Democracy in What State? (New Directions in Critical Theory)
Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Wendy Brown, Kristin Ross, Daniel Bensaïd
Language: English
Pages: 99
ISBN: B01K0UB0WQ
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?"
In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Rancière highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it.
Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate.
Languages of the Unheard: Why Militant Protest is Good for Democracy
Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View
From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation
Process already inaugurated by the neoliberal governmentalization of the state already mentioned. With regard to the first, democracy, rule by the people, is only meaningful and exercisable in a discreet and bounded entity—this is what sovereignty signals in the equation of popular sovereignty with democracy. Democracy detached from a bounded sovereign jurisdiction (whether virtual or literal) is politically meaningless: for the people to rule themselves, there must be an identifiable collective.
Preferred instrument of schemers…. It is they who invented the beautiful aphorism: neither proletarian nor bourgeois, but democrat! … What opinion couldn’t manage to find a home under that roof? Everyone claims to be a democrat, even aristocrats. Democrat no longer named the division to be overcome between those judged capable of governing and those judged incapable: it was too rubbery, it did no labor, it created consensus rather than division. Even the Communards of 1871, engaged in their.
Valley of tears never arrives? This, perhaps, is what is so unsettling about today’s China: the suspicion that its authoritarian capitalism is not merely a reminder of our past, the repetition of the process of capitalist accumulation that, in Europe, went on from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, but a sign of the future? What if “the vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market” proves itself to be economically more efficient than our liberal capitalism? What if it.
Declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day.” For that reason, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.” The Haitian Revolution truly deserves the title of the repetition of the French Revolution: led by Toussaint l’Ouverture, it was clearly “ahead of its time,” “premature,” and doomed to fail, yet, precisely as such, it was perhaps even.
For this Haiti had to agree to pay the sum of 150 million francs as a “compensation” for the loss of its slaves. This sum, roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, was later cut to 90 million, but it continued to be a heavy burden that prevented any economic growth: at the end of the nineteenth century Haiti’s payments to France consumed around 80 percent of the national budget, and the last installment was paid in 1947. When, in 2004, celebrating the bicentennial of the.