Can Democracy Recover?
The Roots of a Crisis

Traces the epistemological roots of the crisis of modern democracy by exploring major cosmological shifts.

Yaron Ezrahi (Author), Dana Blander (Edited by)

9781009350884, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 January 2025

272 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.408 kg

'This volume responds to the unfolding crises of democracy in recent years by seeking to go deeply into the philosophical foundations of modernity in general and democracy in particular … Recommended.' J. D. Moon, Choice

'Can Democracy Recover?' explores the roots of the contemporary democratic crisis. It scrutinizes the evolution and subsequent fragmentation of modern political epistemology, highlighting citizens increasing inability to make sense of the political universe in which they live, their loss of confidence in political causality, distinguishing facts from fiction and objective from partisan attitudes. The book culminates in a speculative discourse on democracy's uncertain future. This work is the final part in Yaron Ezrahi's trilogy. The first, 'The Descent of Icarus' (1990), explored the scientific revolution's role in shaping modern democracy. The second, 'Imagined Democracies' (2012), examined the collective political imagination's impact on the rise and fall of political regimes, emphasizing the modern partnership between science and democracy. 'Can Democracy Recover?' traces the political implications of the erosion of the Nature-Culture dichotomy, the bedrock of modernity's cosmological imagination, and anticipates the emergence of new political imaginaries.

Preface Ruth HaCohen
Words from the author
Introduction
Part I. The Rise of Western Politics Following the Collapse of Monistic Medieval Cosmology: 1. Nature as the transcendental imaginary of modern secular society: preliminary considerations
2. The rise of the western cosmological dualistic nature/culture imaginary from a comparative perspective
3. Risks and innovations inherent in the unstable borderline between nature and culture
Part II. The Emergence of the Epistemological Constitution of Modern Democracy: 4. The imaginary of the modern voluntary individual as a democratic political agency
5. Democratic political causality
6. Objective public facts as political currency
7. The visibility and accountability of political power
8. Objectivity as a fictional limit of the political
Part III. The Dialectics of Objectification: Limiting Overt and Enhancing Hidden Politics: 9. The objectifying gaze of science and technology in the political context
10. Economics as politics by other means
11. The virtual objectification of the law
Part IV. The Erosion of the Epistemological Constitution of Modern Democracy: 12. The political disempowerment of the individual citizen
13. The elusiveness of political causality
14. The loss of self-evident public facts and the crisis of the common-sense conceptions of reality
15. The decay of the epistemological norm of political visibility and accountability
16. The fall of objectivity and objectification
Part V. Democracy Beyond Modernity: Can a Self-Fulfilling Democracy be Imagined in our Time?: 17. Early modernizers of politics
18. Critics of modern democracy
Concluding reflections
Epilogue: 'Depth skepticism' and the roots of democratic crisis Dana Blander.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA]