Three leading thinkers analyze the erosion of democracy's social foundations and call for a movement to reduce inequality, strengthen inclusive solidarity, empower citizens, and reclaim pursuit of the public good. Democracy is in trouble. Populism is a common scapegoat but not the root cause. More basic are social and economic transformations eroding the foundations of democracy, ruling elites trying to lock in their own privilege, and cultural perversions like making individualistic freedom the enemy of democracy's other crucial ideals of equality and solidarity. In Degenerations of Democracy three of our most prominent intellectuals investigate democracy gone awry, locate our points of fracture, and suggest paths to democratic renewal. In Charles Taylor's phrase, democracy is a process, not an end state. Taylor documents creeping disempowerment of citizens, failures of inclusion, and widespread efforts to suppress democratic participation, and he calls for renewing community. Craig Calhoun explores the impact of disruption, inequality, and transformation in democracy's social foundations. He reminds us that democracies depend on republican constitutions as well as popular will, and that solidarity and voice must be achieved at large scales as well as locally. Taylor and Calhoun together examine how ideals like meritocracy and authenticity have become problems for equality and solidarity, the need for stronger articulation of the idea of public good, and the challenges of thinking big without always thinking centralization. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar points out that even well-designed institutions will not integrate everyone, and inequality and precarity make matters worse. He calls for democracies to be prepared for violence and disorder at their margins-and to treat them with justice, not oppression. The authors call for bold action building on projects like Black Lives Matter and the Green New Deal. Policy is not enough to save democracy; it will take movements.

Degenerations of Democracy

Politics & Social Sciences

Taylor, Charles

Calhoun, Craig

Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar

Philosophy

Harvard University Press

How do ordinary people identify themselves as part of a group? By what means do they express a largely unspoken understanding of themselves in society? This special issue on new social imaginaries examines the emergent forms of solidarity and collective identity in a global context. The essays explore how local cultural forms and global social movements contribute to the making and unmaking of imagined collective identities.
Contributors to this collection include major voices in the fields of philosophy, critical literature, sociology, anthropology, and communication studies. The articles consider how people conceive of and categorize themselves as part of a cohesive group under the multiple rubrics of the public and counterpublic, nation, ethnos, civilization, genealogy, democracy, and the market. Many of the essays are situated in specific national and cultural sites such as Africa, Australia, eighteenth-century England, the European Union, India, and Turkey. Others examine the intersections of global financial markets and democratic institutions.
As a whole, New Imaginaries suggests a new way of synthesizing economic, political, and cultural approaches to social life.
Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Craig Calhoun, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Nilüfer Göle, Benjamin Lee, Edward LiPuma, Achille Mbembe, Mary Poovey, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Charles Taylor, Michael Warner

New Imaginaries (Volume 14) (Special Issue of Public Culture: Millinneial Quartet)

Lee, Benjamin

Social Sciences

Duke University Press Books

As technology increasingly dominates the public sphere, Technologies of Public Persuasion: An Accidental Issue offers richly descriptive examples of how technologically influenced forms and artifacts of communication effect transformations in the self-understandings of publics and subjects. This special issue of Public Culture exposes readers to new discursive genres and practices, linking literary cultural methodologies and theories to social analysis.The contributors explore topics ranging from the use of cell phones by middle-class Filipinos in the civilian-backed overthrow of President Joseph Estrada to a media reported "hint" from Alan Greenspan that impacted and altered economic reality through speculation. An essay investigates the politics surrounding the formation and use of Indonesian as a self-consciously modern language designed to reconstitute the social and political identities of its speakers. A photo-essay depicts graffiti on abandoned school buildings as a communicative medium. "Crimes of Substitution: Detection in the Late Soviet Society" looks at late-Soviet detective fiction, censorship strategies, and Soviet semiotics to show how Soviet citizens subverted dictated modes of behavior and challenged the symbolic order of Soviet society. One contributor examines how performance and ethnolinguistic practices become techniques for spatially and socially locating identity.Contributors. Alberta Arthurs, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Michael Kaplan, Webb Keane, Patrick Mullen, Serguei Oushakine, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Vicente L. Rafael, Christopher Schneider, Michael Silverstein, Amanda Weidman

Technologies of Public Persuasion: An Accidental Issue (Volume 15) (Public Culture)

Povinelli, Elizabeth A.

Humor & Entertainment

Cultures of Democracy, a special issue of Public Culture, proposes that democratic strategies and practices pursued by different countries, and the relative successes of those strategies and practices, are deeply affected by the countries’ cultures, histories, and reception of, or resistance to, modernity. The collection suggests that a commitment to normative models of democracy prevents recognition of democratic practices in societies not usually seen as democratic or proto-democratic from a Western vantage point. Offering accounts of practices of democracy in Egypt, Yemen, Argentina, and India, these cultural theorists—drawing on work in anthropology, political theory, and postcolonial studies—revise notions of what might be regarded as a democratic practice.The essays look at examples of democracy in a variety of spheres. One examines how the chewing of khat leaves in public gatherings in Yemen acts as a democratic practice by creating spontaneous forums for political discussion. Another considers the events of the 2003 municipal elections in Buenos Aires, when the center Right secured a record number of votes from an electorate jaded by political corruption by forming strategic alliances with local football clubs, ultimately leading to the election of the president of one popular club. And another essay explores the Indian government’s reaction when the political methods used to achieve the nation’s independence—defiance of the law, hunger strikes, demonstrations, and the destruction of public property—were used to challenge the government in the postcolonial period. Taken as a whole, the essays argue that democracy might be productively viewed as a cultural system inclusive of many cultures of democracy.Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Craig Calhoun, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jean Comaroff, Carlos Forment, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Claudio Lomnitz , Manar Shorbagy, Charles Taylor, Lisa Wedeen

Cultures of Democracy (Volume 19) (Public Culture)

Sociology

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