scholarly journals The Market Lives on Death: The Endocolonizing Logic of the Fascist Moment

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 93-110
Author(s):  
Samir Gandesha

This article poses the question of whether what we are witnessing today can be properly described as “fascistic.” It argues that it can if we understand fascism as an attack on liberal-democracy resulting from the now chronic (rather than acute) crisis of capitalism. Like the fascism of the twentieth century, this entails an endocolonizing logic that nonetheless relinquishes its claim on a future increasingly imperilled by the nature of the Covid-19 pandemic in the context of the impending climate emergency.

Author(s):  
Richard Susskind

What mutton-headed, technologically myopic luddite said this? I confess that these are my own words, as they appeared in 1986 in the Modern Law Review. Although this was comfortably more than thirty years ago, I can recall quite vividly what was going through my head (for want of a better term) when I wrote that passage. Today, I disagree with much that I said then. Emotionally, I no longer have any sense of horror in contemplating the possibility that judges might roundly be outperformed by machines. Technically, the passage of time has put me out of date. Computers often can (in some constrained circumstances) satisfactorily process speech and natural language. I also failed (along with most computer scientists) to predict that many of the remarkable advances in computing would come not through explicitly programming systems (whether, for example, to exhibit political preferences or creativity) but through machines ‘learning’ from vast sets of accumulated data. Morally, when I spoke of the values of western liberal democracy, I was reflecting the mood of the late twentieth century. As technology advances, it transpires, as Jamie Susskind explains in Future Politics, that our political conceptions change too. Liberal democracy in the twenty-first century may be significantly different from its ancestor.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-75
Author(s):  
Federica Carugati

What are the sources of democratic stability? The evidence from three modern waves suggests that stability rests on economic growth, strong states, and liberal institutions. But can we secure democratic stability beyond liberalism? This question is relevant to those developing countries that have little hope, and perhaps little interest in liberal democracy. But it is also increasingly relevant to those developed nations where the achievements of the twentieth-century liberal order are being eroded. This article takes a fresh look at democratic stability by reviewing the evidence from the last two and a half millennia. Particular attention is devoted to the case of ancient Athens, which highlights the importance of alignment between shared norms and appropriately designed institutions. Athens’ case suggests that goods that we usually associate with modern liberal democracy do not necessarily rely on a given set of values and do not have a unique institutional manifestation.


2020 ◽  
pp. 205699712096214
Author(s):  
Perry L Glanzer

Moral philosophy in early American collegiate education founded its understanding and pursuit of virtue on the theological truth that humans are made in God’s image. Therefore, to fulfill our purpose, we need to acquire creaturely analogues of God’s virtues. Later American moral philosophy scholars and texts, however, began to use a different rationale for teaching virtue—we need virtue to support American liberal democracy. As a result, by the late twentieth century, American moral educators at the collegiate level only focused on helping students develop a small set of virtues related to students’ professional and civic identities.


2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
TILL KÖSSLER

AbstractDespite its importance, historical scholarship has largely ignored Catholic education as a historical force. This article argues that a closer look at Catholic education in Spain in the first decades of the twentieth century can widen our understanding of educational modernity and at the same time help us to grasp better the specificity and contradictions of religious political mobilisation in Europe. Catholic pedagogues and schools responded to the increasing politicisation of education, the changing demands of upper- and middle-class parents and challenges posed by the new psychological and pedagogical knowledge with fundamental changes in their educational practices. The article identifies the main developments in this contradictory shift, concluding that, first, it is highly misleading simply to identify the ‘new pedagogy’ of the early twentieth century with liberal democracy. This questions a sterile dichotomy of collectivism versus individualism in analysing social movements in the twentieth century. Second, the case study points to both the power and the inherent limits of Catholic mobilisation.


Author(s):  
Svetlana Shcherbak

In this article, we discuss the modernization hypothesis in consideration of the causes of democratization related to economic development. The modernization hypothesis was formulated in the mid-twentieth century in the midst of specific economic and socio-political conditions. Since then, both societies and representations of their developments have changed. Current research disregards these transformations; therefore, with this work, we aim to fill the gap. We make clear how the neo-liberal turn influenced representations of economic development and democracy. Realization of the neo-liberal economic policy resulted in important social changes, particularly the rise of inequality and the wave of populism that endangers liberal democracy. At the same time, the modernization hypothesis is based on presumptions that economic development leads to income equalization and the creation of the broad middle class. Our analysis reveals that empirical surveys tend to confirm the relationship between economic development and democracy. However, economic growth does not necessarily entail more equal income distribution. The rise of populism indirectly confirms the rightness of the modernization hypothesis and suggests an important role for class dynamics. Democratization necessitates not only the establishment of liberal institutions but also the transformation of the social structure via convergence of incomes.


Author(s):  
Sheldon S. Wolin

This chapter examines the work of Richard Rorty, perhaps the leading philosopher, or lapsed philosopher, of postmodernism. His writings are one of the few, perhaps the only, major attempts to ally postmodernism with liberal democracy, rather than with Marxism or social democracy. He has supplied a focus to his writings that is as remarkable in its way, and as revealing, as the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto. The right questions, he writes in postmodernese, are “like” “What is it to inhabit a rich twentieth-century democratic society?” and “How can an inhabitant of such a society be more than the enactor of a role in a previously written script?” The first question would seem to be simply answered by saying, “Enjoy it.” But the second question carries a note of dissatisfaction; it is certainly not outrage or even sharply critical.


Federalism-E ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-63
Author(s):  
Geoff Nelson

The twentieth century has generally been a time of prosperity and it has brought to light the strength and dominance of liberal democracy into our political culture. In particular, it has lead to the success of the engine of liberal democracy, federalism. However, like all engines there are inherent weaknesses within the structure that exist from conception and perpetuate over time. Australia, Canada and the United States are federations who share a common weakness: inflexibility. The weaknesses of an engine can sometimes be invisible for a long time, and it usually requires a catalyst to be seen. In these three federations, one such catalyst has been the federal system’s relationship with Aboriginals. A fundamental weakness of federalism is that it is inflexible. Nowhere is this clearer than in federal-aboriginal relationships in Canada, Australia and the United States.[...]


2005 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 725-754 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Blecher

The term “ethnic cleansing” vaulted to international prominence in 1992, shortly after Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history. Popularized during the narrow window of optimism between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Ussama Bin Ladin, the phrase was used to describe events in the recalcitrant states that had not gotten the message that liberal democracy was the way of the future. The product of a particular time and place—Yugoslavia in the contemporary era—ethnic cleansing was generalized into an analytic category, stretched across the globe and the twentieth century, and, on occasion, transformed into a transhistorical characteristic of humanity. In this sense, the category of ethnic cleansing is too large: scholars and journalists have vitiated the term's explanatory power by grouping together sundry events.


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