scholarly journals Charisma and Democracy: Max Weber on the Riddle of Political Change in Modern Societies

Topoi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro T. Magalhães
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Elite Theory ◽  
Context Specific

AbstractThe elite theory of Max Weber has recently been rediscovered by political scientists and political theorists who have sought to explore both the heuristic and the normative potential of plebiscitary leader democracy. Notwithstanding the merits of this wave of studies, this paper argues that attention should be shifted from Weber's context-specific defence of plebiscitary leadership in post-WWI Germany to his broader conception of charisma as an attempt to grasp the enigma of significant social and political change. Contemporary democratic theory, this paper contends, can fruitfully draw on Weber to sink into the antinomies and ambiguities of a transformative democratic politics.

The Referendum and Political Change

1975 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Smith
Keyword(s):  
European Community ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
Political Democracy ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
Political Decisions

AS A WAY OF REACHING IMPORTANT POLITICAL DECISIONS, THE referendum is usually regarded as a clumsy and unsatisfactory instrument and quite unimportant as a contribution to political democracy. Yet widespread demands for more participation ‘by the people’ have brought the referendum into new-found favour. Interest has been rekindled too by its application to the issue of membership of the European Community, with the clear possibility of directly comparing the referenda in the four countries involved. This new interest in the referendum comes at a time when many party systems, the traditional supports of a purely parliamentary democracy, appear to be in disarray, and there are signs of increasing volatility within electorates which can foreshadow basic realignments in party systems. Questions now are naturally being raised about the future ordering of democratic politics, and for this reason it seems justifiable to focus an examination of the referendum especially on the problem of political change.

Jacques Rancière

In the Street ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 121-150
Author(s):  
Çiğdem Çidam
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Theory Of Education ◽  
Democratic Action ◽  
Action Taking ◽  
As If

This chapter demonstrates that Rancière’s journey to democratic theory started in the aftermath of May 1968 with his efforts to overcome the problematic transformation of political theory into “a theory of education.” For Rancière, unpredictability is integral to democratic politics. Thus, in an anti-Rousseauian move, he emphasizes the theatrical aspect of democratic action: taking on a role other than who they are, acting as if they are a part in a given social order in which they have no part, political actors stage their equality, disrupting the existing distribution of the sensible. Rancière’s focus on the moments of disruption, however, opens him to the charge of reducing democratic politics to immediate acts of negation. Insofar as he erases the role of intermediating practices in the stagings of equality, Rancière imposes on his accounts a kind of purity that his own work, with its emphasis on broken, polemical voices, cautions against.

11. Social Capital and Civil Society

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Letki
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Change ◽  
New Democracies ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Civic Activism ◽  
Trust And Reciprocity ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the role of civil society and social capital in democratization processes. It begins by reconstructing the definitions of civil society and social capital in the context of political change, followed by an analysis of the ways in which civil society and social capital are functional for the initiation and consolidation of democracies. It then considers the relationship between civil society and attitudes of trust and reciprocity, the function of networks and associations in democratization, paradoxes of civil society and social capital in new democracies, and main arguments cast against the idea that civic activism and attitudes are a necessary precondition for a modern democracy. The chapter argues that civil society and social capital and their relation to political and economic institutions are context specific.

Other Domains of Democratic Theory: Space, Power, and the Politics of Democratization

10.1068/d255t ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Slater
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Democratic Values ◽  
The West ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Guiding Questions

Located in the analysis of spatial power and democratic politics, this paper brings together three guiding questions. First, given the fact that inside the West much theorization of power and social relations has assumed a geohistorical context that is intrinsically Western, to what extent and in what ways does this particularity constrain the conceptual and thematic effectiveness of the perspectives employed and especially in relation to the politics of democratization? Second, as it is most appropriate to argue that power shapes social identities, and that democratic politics cannot dispense with power, a key question becomes how to generate relations of power that are compatible with democratic values and opposed to ethnocentric privilege. Third, how can we open up a discussion of democratic politics so that the geographies of democratization can be explored in a way that might broaden our vision of power and geopolitics? These questions are pursued in the context of the coloniality of power and an exploration of the territoriality of democratization in the Peruvian and Bolivian cases. The overall objective is to go beyond the limits of a Euro—Americanist frame and open up the analysis of the complex and dynamic geographies of democracy.

Democratic Theory and the Athenian Public Sphere

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-51
Author(s):  
Matthew Landauer
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Democratic Practice ◽  
Accountability Practices ◽  
The Relationship

Classical Athens has left to political theorists a dual legacy: a crucial historical case of democratic practice, and a rich tradition of political reflection. A growing number of scholars have placed the relationship between these two legacies at the center of their research. I argue that these scholars collectively offer us a model of a broad, engaged, Athenian public sphere. Yet I also caution that we should avoid overly harmonizing pictures of what that public sphere was like. I focus in particular on two prominent claims in the literature: that Socratic philosophy can be read as an expansion of Athenian accountability practices, and that ancient dramatists, philosophers, and historians were alike engaged in a project to educate citizen judgment. I argue that both claims threaten to obscure arguments over the appropriate role of the judgment of the demos in democratic politics.

Aesthetic Democracy: Walt Whitman and the Poetry of the People

2007 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 402-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Frank
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
The People ◽  
Poetic Translation

This essay argues for Walt Whitman's significance to contemporary democratic theory, neither as a theorist of moral or aesthetic individualism nor as a theorist of communitarian nationalism, but as a theorist of the democratic sublime. Whitman's account of “aesthetic democracy” emphasizes the affective and autopoetic dimensions of political life. For Whitman, popular attachment to democracy requires an aesthetic component, and he aimed to enact the required reconfiguration of popular sensibility through a poetic depiction of the people as themselves a sublimely poetic, world-making power. Through his poetic translation of the vox populi, Whitman hoped to engender a robustly transformative democratic politics. He found the resources for political regeneration in the poetics of everyday citizenship, in the democratic potentials of ordinary life.

scholarly journals Celebrity, Democracy, and Epistemic Power

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Archer ◽  
Amanda Cawston ◽  
Benjamin Matheson ◽  
Machteld Geuskens
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Epistemology ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Democratic Practice

What, if anything, is problematic about the involvement of celebrities in democratic politics? While a number of theorists have criticized celebrity involvement in politics, none so far have examined this issue using the tools of social epistemology, the study of the effects of social interactions, practices, and institutions on knowledge and belief acquisition. We will draw on these resources to investigate the issue of celebrity involvement in politics, specifically as this involvement relates to democratic theory and its implications for democratic practice. We will argue that an important and underexplored form of power, which we will call epistemic power, can explain one important way in which celebrity involvement in politics is problematic. This is because unchecked uses and unwarranted allocations of epistemic power, which celebrities tend to enjoy, threaten the legitimacy of existing democracies and raise important questions regarding core commitments of deliberative, epistemic, and plebiscitary models of democratic theory. We will finish by suggesting directions that democratic theorists could pursue when attempting to address some of these problems.

Reviews: The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More Machiavelli and Seyssel, Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy, The Social Thought of Rousseau and Burke: A Comparative Study, Bentham's Political Thought, in the Interest of the Governed: A Study in Bentham's Philosophy of Utility and Law, Utilitarian Ethics, Utilitarianism for and Against, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, Socialism since Marx: A Century of the European Left, between Ideals and Reality: A Critique of Socialism and Its Future, The Economics and Politics of Socialism: Collected Essays, James Connolly: Selected Political Writings, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship, Stalin as a Revolutionary 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality, Stalin: The Man and His Era, The Morality of Politics, Max Weber and The Theory of Modern Politics, Weber, the Age of Bureaucracy, Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber, Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence (Second Series), The English Ideology: Studies in the Language of Victorian Politics, The Uses of Ideology, Knowledge and Belief in Politics. The Problem of Ideology, Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, Revolutionaries, Politics in England Today: An Interpretation, Maladministration and its Remedies, The Private Government of Public Money. Community and Policy inside British Politics, the Transport Revolution, Pressure Groups and the Permissive Society, the Political Impact of Mass Media, Belfast: Approach to Crisis: A Study of Belfast Politics, 1613–1970, the Ruling Elites: Elite Theory, Power and American Democracy

1974 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-544
Author(s):  
Malcolm Jack ◽  
Robert Wokler ◽  
L. Burkholder ◽  
Raymond Plant ◽  
S. T. Glass ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Elite Theory ◽  
Pressure Groups ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ruling Elites ◽  
Public Money ◽  
Private Government

Book Review: Max Weber and Democratic Politics

1997 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 377-378
Author(s):  
William Johnson Everett
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Democratic Politics

The Body Politic: Bodily Spectacle and Democratic Agency

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-217
Author(s):  
Michael Feola
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Marginal Groups ◽  
Self Immolation ◽  
Civic Discourses ◽  
Image World

This essay engages an undertheorized form of democratic agency: the embodied spectacle that characterizes a strain of activist politics. Where an existing literature addresses “the spectacle” as a tactic of power, it does not do justice to how marginal groups have used radical bodily acts in order to intervene within the image-world of democratic politics (e.g., hunger strikes, die-ins, self-immolation). The essay argues that such performances represent a standing challenge to democratic theory and demand a more richly sensuous approach to how political claims are made. Such forms of bodily theatre do not only “speak” in ways that exceed official civic discourses but, in so doing, they unsettle the space of citizenship. Ultimately, these bodies do something in being undone.

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