Stanislaw Filipowicz

Democracy - The Power of Illusion

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Democracy - hope or illusion? Blooming, failing or declining? Our doubts and hesitation make part of unbending efforts to endorse and explain democracy. Who is right - the custodians of promise or the prophets of decline? The book concentrates on doubts. The author tries to explore "the other side of the moon", emphasizing the role of critical thinking, opposing a main-current optimism. Defending democracy we want to generate hope, but hoping may be a dangerous craft. Protecting our hope we are prone to believe that democracy - even if it is not a full success story - is justified in its nature and out of question. How much do we have to forget to sanction this view? This is, in fact, the main question the book raises. It gives voice to those who never, in their writing on democracy, used a flattering tone. Starting with Greek giants - Plato and Aristotle - up to modern and most recent times, going through a broad field of revealing criticism, leaving us with an unsettling feeling that democracy is rather something to be explained than something to be celebrated. Living in democracy, lamenting its underperformances, we must not overlook a fundamental question - in what part do our disappointments reflect the "art of forgetting", allowing us to cast into oblivion all serious doubts originating in a critical discourse on modernity and democracy?

Produktdetails

• Ius, Lex et Res Publica 2
• Verlag: Peter Lang
• Artikelnr. des Verlages: 262894
• Seitenzahl: 235
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 18mm x 148mm x 210mm
• Gewicht: 430g
• ISBN-13: 9783631628942
• ISBN-10: 3631628943
• Artikelnr.: 38106662

Inhaltsangabe

Contents: Democracy and ambiguity - between rationality and mythology - Instrumental reason and the domain of politics - Illusions as a formative power, shaping the foundation of modern democracy and framing its message - Unmasking illusions in company of great champions of critical thinking, revealing a hallucinatory power of key concepts, underpinning the project of modern democracy - Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Foucault, MacIntyre on deceiving nature of modernity.

Rezensionen

«This is an engaging book which sows the seeds of intellectual doubt in this period where democracy appears rather ill almost every where.» (Michel Theys, Bulletin Quotidien Europe 05/2014)