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

{"title":"Racists, Fascists, and Other Dejects: Authoritarianism Reconsidered","authors":"Noëlle McAfee","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12796","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12796","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 3","pages":"385-393"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145100868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The State and Its People","authors":"David Owen","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12793","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12793","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 2","pages":"366-367"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144520117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Epistemic Challenge to Democratic Resilience: A Late-Classical Athenian Institutional Solution","authors":"Alexandru Volacu","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12792","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12792","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Democratic erosion is an increasingly worrying phenomenon, affecting not only both young and transitional democracies but also more consolidated ones. A particularly important aspect of this process (in its contemporary incarnation) is that, because of its subtle and incrementalist character, it is difficult to perceive by citizens, who often fail to mobilize in support of democracy as they are unaware that the regime is being threatened. I aim to address this challenge in the present article, by drawing on a historical case study where a democratic citizenry is confronted with a very similar epistemic difficulty. I outline the institutional solution devised in the historical context and use its features as a basis for articulating a normative framework underlying the respective solution. I then explore some alternative institutional proposals for contemporary politics that are derived on the basis of this framework.</p>","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 3","pages":"394-403"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12792","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145102167","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}

{"title":"The Long March Through the Institutions and the Fifth Wave of Juridification","authors":"Olof Hallonsten","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12791","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12791","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Sometime in 1967 or 1968, German student protest leader Rudi Dutschke coined a phrase that has become historical: In order for the youth movement to truly accomplish social change, it should undertake a “long march through the institutions”—a generational shift in the core constituencies of society, including its elites, thus reforming them from the inside.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The youth movements of the 1960s were decisive in the profound transformation of Western society from the mid-1960s and on, which included broad shifts in norms and values, the end of the 30-year post–World War II economic miracle, and the birth of new political programs. Several renowned sociological works have contributed to the analysis and characterization of these changes, their deeper meaning, and their consequences. They include, most famously, conceptualizations of the &lt;i&gt;post-industrial society&lt;/i&gt; (Bell &lt;span&gt;1973&lt;/span&gt;; Kumar &lt;span&gt;1995/2005&lt;/span&gt;), &lt;i&gt;reflexive modernity&lt;/i&gt; (Giddens &lt;span&gt;1990&lt;/span&gt;; Beck &lt;span&gt;1992&lt;/span&gt;), and &lt;i&gt;postmodernity&lt;/i&gt; (Bauman &lt;span&gt;1992, 1993&lt;/span&gt;). The period that preceded the transformation has not been as amply characterized and branded, but has been used as an important reference point to deepen the understanding of the current era, and what caused the transition between the two (Wagner &lt;span&gt;1994, 2008&lt;/span&gt;; Reckwitz &lt;span&gt;2020, 2021&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this article, we build on these theoretical works and use a periodization of modernity that distinguishes between &lt;i&gt;early&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;high&lt;/i&gt;, and &lt;i&gt;late modernity&lt;/i&gt; and two transition periods in between, identified as the &lt;i&gt;first&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;second crises of modernity&lt;/i&gt; (Wagner &lt;span&gt;1994&lt;/span&gt;). The first crisis, in the late-19th century and early 20th century, culminated in popular struggles for civil rights and equity and was resolved by the buildup of near-universal welfare states in tandem with an expansion of industrial capitalism, the two cornerstones of high modernity, through what Habermas (&lt;span&gt;1987&lt;/span&gt;: 358ff) has called the “fourth wave of juridification.” The second crisis, in the 1960s and 1970s, came about largely as a reaction to overregulation and the social conformism and normative control of the “mass society” (Giner &lt;span&gt;1976&lt;/span&gt;) and the several “social pathologies” that the institutions of high modernity had produced: imperialist warfare, structural racial injustice, and capitalist exploitation of nature and humanity (Habermas &lt;span&gt;1987&lt;/span&gt;: 285).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We reinterpret the “long march through the institutions” as a key process in the transition that took society out of the second crisis, and thus from high modernity to late modernity. The transition itself brought about broad and deep changes in norms and values, but it also produced some of the most distinguishing features of contemporary society, including new forms of bureaucratization, a veritable explosion of audit and evaluation, and a “hyper-defensive” (Power &lt;span&gt;2004&lt;/span&gt;) pursuit o","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 3","pages":"484-492"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12791","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145102103","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}

{"title":"Why AI Undermines Democracy and What to Do About It by Mark Coeckelbergh, Cambridge, UK: Polity. 2024. pp. 144. $22.95 (pbk). ISBN: 9781509560936. Algorithmic Institutionalism: The Changing Rules of Social and Political Life by Ricardo Mendonça, Virgilio Almeida, and Fernando Filgueiras, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2024. pp. 192. $90.00 (hbk). ISBN: 9780192870070.","authors":"Glen Billesbach","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12776","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 3","pages":"552-554"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145101640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Critique as Coloniality: The Decolonial Challenge to Immanent Critique","authors":"Shivani Radhakrishnan","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12790","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12790","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Frankfurt School methodology involves a lasting commitment to immanent critique. What distinguishes immanent critique from other forms of social criticism, scholars in this tradition argue, is that social practices are to be judged according to norms and potentials already contained within their objects. This article considers critical theory's relationship to coloniality by developing a three-part challenge to the practice of immanent critique, drawing on insights of decolonial philosophers Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Maria Lugones, and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí. Immanent critics, I conclude, risk being inattentive to constitutive exclusions, reinscribing asymmetrical burdens on certain critics, and unwittingly replaying a mechanism of domination familiar from colonialism in and through their preferred method of critique. Accordingly, I argue that immanent critics should attend to relations of power that govern the practice of critique itself and offer reasons for being more pluralistic about our methods of criticism.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 3","pages":"476-483"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145101156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Identity, Knowledge, and Antipoverty Politics","authors":"Andrei Belibou","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12781","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 3","pages":"438-449"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145100954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lucidity and Its Limits: Plato and Castoriadis on Myth and the Imaginary","authors":"Jonny Thakkar","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12783","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12783","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 2","pages":"273-285"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144519891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Guiding Examples: Democratic Myth-Making in the Work of María Zambrano","authors":"Karolina Enquist Källgren","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12782","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Against the background of growing populist and authoritarian movements in the United Staes, Europe, India, and Russia, political myths and their use have become a topic of theoretical contention (Bauman &lt;span&gt;2017a, 2017b&lt;/span&gt;; Reich &lt;span&gt;2015&lt;/span&gt;). Some authors have argued that political myths—for example, narratives of rise and decline or of origins—are a populist tool foreign to the principles of rational liberal democracies (Abizadeh, &lt;span&gt;2004&lt;/span&gt;; Eatwell and Goddwin &lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;; Green &lt;span&gt;2014&lt;/span&gt;, 119–130; Müller &lt;span&gt;2016&lt;/span&gt;). But the more radically political myths are positioned in opposition to the good governance of liberal democracy, the more difficult it becomes to explain the resurgence of populism in contemporary politics. An alternative opinion maintains that myths are in fact a necessary part of identity-building. Whether in the context of nation-building and the establishment of strong identities (Hosking and Schöpflin &lt;span&gt;1997&lt;/span&gt;) or as a significant basis for radical forms of social self-assertion (Bottici &lt;span&gt;2009&lt;/span&gt;; Errejón and Mouffe &lt;span&gt;2015&lt;/span&gt;), myths play a fundamental role. Yet, if myth is pervasive and will not cease to exist independently of rational attempts at debunking it, the question of how to evaluate myth becomes all the more important. How is it possible to distinguish between myths that are detrimental to democratic institutions, procedures, and values, and myths that encourage democratic forms of participation, subjectivity, and political action, and that strengthen values like equality and justice?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this article, I seek to combine interpretive and conceptual perspectives in 20th century history in order to propose a normative analysis of political myths. In particular, I argue that in our recent history, there have been two different models of myth-making: fascist myths, on the one hand, and the more recent development of populist myths, on the other. One important distinguishing feature is the way in which these two models organize emotions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the following, I will first define political myths as a historical phenomenon and then introduce the concept of &lt;i&gt;emotional analogy&lt;/i&gt; to distinguish fascist from populist leader myths. With the help of the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano (1904–1991), I will further use this analysis to develop a third, democratic model of myth-making. I suggest to use this model as a heuristic to guide democratic practices in creatively criticizing and (re)working political myths today.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As Martha Nussbaum rightly maintained, myth-making is part and parcel of democracy because like any other form of government, democracy relies on emotions that keep it alive (Nussbaum &lt;span&gt;2013&lt;/span&gt;). In a time where myths are being weaponized for authoritarian politics, democratic societies need to harness democratic myths that are capable of organizing and strengthening a democratic emotional core. If such myths are to be","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 2","pages":"310-320"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12782","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144519825","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}

{"title":"The First Theorists of Liberal Democracy","authors":"Arthur Ghins","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12778","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Who were the first theorists of liberal democracy? Since the mid-20th century, scholars have attributed this title to figures like Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, Madison, Constant, Tocqueville, Mill, and Lincoln. Yet none of these thinkers used the term “liberal democracy.” Rather than retroactively applying this label, this essay adopts an actor's categories methodology to examine what “liberal democracy” meant to those who first used it. The term originated in 1860s France, coined by liberals opposing Napoleon III. This article argues that liberal democracy was conceived as a polemical concept, designed to counter rival definitions of democracy. It also explores one of its foundational meanings: rule by public opinion. The essay concludes by showing how this polemical character and emphasis on public opinion continue to shape liberal-democratic theory in France and beyond.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 3","pages":"415-426"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145100959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}