| Bemerkung |
Session 1: Narratives of democratic crises
Friday, 15 May 2025 / 09:00-13:00 hrs.
Assigned readings:
Przeworski, A. (2019). Crises of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
1-23, 81-122.
Calhoun, C., Gaonkar, D. & Taylor, C. (2022). Degenerations of democracy.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, chapter 1.
Fassin, D. (2009). “Moral Economies Revisited.” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales64(6): 1237–1266 |
| Lerninhalte |
Polarization has become the conceptual lens through which many scholars and media pundits observe the intractable crisis tendencies afflicting contemporary democracies.
The symptoms of democratic deterioration are manifold: backlash against liberal values, sectarism beyond party alignments, conspirative and provocative rhetoric, electoral instability and unpredictability, social antagonism and violence, authoritarian and uncivil attitudes, inter-group resentment, distrust
in public institutions, and policy gridlock. While distinct from the normal fragmentation arising from cultural pluralism and social heterogeneity inherent to democratic life, these crisis symptoms cannot be merely reduced to pathological expressions of ill-designed institutions, representation deficits,
and ideological politics. Rather, they signal deep-seated societal fissures and moral divides over the values (grammars of worth and conceptions of justice) that should organize social life. This workshop proposes to investigate the moral dimension of polarization. Drawing on a variety of recent theoretical
debates and empirical studies on democratic crises, the workshop aims to explore the field of moral disputes shaping how democracy is lived, practiced, contested, and imagined in in the context of divided, almost unbridgeable social worlds.
|
