Hyperdemocracy

by Welch, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9780230341142
• ISBN10: 0230341144
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-10-24
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The processes of intensifying democracy and extending knowledge is self-undermining. Democracy as a mode of decision-making rests on certain preconditions. So far this is uncontroversial, but these preconditions have been understood in the progressive branch of democratic theory as causal preconditions, measurable as quantitative variables, which (when their values are high enough) provide the environment in which democracy can thrive. They have been variously understood as socio-economic or as cultural conditions. The book looks at the constitutive preconditions of democracy. These are the conditions that allow decisions to be made. They are threatened, not reinforced in a virtuous circle, by the processes described as cognitive mobilization. This in turn leads to a different assessment of the supposed limitations on democracy identified by radical critics, as the constitutive preconditions of democracy are themselves necessarily non-democratic. That is, non-democratic preconditions, far from being removable impediments to democracy, are essential to it. From this argument arises the key problem: the undermining of the predemocratic constitutive preconditions of democratic decision-making by the process of democratization itself. The ongoing reflexive undermining of its own foundations by the process of democratization is "hyperdemocracy."

Author Biography

Stephen Welch is a lecturer in the School of Government and International Affairs at the University of Durham.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Idea of Hyperdemocracy * The Constitutive Preconditions of Democracy * The Democracy–Knowledge Nexus * Reflexive Modernization and the Technodemocratic State * Symptoms of Hyperdemocracy * Conclusion: The Concept and Implications of Hyperdemocracy