Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory最新文献

Oligarchy, Democracy, and Plebeianism: For a Political Conceptualization 寡头政治、民主与平民主义：一个政治概念

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Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2025-07-01 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.70004

José Maurício Domingues

{"title":"Oligarchy, Democracy, and Plebeianism: For a Political Conceptualization","authors":"José Maurício Domingues","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70004","url":null,"abstract":"Oligarchy is back. That is, it has recently essayed to make a conceptual comeback because it has never disappeared from the way societies are ruled and, particularly and specifically in modernity, political life. What is it, though? Mostly it has remained untheorized or undertheorized in modernity, despite some critical approaches having mentioned it in connection to liberalism, such as Castoriadis’ (1999, 153ff), whereas others, within democratic liberalism, pointed to it as a stage in the development of liberalism that would have been already superseded, such as Santos (2013). This article precisely aims to engage with it in modernity and critically assess its relation to democracy, including its relation to plebeianism.Since apparently the Persians, but more consistently with the Greeks and above all Aristotle, oligarchy entered the vocabulary of power and rule (or “government”), having a sort of half-life in Medieval times, when monarchical power and the papacy held center stage in the discussions about power. Oligarchy re-emerged in the Renaissance, for instance, in Machiavelli, and early modern thinking, including Montesquieu, but was eventually sidelined by a different sort of vocabulary in which the ancient tradition of “forms of rule” (or “government”) played no role. Yet the theories of “elites,” especially Mosca and Pareto, as well as liberal approaches, provided new names for this old phenomenon, which could not be entirely overlooked, actually hypostatizing it as a universal and inexorable phenomenon (Urbinati 2010). Only here and there, with limited consequences, were such ideas resumed by modern thinkers. The state, representation, and other concepts took the place of the forms of rule within a new caesura regarding the discourse about power and the emergence of a specific dimension in modernity, the political one.Despite the analysis of the oligarchization of the inner life of political parties as a distinctive phenomenon, particularly in Michels’ (1911/2009) classic work about the German Social Democratic Party (which refrains from discussing oligarchy as a form of government or rule), that is, as strictly political, oligarchy has primarily been understood according to Aristotle's (1996) definition, that is, as the self-oriented rule of the few. These are, in fact and at the same time, the rich—thus configuring a “plutocracy.” This is also McCormick's (2011) and Winters’ (2011) perspective, the main references for contemporary discussions, as well as that of other recent authors such as Arlen (2019, 2023), Vergara (2020), and Bagg (2022), as well as Kalyvas (2019), with an opposition between the oligarchy and the “poor.”1Winters stresses that oligarchs are concerned with and dedicate themselves to the “defence of property,” which is based, differently from Rome, on ","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 2","pages":"245-254"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.70004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144519748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Oligarchy and Political Modernity: Conceptual Transformation and the Politics of Wealth 寡头政治与政治现代性：观念转型与财富政治

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Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2025-06-22 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.70003

Andreas Kalyvas

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Perception and Body: Walter Benjamin's Anthropological Materialist Theory of Myth 知觉与身体：本雅明的人类学唯物主义神话理论

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Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2025-06-19 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.70002

Michael Mango

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A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity 不稳定的幸福：阿多诺和规范性的来源

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Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2025-05-27 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12817

Robyn Marasco

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Toward a Theory of Myth Critique: Ideology, Learned Ignorance, and the Conditions of Imaginative Success 走向神话批判理论：意识形态、习得的无知和想象成功的条件

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Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2025-05-12 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12813

Carmen Lea Dege, Tae-Yeoun Keum

{"title":"Toward a Theory of Myth Critique: Ideology, Learned Ignorance, and the Conditions of Imaginative Success","authors":"Carmen Lea Dege, Tae-Yeoun Keum","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12813","url":null,"abstract":"Sweeping accounts of the history of the human species—from Rousseau (1997 [1755]) to Toynbee (1934–1961) to Diamond (1997) to Harari (2014)—are no novelty in popular culture, just as they are no strangers to controversy. But the debate that ensued around David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), perhaps the most significant recent addition to this genre, was different. One especially striking instance of its peculiar reception unfolded in the pages of the New York Review of Books letters section between Wengrow and the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who had written a lengthy review.Appiah was clearly taken with Graeber and Wengrow's project. Expressing admiration for its vision of freedom and political possibility, he rounded off his review with the verdict that, “whatever its empirical shortcomings, the book must be counted an imaginative success” (Appiah 2021). But this conclusion also came, almost like an afterthought, at the heels of a detailed report on those very empirical shortcomings, which took up the greater part of his review. In their book, Graeber and Wengrow had positioned themselves as debunkers of a pervasive “myth” about human history: a Rousseauian narrative about the birth of political society from out of an original, prepolitical state, whereby the privatization of property and domination by centralized governments were the necessary price humans had to pay for the complexity of civilization. But among the preponderance of archaeological counterexamples the authors marshaled as a corrective to this myth, not a single one, Appiah judged, held up to strict scrutiny. “Two half-truths, alas, do not make a truth,” he concluded, “and neither do a thousand” (Appiah 2021).If Appiah had meant to praise the book as an imaginative success, this certainly got lost in the ensuing conversation, which quickly hardened into a debate over facts. In a fiery response, Wengrow defended their empirical foundations, accusing Appiah of being too beholden to the old myth to face the archaeological evidence challenging it. Appiah responded, for his part, by once again highlighting the ambiguities surrounding the evidence, and reaffirming his regard for the authors’ imaginative vision (Wengrow and Appiah 2022).In this paper, we suggest something crucial is at stake in the crossfire of this conversation. All the parties to the debate agree that disrupting our sense of what is possible in politics is valuable, and that social criticism to this end is ultimately aimed at bringing about conceptual shifts in its audience that are, in essence, imaginative. Such shifts require their subjects to rework their attachments to tacit, subconscious values in the background of their worldviews. As such, successful social critique involves engaging the affective, aesthetic, an","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 2","pages":"286-297"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12813","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144520071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Uncivil Speech in the Social Media: Democracy, Political Liberalism, and the Virtue of Public Reason 社交媒体中的不文明言论：民主、政治自由主义与公共理性的美德

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Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2025-04-30 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12807

Ludvig Beckman

{"title":"Uncivil Speech in the Social Media: Democracy, Political Liberalism, and the Virtue of Public Reason","authors":"Ludvig Beckman","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12807","url":null,"abstract":"Initial hopes of the democratizing potential of the internet are increasingly replaced by fear that a fragmented and unedited public sphere unleashes the destructive forces of populism, hate speech, and demagoguery (Tucker et al. 2017). In social media, these forces are amplified by algorithms used to feed designed to create “audience engagement.” Thus, toxic communication in social media is no accident as postings that provoke and elicit emotional responses are consistent with the business model (Saurwein and Spencer-Smith 2021; Maréchal 2021). At the same time, operators of social media supervise and regulate postings on their platforms. Content violating “community standards” risk being demoted, flagged, or deleted, while users that do not comply with these standards are potentially excluded or “deplatformed” in the new vocabulary.As emphasized by Gillespie (2018), content moderation is an unavoidable feature of social media. Standards for content moderation frequently target hate speech, disinformation, and violent threats. Few deny that measures taken to reduce such content are or can be justified. Less obvious is if platforms should regulate and moderate uncivil speech; words or utterances that communicate rudeness, impoliteness, insult, or hostility.1 Uncivil speech is here defined as denigrating but not hateful speech: uncivil speech and hate speech are thus mutually exclusive categories (Waldron 2013). Hence, the question is whether social media providers should delete, demote, or flag uncivil postings and comments. Are they justified in ultimately excluding from their platforms users that engage in what Meta (2017) calls “language that seems designed to provoke strong feelings”?The value of freedom of speech is a reason to worry about regulating uncivil speech in social media. Just as there is reason to object to governments that suppress free speech in the public sphere, we should arguably oppose acts of censorship by social media platforms in the “digital public sphere” (Schäfer et al. 2015). Accordingly, critics argue that the regulatory activities of social media platforms are contrary to basic democratic values and principles. The suppression of speech in social media is a species of “cancel culture” that stifles freedom of expression and undermines the value of democratic participation (e.g., McGarvey 2022).Against these critics, it is worth keeping in mind that content moderation has for a long time been institutionalized in traditional media (Ward 2014). Publishing and broadcasting is unthinkable without editors enforcing professional standards, codes of responsible journalism and self-regulatory nongovernmental institutions. Hence, the normative issues at stake in the digital public sphere are not altogether new. What is new is who the relevant players are. Standards of content mode","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 2","pages":"356-365"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12807","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144520223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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The Aesthetics of Democratic Power: Sensibility, Normativity, and the Sublime 民主权力的美学：感性、规范性与崇高

IF 1.2

Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2025-04-28 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12806

Stephen K. White

{"title":"The Aesthetics of Democratic Power: Sensibility, Normativity, and the Sublime","authors":"Stephen K. White","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12806","url":null,"abstract":"Many today believe that our aesthetic-affective sensibility can enliven our thinking and thus enhance our capacity to perceive how existing attitudes, practices, and institutions may be undermining the imagination of a better political world.1 However, when we ponder such an admirable role for our sensibility, this also tends to reawaken a venerable concern in political theory: in according a substantial a role to affect and imagination, we may be undermining the role of normative reason and thereby implicitly legitimating dangerous forms of collective power. In Western history, this concern has taken a multitude of forms from the 16th century until today. In the period of the English Civil War, the more radically democratic revolutionaries came to be excoriated for embracing a dangerous “enthusiasm,” whereby religious belief, instead of providing restraint, was fused with vivid imagination envisioning radically new possibilities for political power, something critics saw as fomenting protracted violence and fanatical behavior.2 In the 20th century, it was the secular myths of fascism that fired popular imagination in many countries. This concern is hardly remote today, as right-wing populism flourishes in a variety of democratic societies. Given this extensive and unsettling background, we today face a situation where we seem to be moved simultaneously to admit a greater role for aesthetic-affective sensibility in political life and yet also deeply question it. How should we begin to get our bearings in these cross currents?In recent years, many of the issues surrounding sensibility have been gathered under the term social or political “imaginary,” with this meaning something like how figures of the imagination intertwine with explicit political orientations.3 But the increasing acceptance of the force of imaginaries is usually not followed by reflection on how they ought to be related to normative ideals we wish to explicitly affirm. I want to cut into this knot of issues. How should the features of a political imaginary or mythic resonate with ideals reflecting a more rational normative basis? And, more particularly, how does a fuller acknowledgement of a role for our aesthetic-affective figurations avoid the dangers noted above? In other words, can we conceive of an imaginary of political power whose cultivation encourages, rather than undermines, the core associations and ideals of democracy?Crucial to any such exploration is an aesthetic-affective notion traditionally tied to democracy, namely, the sublime.4 Since the 18th century, sublimity has been associated with an elevating enthusiasm for vehement collective action animated by the grand ideals underlying the revolutionary emergence of democratic power. Section 1 provides a brief historical overview of this connection, focusing specifically on how Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant unpacked its character. This background is necessary not just for contextual reasons, ","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 2","pages":"264-272"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12806","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144520126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Rethinking Political Myth, Unpacking the Settler–Colonial Dream of an “American Arcadia” 重新思考政治神话，拆解“美国世外桃源”的移民-殖民梦想

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Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2025-04-28 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12812

Chiara Bottici

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Eco-Emancipation: An Earthly Politics of Freedom pp. 224. $35.00 (Hardcover) $22.95 (Paperback). ISBN: 9780691242279. 生态解放：自由的世俗政治第224页。$35.00（精装）$22.95（平装）。ISBN: 9780691242279。

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Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2025-04-15 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12801

Rebecca Marwege

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The State and Its People 国家和人民