisis of democracy. Conclusions and implications: The analysis shows that debate is characterized by significant disagreement on the nature of the crisis—how it started, its main symptoms, and its potential resolution. While this commentary rejects the assumption that liberal democracy is in crisis, it argues that there is radical insight and potential in this misguided view.
This article examines how British philosophers of the 1930s grappled with the relationship between reason, emotion, and democratic citizenship in the context of a perceived “crisis of democracy” in ...Europe. Focusing especially on Bertrand Russell, Susan Stebbing, and John Macmurray, it argues that philosophers working from diverse philosophical perspectives shared a sense that the crisis of democracy was simultaneously a crisis of reason and one of emotion. They tended to frame this crisis in terms of three interrelated concerns: first, as a problem of balancing or integrating reason and emotion; second, as a problem of the relationship between emotions and democratic citizenship; and third, as a problem of how to properly train or educate the emotions. Significantly, British philosophers addressed these issues most directly in writings for a non-professional audience, as they sought to translate their professional expertise into popular works that might rejuvenate democratic citizenship. This historical episode is a reminder of how philosophers were deeply engaged in the cultural politics of the interwar period and is a telling example of how personalist concerns were central to philosophy even as the “analytic revolution” was gathering steam.
The issue of the crisis of democracy has been debated abundantly and intensively in recent years. The body of academic literature on the topic has gradually increased. However, a similar debate took ...place almost one-hundred years ago in the Central European region. At that time, the debate was closely intertwined with the geopolitical situation, especially with the rise of fascism and Nazism. The paper conceptualizes the intellectual discussion on the reasons of the democratic crisis in the 1930s in Czechoslovakia from a sociological and philosophical perspective. The opinions of important Czech intellectuals, such as František Modráček, Emanuel Rádl, Karel Čapek, Edvard Beneš, František Žilka, F.X. Šalda, T.G. Masaryk, J.B. Kozák, and J.L. Fischer, are clarified. Furthermore, some main features of the nature of the past and present crises of democracy are compared.
This article engages the contemporary crises of health, the economy, and democracy in the United States during the era of Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic. The author begins with a discussion of the ...COVID-19 pandemic and Trump's chaotic and inept responses. The author follows with a discussion of Trump and authoritarian populism, arguing that Trump's floundering fortunes in the context of a hotly contested 2020 presidential campaign triggered his chaotic and contradictory responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, producing a crisis of democracy.
The article reveals the role of education in ensuring the existence of a contemporary democratic system. Democratic governance is viewed through the prism of the crisis of representative democracy ...that arises in global world. The focus of the crisis forms a crisis of citizen participation in democratic governance. Among the various scenarios for overcoming this crisis, the emphasis is on a model of deliberative (“discussing”) democracy. Accordingly, a key role in the productive functioning of contemporary democracy belongs to public discourse. Public discourse has an internal contradiction. Its participants are guided by their own interests, but the productivity of the discourse is achieved only if it is subject to the requirements of the common good. Five criteria of the authenticity of the discourse that make it aimed at the common good are highlighted. The medium of discourse that ensures its authenticity is a public intellectual. It is proved that the main vocation of education in the contemporary democratic system is the production of a public intellectual as an effective social character. In this process, a key role belongs to humanitarian education, respectively organized.
In government policy, security of supply, affordability and the protection of the climate and the environment are postulated as equal goals of the German energy transition (Energiewende). There is no ...explicit prioritization of these supposed goals. This leads to problems both in terms of the success of the Energiewende itself, and in terms of its effects on the political culture. Conflicts over the implementation of the Energiewende increasingly reveal a crisis of democracy, which cannot be adequately responded to in negotiations over concrete energy projects. A one-sided focus on the deliberative model of democracy further exacerbates the symptoms of a democratic crisis. From a radical democratic perspective, the key to constructively addressing both climatic and democratic challenges is to encourage a confrontation between competing Energiewende visions in a way that is compatible with a pluralistic understanding of democracy.
This is an article about the impeachment in Brazil. I argue that it was the result of the political crisis that takes place in the country since 2013. T his political crisis has at least two major ...components: (1) the first one is the collapse of the coalition presidential system associated with the ascension of a conservative group within the National Congress led by Eduardo Cunha ; (2) the second is a crisis of representation expressed by the increase of illegal campaign financing and the influence of money in Congress. Together, the opposition and the conservative block of the PMDB blocked every move of Dilma Rousseff's administration and proposed moral and economic conservative legislations. After impeaching the president, this group is proposing legislations that pose under threat the democratic system built in the country after 1988.
This essay aims to advance the general discussion of hypocrisy in moral and political philosophy as well as normative policy debates regarding democratic sanctions against autocracies that often ...trigger charges of hypocrisy. In the process of making sense of these charges, I articulate and tackle three general puzzles regarding hypocrisy complaints. The first—the inaction puzzle—asks why a charge of hypocrisy should have any effect on the moral assessment of an agent’s actions, as distinct from the agent’s character or attitudes. The second—the ambivalence puzzle—asks why we often react to hypocrisy charges with seemingly paradoxical ambivalence, recognizing such charges for the transparent deflections they often are, but also granting their normative force. The third—the preemption puzzle—asks why hypocrisy charges do not entirely lose their force when their targets openly concede that they too have suffered from the same flaws that they highlight in others. I argue that sustained reflection on each of these puzzles can enrich—and be enriched by—normative analysis of democratic sanctions.
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