In some of the most established and supposedly immutable liberal democracies,
diverse social groups are losing con
fi
dence not only in established democratic
institutions, but in the idea of liberal representative democracy itself. Meanwhile, an
illiberal and anti-egalitarian transformation of democracy evolves at an apparently
unstoppable pace. This
democratic fatigue syndrome
, the present article suggests, is
qualitatively di
ff
erent from the
crises of Democracy
which have been debated for
some considerable time. Focusing on mature democracies underpinned by the
ideational tradition of European Enlightenment, the article theorizes this Syndrome
and the striking transformation of democracy in terms of a dialectic process in
which the very norm that once gave birth to the democratic project -
the modernist
idea of the
autonomous subject -
metamorphoses into its gravedigger, or at least
into the driver of its radical reformulation. The article further develops aspects of my
existing work on
second-order emancipation
and
simulative democracy
. Taking a
theoretical rather than empirical approach, it aims to provide a conceptual
framework for more empirically oriented analyses of changing forms of political
articulation and participation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:7107 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | BlĂĽhdorn, Ingolfur |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2019.1648436, https://www.tandfonline.com/, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1774-5984, http://epub.wu.ac.at/7107/ |
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