Session 8b: Democracy and Other Matters
1st Global Conference
Friday 30th April – Sunday 2nd May 2010
Prague, Czech Republic
Democracy and the Novel
Cathy Bergin
School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton, United Kingdom
According to George Eliot the novel “ is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” The Novel as a form has been intrinsically related to democracy, and especially democracy’s capacity to generate narratives of universality. These narratives of universality underlie what we think of as reason and progress. Yet the novel is an historical and cultural form which both evades and demands concrete theorization in terms of Democracy. This paper will reflect precisely on the contradictions involved in placing ‘the novel’, and ‘democracy’ as adjacent terms whose fraught relationship is more often explained than interrogated. It argues rather that in Joseph Slaughter’s words ‘each projects an image of the human personality that ratifies the other’s idealistic visions of the proper relations between the individual and society.’
Against Liberalism: An Essay on the Decline of Politics and Civilisation
Isobel David
School of Social and Political Sciences, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal
In the long course of human evolution and political experimentation, democracy, especially after the events of 1989, has come to be seen as the best political system, or, at least, as Winston Churchill put it, “the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” (From a House of Commons speech on November 11, 1947) – a vision which is clearly opposed to that of the Classics, who, curiously, always looked upon democracies with severe contempt.
Tocqueville has brilliantly described its essence in Democracy in America: in a democratic society, where the passion for equality is the prevalent and irresistible dogma, all people have to work, which means that all live in a state of perpetual agitation, which is simply incompatible with contemplation and its ultimate end – the search for truth – if by no other reason than that thinking requires time, something which is lacking in such societies. In other words, democracies have no leisure class, precisely that which has traditionally dedicated itself to these matters. In the absence of theoretical concerns, people turn to their material well-being and live for the present, a context in which science comes to exist not per se, but only possesses a utilitarian rationale that merely conceives of its immediate and practical application.
However, by portraying itself as the only valid way of thinking, what this language – the end of history – entails in fact is the obliteration of alternative modes of thinking, but which is nothing more than the effective dominance of this particular ideology. The effect of this peculiar mechanics is self-evident: the persistence of one particular form of thinking self-multiplies and, through repetition, generates its own legitimacy. And it is here that lies precisely the gist of my paper. The obliteration of ideology has created a system which has replaced the government of men with a government of things. In the process, isn’t it possible that this politically correct mode of eliminating conflict, is, in truth, more liable to create a paralyzing uniformity rather than an undetermined infinity of forms of human living-together that reflect men’s inventiveness ?
Democracy and Intimacy: Contrasting Views on a Controversial Connection
Joaquim Negreiros
King’s College London, United Kingdom
It has become commonplace to remark that democracy does not exhaust itself in the exercise of the right to vote. An healthy democratic system is rather seen as relying upon the active and regular participation of the people (before, after and beyond elections) in the formation of decisions which affects the community they are part of. Despite isolated phenomena of enthusiastic citizenship, such as the Obama campaign and election in the USA, such active engagement in the public sphere is the exception rather than the rule, feeding the perception of a ‘crisis’ affecting democracy in so called western developped societies. Growing abstention rates are pointed out to argue that even the most basic manifestation of citizenship – let alone more demanding forms of civic engagement – is dangerously declining.
A plethora of reasons have been offered as to explain this perceived ‘crisis’ of democracy. The aim of this paper is to address a seldom referred explanation, namely by exploring the hypothetical connection between the decreasing disposition to engage in the civic realm and contemporary forms of intimacy. So as to conceptualize this possible connection, a set of contrasting views will be presented, offering distinct perspectives stressing either an antithetical or a sympathetic relation between self-disclosure practices of intimacy and social agency in the democratic public sphere. Rather than offering definitive answers, this paper aims to present a conceptual framework for the following question: do the exclusivity features of post-modern intimacy contribute to encapsulate intimates in a protective boundary which inhibits their agency in civic life? Or does the construction of the self based upon the dialogical character of contemporary intimacy actually favour meaningful and transformative forms of civic engagement?
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