democracy

Following in Paul Ricœur’s footsteps, Olivier Mongin proposes an interpretation of politics as a tension between state domination at “the top” and living together at “the bottom.” This tension, he argues, contains a potential for reciprocal violence that poses a threat to democracy.

When dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, the political and banking authorities seemed to shrug off budgetary concerns. But now that the pandemic’s restrictions have eased, debt-related concerns are returning to the spotlight.

Do the institutions and procedures of democracy deliver more social justice than authoritarian regimes or a hypothetical government of experts? They can, suggests one philosopher, by virtue of the impartiality they foster between citizens.

The political construction of the European Union has broken down. Restarting it would require profoundly changing our ways of thinking about sovereignty, the people and democracy – we must find a new way of thinking about our citizenship.

Carole Gayet-Viaud’s ethnographic study shows that city dwellers are far from always indifferent to their public environment. They sometimes interact with it, either by giving to beggars, getting into disputes, engaging in pure sociability, or perpetuating (but also combating) discrimination.

Democracy has become a key element of government legitimacy throughout the word. A new book’s comparative approach sheds light on the ambivalence of democratic norms, and the paradox of their strategic appropriation by authoritarian regimes like Russia and Turkey.

How can the ideal of deliberative democracy be put into practice? A collective work analyses the “deliberative turn” in theories of democracy and outlines pathways for how deliberation could be implemented in mass democracies where public opinion continues to be shaped by the media and political parties.

How do environmental concerns affect forms of democratic participation? Comparing a deliberative process in Poitou to citizens’ mobilization in Ardèche, an ethnographic study examines how citizens engage in politics and conflict.

In Athens, choral performance was much more than a dramatic method: it was a civic and collective experience, a kind of democratic embodiment of plurality. V. Azoulay and P. Ismard see in it the profound identity of a society overcoming its divisions.

Targeted assassination campaigns seem increasingly well established as a newly prevalent way of war. Through a comparison between the United States and Israel’s practices of assassination, Amélie Férey analyses the discourses which legitimise this practice despite its apparent incompatibility with political liberalism.

Is the project of deliberative democracy unrealistic? Against the cynical assimilation of democracy to a set of voting procedures aimed at satisfying the interests of the greatest number, Charles Girard argues that deliberation is a relevant ideal for a society of equals.

The last few decades have been marked by a profound reconfiguration of the dividing line between the state and the market. As the state increasingly ensures that market competition functions without impediments, the field of intermediation and influence is experiencing an unprecedented expansion.

For twentieth-century American pragmatists, democracy was a radical experiment involving the deliberate and deliberative participation of the people in identifying and resolving their own problems. Who are their descendants today?

With taxpayer suffrage abolished and universal suffrage achieved, political participation in our democratic societies should no longer be conditioned on property ownership. However, as Timothy Kuhner shows, politics remain subservient to capital.

In France as in the United States, transparency has become a core democratic requirement, and is the cornerstone of all the laws that claim to regulate the funding of political life. But this art of disclosing information often coexists with the ability to conceal it.

Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection focuses on China today, its uses of digital technologies to govern, and the political theories developed by its intellectuals.

While the expression “fake news” appeared recently, the problem itself, Sophia Rosenfeld argues, can be retraced to the very birth of democracy. Drawing upon the history of ideas, Democracy and Truth investigates the roots of current tensions around the question of truth in politics.

What can we expect from elections? A. Przeworski urges us to be minimalist: elections provide only imperfect control over the actions of those in power and are not enough to counteract the political effects of inequalities, but they are still the best way to resolve conflicts without taking up arms.

Can a state exclude people in the name of the common good? What gives legitimacy to definitions of borders and belonging? In this work of political theory, B. Boudou argues for a pragmatic, democratic and shifting approach to borders: only shared interests can define a community.

Nowadays, criticism of Europe has become the outlet for democratic disarray. While disintegration threatens the European Union, what are the forces opposing it, and what are they going after exactly?

The historically informed study of participatory mechanisms in the Indian capital, New Delhi, shows that democracy resides less in procedural engineering, whether participatory or electoral, than in the mobilizations that take advantage of it.

The present era tends to blur the line between the true and the false. Democracy, which is based on the conflict of opinions and hence the horizon of a common truth, is consequently compromised. Yet for Myriam Revault d’Allones, this threat also hangs over the imagination.

The ways in which political parties are funded, in France and elsewhere, tend to reinforce the invisibility of certain groups and the political influence of the wealthiest people in society, in particular through right-wing parties. Are there, Julia Cagé wonders, more democratic ways of funding democracy?

By insisting on the need to consider philosophical works as interventions in the general, ongoing political debates of their time, Quentin Skinner has profoundly renewed the history of ideas. In this interview, he revisits the main themes of his work.

What justifies majority decision making in democracies? Can we consider that the majority is more likely to be right? Didier Mineur reflects on the philosophical foundations of a rule that has become so self-evident in our societies.

Upon the request of Corsican leaders, Rousseau undertook the writing of what would later be published as Projet de constitution pour la Corse. This new critical edition shows that this unfinished work requires a new title and a new understanding of Rousseau’s goals in undertaking it.

Peronism, a political and social movement, has structured life in Argentina since the 1940s, and has been emulated elsewhere in Latin American. But it eludes any precise definition. Neither a dictatorship, nor a democracy, this plebiscitary regime is based on the army and trade unions.