Anti-democratic Research Articles

Democracy Ancient and Modern?

Abstract The idea that democracy is in crisis is nothing new; ancient Greek commentators like Plato and Thucydides argued that political instability was baked into democracy as a regime type. Can examples drawn from classical Athens make a useful contribution to discussions of the failings of contemporary democracy? This article considers a range of interventions from the past decade in the United States and the United Kingdom, carried out at different scales and through different methods. It considers the strengths of working with material from the distant past – its non-partisan nature offering a safe space to discuss political conflict without engaging in it – and also the weaknesses, such as the limited franchise of ancient democracies like classical Athens, and the need to consider specific historical issues in their own context. It also considers the unfamiliarity of ancient history and the way in which knowledge of the classical past can itself be perceived as class-bound and exclusionary.

Defying the Demos: Antidemocratic Thought in the United States, 1930–1950

Defying the Demos: Antidemocratic Thought in the United States, 1930–1950

«Хороший слог» и «новая художественность» в журнальной полемике 1860-1870-х годов

The research aims to determine the mutual influence of the principles of democratic criticism and raznochinets (“mixed-title”) literature in the 1860s-1870s. The work examines the issues related to the denial of artisticity as an important aesthetic criterion, as well as to the attempt to diminish the authority of literature with a “good style”, which “real critics” attributed to “aristocratic” literature. The paper considers the polemics of those years related to the socio-literary definition of the new stage of democratic literature with a social orientation, which was presented in magazines and by writers. The influence of raznochinets prose on the development of new criteria for evaluating literary works is identified, the function of the rhetorical form of a “conversation with the reader” in terms of combining critical and literary discourse is analyzed, using the prose of A. Scheller-Mikhailov, F. Reshetnikov, and I. Fedorov-Omulevsky as examples. As a model for subsequent imitation by fiction writers, the “conversation with the reader” in N. G. Chernyshevsky’s novel “What Is To Be Done?” is considered in comparison with his concept of art in “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality”. Scientific originality is determined by the comparative method, which allows the researcher to reveal the forms of discursive interaction at the level of the concept of criticism and its embodiment in literary practice. As a result, it was found that a “conversation with the reader” as a metatextual manifesto of the author’s program becomes a component in the concept of literature of the post-Gogol period.

Ideological Constitutionalism

A renewed interest in the concept of ideology is evident in recent constitutional theory. Ideology has featured prominently not only in restatements of traditional Marxist positions and attempted retrievals of the material conception of the constitution, but also in democratic critiques of liberal constitutionalism and theories of constitutional identity. The intention of this article is twofold. Firstly, the article defends the explanatory power of a conception of constitutional ideology that is centred on political domination and the ‘universalisation’ of contingent power relations, rather than more diffuse notions like the symbolic construction of reality or worldviews. Secondly, the article considers distinctive ideological dimensions of modern constitutionalism. An analysis of these dimensions, I contend, confirms modern constitutionalism's strong ideological ‘potential’.

Maimun Zubair and Response of Social, Political, and Religious Problems in Indonesia: A Study of Safīnatu Kallā Saya’lamūn fī Tafsīr Maimun Zubair by Lora Ismail Al-Ascholy

Tafsir Al-Qur’an always reflects the reality faced by the interpreter. This paper will analyze Kiai Maimun Zubair’s response to social, political, and religious issues in Indonesia through Safīnatu Kallā Saya’lamūn. This interpretation comes from the study of Tafsir al-Jalālayn presented by Kiai Maimun Zubair in Javanese, then translated into Arabic by his student, Lora Ismail Al-Ascholy. Kiai Maimun Zubair is an active figure in the pesantren environment and has extensive experience in the Indonesian political sphere. Therefore, an in-depth exploration of his interpretation is essential. The research methods used in this study are descriptive, historical, and explanatory, applying Teun A. Van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis. The results of this study show that Kiai Maimun Zubair uses tafsir to understand God’s words in the Qur’an and as a platform to express his views and responses to social, political, and religious phenomena in contemporary Indonesia. He highlighted issues such as agriculture in Indonesia, criticism of democracy in Indonesia, and independence of the Republic. Safīnatu Kallā Saya’lamūn describes the social, political, and religious situation in contemporary Indonesia and significantly contributes to discussing these issues. His attitude reflects the paradigm of thought of pesantren scholars who are firm in their attitudes and beliefs, thus making pesantren play an active role in Indonesia’s development process.

The End of Politics in Antony and Cleopatra

This essay aims to honor the important contributions Paul Cantor and David Lowenthal made through their thoughtful scholarship and extraordinary teaching to the study of Shakespeare as a playwright who studied political through his nature his portrayal of human nature and the variety of regimes available to human beings, from Athens and Rome to his own England. Both Cantor and Lowenthal thought deeply about Shakespeare’s Roman plays and devoted much time to how Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” fit into his “Roman Trilogy.” They agree that “Antony and Cleopatra” is a love story that parallels and portrays the final dissolution of not only the Roman republic, but the civic institutions and political way of life characteristic of ancient republicanism, and the transition to the Roman “time of universal peace” under the imperial rule of a single man (4.6.5). They also agree that the play signals the incipient introduction of Christianity into the world. Starting from this essential agreement, I explore the ways in which their arguments differ more on the details, and, in particular, where those details take them in their understanding of the character and ultimate fate of Antony and Cleopatra.

Reanimating Public Happiness: Reading Cavarero and Butler beyond Arendt

Abstract This article takes as its point of departure Hannah Arendt’s discussion of public happiness, contextualising it within her thoughts on politics, democracy and revolution. It draws on Arendt’s discussion of how the expression “pursuit of happiness” has historically shifted from a public understanding of happiness into an increasingly privatised one. The article engages with Arendt’s account of public happiness in order to reanimate her radical democratic critique of how representative politics reduces the scope of political action and participation; and how the notion of happiness in a neoliberal era can only be interpreted in economistic and subjectivist terms. Furthermore, the article turns to examine how recent works in contemporary political thought, namely, those by Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler, extend and transform the stakes of Arendt’s account of public happiness. On one hand, Cavarero’s notion of surging democracy is considered as an account of radical politics that keeps alive the Arendtian concern with public happiness by contextualising it within contemporary political struggles and social movements. On the other hand, Butler problematises Arendt’s discussion of politics for its neglect of precarity; however, this article argues that Butler’s work on assembly extends Arendt’s by highlighting possibilities of resistance, radical democracy and even public happiness amid experiences of loss and grief. Although prima facie it might appear that happiness and precarity are opposed to each other, this article points towards contemporary political practices, such as those of Ni Una Menos, that are critically reanimating public happiness through the intertwining of affective registers that range from joy to grief.

Does algorithmic content moderation promote democratic discourse? Radical democratic critique of toxic language AI

ABSTRACT Algorithmic content moderation is becoming a common practice employed by many social media platforms to regulate ‘toxic’ language and to promote democratic public conversations. This paper provides a normative critique of politically liberal assumption of civility embedded in algorithmic moderation, illustrated by Google’s Perspective API. From a radical democratic standpoint, this paper normatively and empirically distinguishes between incivility and intolerance because they have different implications for democratic discourse. The paper recognises the potential political, expressive, and symbolic values of incivility, especially for the socially marginalised. We, therefore, argue against regulation of incivility using AI. There are, however, good reasons to regulate hate speech but it is incumbent upon the users of AI moderation to show that this can be done reliably. The paper emphasises the importance of detecting diverse forms of hate speech that convey intolerant and exclusionary ideas without using explicitly hateful or extremely emotional wording. The paper then empirically evaluates the performance of the current algorithmic moderation to see whether it can discern incivility and intolerance and whether it can detect diverse forms of intolerance. Empirical findings reveal that the current algorithmic moderation does not promote democratic discourse, but rather deters it by silencing the uncivil but pro-democratic voices of the marginalised as well as by failing to detect intolerant messages whose meanings are embedded in nuances and rhetoric. New algorithmic moderation should focus on the reliable and transparent identification of hate speech and be in line with the feminist, anti-racist, and critical theories of democratic discourse.

Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Excitement and the Muslim Sacred, By Masood Ashraf Raja

Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Excitement and the Muslim Sacred, By Masood Ashraf Raja

Power to the (Right) People: Reply to Critics

ABSTRACT This article responds to four critics of Democracy in Spite of the Demos and reiterates its central thesis. Christopher Holman and Théophile Pénigaud attempt to maintain the critical value of democracy by invoking different elements of the deliberative tradition, while Benjamin Schupmann answers my charges by appealing to a strong liberal constitutionalism. I argue that these attempts repeat the ambivalence described and criticized in the book: democracy is taken as an end in itself, but with asterisks that introduce conditions and qualifications. As long as democracy is only desirable given certain caveats, the critical weight is placed on these caveats and not on the figure of democracy. Andrew Norris takes a different approach, interrogating the book’s use of ideology critique and the concept of “socially necessary delusion.” This intervention presents difficulties to the concluding suggestion of the book, but I maintain that that these difficulties can be productive and generative rather than limiting or prohibitive.

Converted Republic: Lemuel Haynes, Timothy Dwight, and the Anti-Racist Politics of the Republican Sermon

Abstract: This essay explores the under-examined philosophy of evangelical republicanism that preacher-reformers Lemuel Haynes and Timothy Dwight developed at the end of the eighteenth century. To demonstrate their evangelical critique of classical republicanism, Haynes and Dwight invented a new genre: the republican sermon, which allowed them to champion evangelicalism's understanding of disinterested virtue as a corrective to self-serving ambitions that dominated ancient republics. Civic republicans believed that elite white men were the only ones disinterested enough to contribute to politics and participate in the public sphere. By contrast, evangelicals transformed disinterestedness from an intellectual attribute to an affective quality available to all persons who had undergone a conversion experience. Because evangelical republicans vacate individual interests and consider all persons to be dignified and worthy of benevolence, their approach to condemning race-based injustices does not accord with the autobiographical impulse of antebellum genres like the slave narrative. Instead, evangelical republicans like Haynes protest slavery and racism by disinterestedly focusing on the suffering that all Black Americans collectively experience.

AUTHORITARIAN LIBERALISM, ORDOLIBERAL RATIONALITY AND THE EUROPEAN INTEGRATION PROJECT

Abstract. The author assesses the relevance and analytical significance of authoritarian liberalism and interprets it as one of the modern conceptual models of ordoliberalism and European integration. The basic concepts of authoritarian liberalism and ordoliberalism emphasise the political and ideological connection between the authoritarianism of the strong state and the economic liberalism of market rationality. As a flexible market-oriented form of authoritarian liberalism, ordoliberalism means a rational strategy for maintaining and promoting the European integration project towards which the market economy and the technocratic elite are moving to contain crises. Due to the presence of the values of political liberalism, pluralism and the rule of law, authoritarianism in this structure is not repressive or monocentric, but subject to democratic criticism in relation to the supranational regulation of European integration. Keywords: authoritarian liberalism, ordoliberalism, market capitalism, democracy, eurocrisis, European integration

Inverted Propositions

Abstract Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89) is best known for his utopian realist novel What Is to Be Done? (1863). However, he was perhaps most celebrated as a literary thinker in China as a result of the Soviet canonization of the nineteenth-century “democratic critics.” This essay discusses two Chinese critics’ engagement with Chernyshevsky’s treatise The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality (1853). Here Chernyshevsky advanced the proposition “Beauty is life.” In the 1930s and 1940s the literary theorist Zhou Yang read Chernyshevsky and produced a Chinese translation in 1942. In 1963 the philosopher Zhu Guangqian published the History of Western Aesthetics, in which he devoted a chapter to Chernyshevsky. This article explores how both Zhou and Zhu responded to Chernyshevsky’s proposition on beauty and life, with particular attention to all three thinkers’ engagement with Ludwig Feuerbach’s “transformative method” in his critique of Christianity, which sought to invert the relation between subject and predicate. Both Zhou and Zhu alighted on how Chernyshevsky’s reliance on Feuerbach led to a one-sided interpretation that needed further articulation; they marshaled the insights of Marx and Hegel to reinterpret Chernyshevsky. Finally, the essay considers the issue of transnational Bildung between Russia and China and the teacher-student relation as expressions of totality along the lines of both Feuerbachian transformative critique and Hegelian speculative retrieval.

Why does Kant Think that Democracy is Necessarily Despotic?

AbstractKant’s criticism of democracy has been traditionally defused with the consideration that Kant’s aversion is not to democracy per se, but to direct democracy. However, what Kant says – ‘to prevent the republican constitution from being confused with the democratic one, as commonly happens’ (ZeF, 8: 351) – appears to count not only against direct democracy, but also against conceptions of democracy closer to the ones we are accustomed to. By offering a new account of what Kant sees as the real problem of democracy (direct or not), the article unpacks a lesson about the limits of democracy that has gone largely unnoticed among political theorists and Kant specialists.

Should Progressives Fight or Welcome the Republican Effort to Call a Constitutional Convention?

Recently published, Senator Russ Feingold and Stanford scholar Peter Prindiville’s, The Constitution in Jeopardy: An Unprecedented Effort to Rewrite Our Fundamental Law and What We Can Do About it, criticizes a current Republican effort to call a constitutional convention under Article V of the U.S. Constitution. This paper argues that progressives, like these authors, and defenders of democracy are mistaken to defend the status quo of the U.S. Constitution. Rather, while the political stakes are certainly high, the effort to create a constitutional convention may be an opportunity for U.S. citizens across the spectrum to engage in constitutional politics aimed at altering the Constitution. A fully engaged citizenry and political elite—rather than one political side in a politically polarized society—would be healthier for the future of a successful modern democracy. This essay will engage Feingold and Prindiville‘s challenging argument opposing the Republican effort to call a constitutional convention under Article V which states that Congress, “on the application of legislatures of two-thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments.” Roughly 20 states of the 34 required have passed such resolutions. While there are 27 Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, Article V has never been used to call a convention. A second aim of the essay is to review the democratic critique of the Constitution, and argue that democratic reform is urgently needed. From the perspective of effective modern democracy, the goal of constitutional change should be seen as imperative: consideration should be given to alter the counter-majoritarian and unrepresentative features of the Constitution. These counter-majoritarian constraints in the U.S. Constitution are an institutional cause of “American Exceptionalism:” why is the United States more libertarian, with only a weak social democratic tradition, and always challenged to create efficient and representative policies? In short, I will argue that progressives must win the battle for democracy and make efforts to reform the Constitution.

워즈워스의 “숭고한” 공화국: 스위스 신화의 정치학

This paper is an attempt to examine the idea of a republic in the Wordsworth’s poetic career in relation with the Swiss myth. The Swiss myth was a popular belief that an ideal democracy is being practiced in the small communities located in the mountainous areas of the Alps each one of which could be called a mini republic, a microcosm of the ancient republics such as Athene or Sparta. Such small republics were peopled by the native inhabitants naturally equipped with civic virtues such as patriotism, a spirit of independence, frugality, and self-government all of which were grown in constant contact with the sublime landscape of the Alps. Wordsworth began his poetic career publishing a topographical poem Descriptive Sketches based upon his trip to the Alps which was made in 1790 under the charm of Switzerland as a country of pure democracy and sublime landscape. The Swiss myth, along with its aesthetic and political ramification, was always the source of inspiration in Wordsworth’s public life particularly in relation with his political sentiments. In this paper, I am trying to explore the significance of the Swiss myth in the transformation of Wordsworth’s political standpoint. I start with E. P. Thompson’s sincere question about Wordsworth’s apparently groundless optimism which managed to survive after all those traumas of political disenchantment. The secret, I argue, is that the Swiss myth provided him with a spiritual model with which to build an alternative Swiss in his native Lake District. Wordsworth’s ambitious project failed, of course, leaving the opprobrium of political apostasy only. It was undeniably an apostasy indeed after a certain point in his life, but his impossible dream for an alternative Swiss in the Lake District, I would like to argue, was dreamed due to his desperate wish to keep his republican idealism alive by building a ‘sublime’ republic of his own in whatever terms.

The rule of unreason: Analyzing (anti‐)democratic regression

The rule of unreason: Analyzing (anti‐)democratic regression

Edwin Carawan, Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens

Edwin Carawan, Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020, pp. XI + 308. ISBN 13: 978-1-4214-3949-5

Local politicians’ perceptions of financial conditions – do they align with financial indicators?

ABSTRACT Throughout history, critics of democracy have doubted people’s ability to govern themselves. For example, are local politicians – who often lack any formal training in accounting or economics – really able to comprehend complex financial information? Previous studies addressing this issue are in short supply, and their results are generally pessimistic. The aim of this paper is to test which – if any – financial indicators are related to local politicians’ perceptions of financial conditions in the setting of Swedish municipalities, thus extending earlier studies to a European context. Our analysis shows strong and significant correlations between most of the financial indicators tested and politicians’ perception of their municipality’s financial condition, including financial indicators capturing the levels of net income, equity ratio and tax rates. These findings provide optimism and strengthen arguments for the defenders of democratic government.

Reformas educativas para una crisis. Acerca de la educación del carácter en Platón y Aristóteles

This work considers the current crisis in the Western world, caused by the pandemic, war, energy supply issues, and other related disturbances, and its potential impact on current educational models, which are being reformed in various countries and attempts to relate it with historical precedents from classical antiquity that were a reaction to crises of ancient democracy through more or less utopian proposals for the reform of the traditional educational system put forward by two great thinkers: Plato and Aristotle. Our aim is to try to summarize the importance for these two thinkers of the education of individual character in the pursuit of the common goods of various political communities by uniting the wills of the citizens. The methodology used is rereading the fundamental passages of the classical sources on character and education in the young, comparing them with the points of view of most of the research, summarized in the assessments of the great manuals of the history of education. Despite being a well-known theme, it is worthwhile returning to these passages for an updated reflection in our contemporary world. Thus, it is apparent that, in spite of the obvious divergences between the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle, there is a curious similarity in the case of character education as the key to solve the problems posed for a society in times of crisis.