The Sources of Disenchantment with Democracy*

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-182
Author(s):  
Janusz Reykowski
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Lay Theories ◽  
Political Advantage ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Different Sources

Disenchantment with democracy may have different sources. One such source is the discrepancy between the expected advantages of the system and the experience with real democracy. In our research, we found that these expectations depend on lay theories of democracy that may differ substantially from its normative conceptions and practical realizations. Another source is the change in social priorities that can be described as a conservative shift. This change is a reaction to an increased sense of existential and epistemic insecurity that entails higher preferences for strong government founded on tradition and a shared worldview. It is associated with decreased importance of political agency and pluralism. There is also disappointment with democratic politics based on adversarial principles, in which those who gain political advantage shape the political and social relations according to their own interests and points of view, ignoring the interests and views of others.

ROUPAS COMO CORPOS: O AGENCIAMENTO POLÍTICO DO VESTUÁRIO POR CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI / Clothes as bodies: the political agency of clothing by Christian Boltanski

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (39) ◽  
pp. 55-65
Author(s):  
Angélica Adverse
Keyword(s):  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Historical Document ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Political Experience

O artigo aborda o agenciamento das roupas no trabalho do artista Christian Boltanski. Partindo da dimensão do poder dos corpos têxteis, analisaremos como as roupas investem-se das palavras emudecidas dos corpos ausentes, constituindo-se como alegoria do testemunho e do documento histórico. A ideia central é pensar como as roupas explicitam a aniquilação humana provocada pelos regimes políticos totalitários. Analisaremos como as instalações Prendre la Parole (2005) e Personnes(2010) desvelam a presença-ausência da vida-morte na experiência política do discurso têxtil.  Palavras-chave: Roupas; Corpos; Agenciamento; Política; Memória.AbstractThe article addresses the agency of clothes in the work of the artist Christian Boltanski. Starting from the dimension of the power of the textile bodies, we will analyze how the clothes invest themselves with the muted words of the absent bodies, constituting themselves as an allegory of the testimony and of the historical document. The central idea is to think about how clothes make explicit human annihilation brought about by totalitarian political regimes. We will analyze how the installations Prendre la Parole (2005) and Personnes (2010) reveal the presence-absence of life-death in the political experience of textile discourse.Keywords: Clothes; Bodies; Agency; Politics; Memory. 

Searching for Political Parties in the Past

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.

Mary, Countess of Derby, and the Politics of Victorian Britain

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Davey
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Benjamin Disraeli ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
William Gladstone ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Key Events

Lady Mary Derby (1824–1900) occupied a pivotal position in Victorian politics, yet her activities have largely been overlooked or ignored. A Female Politician places Mary back into the political position she occupied and offers the first dedicated account of her career. Based on extensive archival research, including hitherto neglected or lost sources, this study reconstructs the political worlds Mary inhabited. Her political landscape was dominated by the machinations and intrigues of high politics and diplomacy. As this book uncovers, her political skill and acumen were highly valued by leading politicians of the day, including Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, and she played a significant role in many of the key events of the mid-Victorian era. This included the passing of the Second Reform Act, the formation of Disraeli’s 1874 government, the Eastern Crisis of 1875–1878, and Gladstone’s 1880–1885 government. By exploring how one woman was able to exercise influence at the heart of Victorian politics, this book considers what Mary’s career tells us about the nature of political life in the mid nineteenth century. It sheds new light on the connections between informal and formal political culture, incorporating the politics of the home, letter-writing, and social relations into a consideration of the politics of Parliament and government. A Female Politician is a rich investigation of how a woman, with few legal or constitutional rights, was able to become a significant figure in mid-Victorian political life.

Democracy and Political Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross McKibbin
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social System ◽  
Political System ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of

This book is an examination of Britain as a democratic society; what it means to describe it as such; and how we can attempt such an examination. The book does this via a number of ‘case-studies’ which approach the subject in different ways: J.M. Keynes and his analysis of British social structures; the political career of Harold Nicolson and his understanding of democratic politics; the novels of A.J. Cronin, especially The Citadel, and what they tell us about the definition of democracy in the interwar years. The book also investigates the evolution of the British party political system until the present day and attempts to suggest why it has become so apparently unstable. There are also two chapters on sport as representative of the British social system as a whole as well as the ways in which the British influenced the sporting systems of other countries. The book has a marked comparative theme, including one chapter which compares British and Australian political cultures and which shows British democracy in a somewhat different light from the one usually shone on it. The concluding chapter brings together the overall argument.

An Intersectional Approach to the “Mobility Trap” That Ensnares Migrant Youth in China

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaorong Gu
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Urban China ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Life Chances ◽  
Migrant Youth ◽  
Political Economic

This essay explores the theory of intersectionality in the study of youths’ lives and social inequality in the Global South. It begins with an overview of the concept of intersectionality and its wide applications in social sciences, followed by a proposal for regrounding the concept in the political economic systems in particular contexts (without assuming the universality of capitalist social relations in Northern societies), rather than positional identities. These systems lay material foundations, shaping the multiple forms of deprivation and precarity in which Southern youth are embedded. A case study of rural migrant youths’ ‘mobility trap’ in urban China is used to illustrate how layers of social institutions and structures in the country’s transition to a mixed economy intersect to influence migrant youths’ aspirations and life chances. The essay concludes with ruminations on the theoretical and social implications of the political-economy-grounded intersectionality approach for youth studies.

scholarly journals (In)coherent subjects? The politics of conceptualising resistance in the UK asylum system

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
Sarah M Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Grounding Resistance ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
The Uk

Many accounts of resistance within systems of migration control pivot upon a coherent migrant subject, one that is imbued with political agency and posited as oppositional to particular forms of sovereign power. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the role of creativity within the UK asylum system, I argue that grounding resistance with a stable, coherent and agentic subject, aligns with oppositional narratives (of power vs resistance), and thereby risks negating the entangled politics of the (in)coherence of subject formation, and how this can contain the potential to disrupt, disturb or interrupt the practices and premise of the UK asylum system. I suggest that charity groups and subjects should not be written out of narratives of resistance apriori because they engage with ‘the state’: firstly, because to argue that there is a particular form that resistance should take is to place limits around what counts as the political; and secondly, because to ‘remain oppositional’ is at odds with an (in)coherent subject. I show how accounts which highlight a messy and ambiguous subjectivity, could be bought into understandings of resistance. This is important because as academics, we too participate in the delineation of the political and what counts as resistance. In predetermining what subjects, and forms of political action count as resistance we risk denying recognition to those within this system.

“Don’t You See What’s Going on Here?” Seinfeld and Badiou on Situations and Events

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 493-509
Author(s):  
Rohan Kalyan
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Structural Level ◽  
Situation Comedy ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
American Television

Far from being merely “a show about nothing,” this article argues that the American television sitcom Seinfeld (1989-1998) managed to develop a sophisticated theory of situations and events in modern life. The show explored a rich and humorous multiplicity of everyday situations and events that took its main characters and audience members alike to the very limits of their conventional lives. Yet Seinfeld consistently stopped short of raising larger political stakes in these explorations. In other words, Seinfeld never took its critique of everyday modern life to a structural level, that is, to the historical forces and social relations that shape contemporary situations and events. By bringing Seinfeld into an intellectual encounter with communist philosopher Alain Badiou’s work on situations and events, I argue that we can gain a deeper appreciation of both sides and rethink the political and aesthetic potential of situation comedy.

scholarly journals The Reconfiguration of the Modern Social Contract: New Forms of Citizenship and Education

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 692-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen R. Stoer ◽  
António M. Magalhães
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Education Systems ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Political Management

This article argues that a reconfiguration of the modern social contract is taking place as a process that involves the reconceptualisation of citizenship as difference. At the base of this process is one the authors have previously described as ‘the rebellions of differences' (Stoer & Magalhães, 2001). The rebellions are against the cultural, political and epistemological yoke of Western modernity. What characterises differences and their social relations today is precisely their heterogeneity and their inescapable resistance to any attempts at epistemological or cultural domestication. The implications of this rebellion of differences for the concept and practices of citizenship are profound. The main implication explored here is the reconfiguration of what we call ‘attributed citizenship’ into ‘demanded’ or ‘claimed citizenship’. The authors conclude by relating the latter to the political management of education systems.

History, Politics, and the Constitution: Ethnic Conflict and Constitutional Adjudication in Postcommunist Bulgaria

Slavic Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Venelin I. Ganev
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
Constitutional Adjudication

Infamously, the 1991 Bulgarian Constitution contains a provision banning political parties “formed on an ethnic basis.” In the early 1990s, the neo-communist Bulgarian Socialist Party invoked this provision when it asked the country's Constitutional Court to declare unconstitutional the political party of the beleaguered Turkish minority. In this article, Venelin I. Ganev analyzes the conflicting arguments presented in the course of the constitutional trial that ensued and shows how the justices’ anxieties about the possible effects of politicized ethnicity were interwoven into broader debates about the scope of the constitutional normative shift that marked the end of the communist era, about the relevance of historical memory to constitutional reasoning, and about the nature of democratic politics in a multiethnic society. Ganev also argues that the constitutional interpretation articulated by the Court has become an essential component of Bulgaria's emerging political order. More broadly, he illuminates the complexity of some of the major issues that frame the study of ethnopolitics in postcommunist eastern Europe: the varied dimensions of the “politics of remembrance“; the ambiguities of transitional justice; the dilemmas inherent in the construction of a rights-centered legality; and the challenges involved in establishing a forward-looking, pluralist system of governance.

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