Imagined Democracies

by Ezrahi, Yaron

• ISBN13: 9781107025752
• ISBN10: 1107025753
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-10-31
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

This book proposes a revisionist approach to democratic politics. Yaron Ezrahi focuses on the creative unconscious collective imagination that generates ever-changing visions of legitimate power and authority, which compete for enactment and institutionalization in the political arena. If, in the past, political authority was grounded in fictions such as the divine right of kings, the laws of nature, historical determinism, and scientism, today the space of democratic politics is filled with multiple alternative social imaginaries of the desirable political order. Exposure to electronic mass media has made contemporary democratic publics more aware that credible popular fictions have greater impact on shaping our political realities than do rational social choices or moral arguments. The pressing political question in contemporary democracy is, therefore, how to select and enact political fictions that promote peace, not violence, and how to found the political order on checks and balances between alternative political imaginaries of freedom and justice.

Table of Contents

Necessary Fictions of the Political and the Reality o Political Fictions

The contest over the rightful domain of the imagination

The revival and contemporary legacy of Giambatista Vico (1668-1744) as a modern theorist of the political imagination

Modes of imagining: elements of a theory of the political imagination

Naturalization and historicization as strategies of the political imagination

Modern Common Sense and the Rise of Modern Political Imaginaries

The historicity of common sense and the role of scientism in the modern political imagination

Empiricism, induction, and visibility: the moral epistemology of democratic political power

The performing arts and the performance of politics: the dialectics between the transparent and self-concealing imagination

Modern Imaginaries of Democratic Political Agencies and Causality

Voluntary action, the fear of theatricality, and the materialization of the political

Animated fictions: self (as) fulfilling prophecy and the performative imaginaries of democratic political agencies

Individuals between liberal and illiberal corporations

The impact of culture, the cultivation of the individual interior in literature, painting, and music

The Postmodern Turn and the Return of Political Theatricality

Mass media and the refictionalization of agency and reality

The ethics and pragmatics of the democratic political imagination: on choosing the imaginaries we want to live by

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