Democratic Self Research Articles

جياوازى فاكتەرەكان وكاريگەرى لە سەر گۆڕانكارييە سياسيەكانى توركيا ١٩٤٦- ١٩٦٠ توێژينەوەيەكى مێژووييە

This study is a modest attempt to shed light on the political changes in Turkey after the Second World War، on the margins of the role and influence of the internal and external factors، and at the same time, it is a comparative study between these two factors and the extent of their impact on political changes and their results. The political، social and economic developments that took place after the Second World War in Turkey had a suitable basis for applying this historical equation. In fact, the political changes that occurred in Turkey from this historical stage were more influenced by external factors compared to internal factors، and from this standpoint, this study tries to prove that، which was a major reason in order not to form a democratic political system in the past، bypassing the political parties. Its political activity is open-minded. From this point of view، the second half of the fourth and fifth decade of the last century was the political system in Turkey is not democratic from a practical point of view، because the political reality is not of an ambitious level. Democracy with others، even the political parties did not reach the level of accepting opposition parties with a democratic self.

Indonesia’s sense of self, the West, and democracy: an ontological (in)security perspective

ABSTRACT Democracy has remained an important phenomenon in Indonesian politics over the past two decades. Despite various studies on the topic, the question of ontological security, or security of the Indonesian self that lies at the heart of Indonesia’s identity, agency, and relations with others, has been largely overlooked. This article deviates from rationalist accounts to argue that democracy has been a crucial source of self-identification in Indonesia’s ontological struggle driven by colonial stigmas and existential anxiety. Similar to ‘sovereignty’ and ‘unity’, the idea of ‘democracy’ has been used repeatedly for many purposes, including the construction of the modern Indonesian state and the stabilisation of its sense of self. Recently, thanks to global politics and security, Indonesia’s democratic self has been recognized and showcased by the West. This democratic identity has fostered a sense of pride in achieving long-sought modernity, social agency and the ontological security of the state.

Honesty and genuine happiness

ABSTRACTGenuine happiness is impossible without authentic concern for and corresponding behaviour towards the well-being of others. Such an incorporation of others into the self refers to a “democratic self” and the related regard for the common good. The author argues that the honesty of professionals who work in or for an educational or vocational setting is vital for the good of the individual and the common good. By introducing “democratic selves”, recent advancements in Dialogical Self Theory (DST) point to an inclusion of the common good. However, given the importance of virtues for one’s own and the common good, the theory and its applications are in need of integrating virtues and in particular honesty.

Byzantine spirit of the Undead and its legacy in the Sick Man of Europe

Abstract This paper examines the source and consequences of permanent liminality in the political-legal administration of the Byzantine Empire. The paper argues ambiguous and incomplete identities of individuals, groups, and society associated with certain authoritarian political arrangements and consequent arrested liminal period(s) contributed to the decline of the Empire. Further, and significantly, the unresolved situation of disaggregated identity, or spirited away demos, persisted in the Ottoman Era and continues to infect contemporary socio-political affairs in regions in the Balkans and other countries of the former Soviet Union which now seek to balance the interests of a nation-state with the diversity of Europe. The paper does not consider the Orthodox Spirit, but rather analyzes the role of pseudo-intellectuals and sophists who derail the democratic and philosophical Hellenist traditions with authoritarian policies and tools. The research compares and links the institutional attempts of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires to manage and manipulate differences and distinctions through mechanisms such as theatricalization and the millets. The argument concludes that these strategies created the basis for the perpetualization of the sick man of Europe to the extent they focused on juggling the distinctions and identities of the empires rather than pursuing the development of the democratic self. Thus, in liminality is revealed and contained undead and viral authoritarian spirits, sometimes manifested in populist or extremist ethnic leaders, whose technologies trick the demos and disrupt the democratic imagination.

Three Models of Democratic Self-Defence: Militant Democracy and Its Alternatives

Militant democracy relies on the idea that democracies ought to defend themselves from anti-democratic forces by constitutionalising repressive measures. We offer a criticism of this view by highlighting the exclusionary elitism on which militant democracy is built. In doing this, we consider two competing models of democratic self-defence: the procedural and the social. We suggest that the procedural model, while avoiding the exclusionary and other pitfalls of militant democracy, is detached from socio-political realities and fails to offer a comprehensive vision of democratic stability. The largely neglected social model of democratic self defence avoids this problem; it combines proceduralism’s commitment to dissensus with a social-democratic logic in the design of democratic constitutions. We argue in favour of such a social democratic self-defence and further develop this model around the guiding principle of political and social non-domination.

Michal Shapira. The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain.

Michal Shapira. The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain.

Fields of Tension in a Boundary-Crossing World: Towards a Democratic Organization of the Self

In their study of the relationship between self and society, scientists have proposed taking society as a metaphor for understanding the dynamics of the self, such as the analogy between the self and the functioning of a totalitarian state or the analogy between the self and the functioning of a bureaucratic organization. In addition to these models, the present article proposes a democratic society as a metaphor for understanding the workings of a dialogical self in a globalizing, boundary-crossing world. The article follows four steps. In the first step the self is depicted as extended to the social and societal environment and made up of fields of tension in which a multiplicity of self-positions are involved in processes of positioning and counter-positioning and in relationships of social power. In the second step, the fertility of the democratic metaphor is demonstrated by referring to theory and research from three identity perspectives: multicultural, multiracial, and transgender. In the fields of tension emerging between the multiplicity of self-positions, new, hybrid, and mixed identities have a chance to emerge as adaptive responses to the limitations of existing societal structures. In the third step, we place the democratic self in a broader societal context by linking three levels of inclusiveness, proposed by Self-Categorization Theory (personal, social, and human) to recent conceptions of a cosmopolitan democracy. In the fourth and final step, a model is presented which allows the formulation of a series of specific research questions for future studies of a democratically organized self.

The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain, by Michal Shapira (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013; 272 pp) The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America, by Marga Vicedo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013; 321 pp); reviewed by Nick Midgley

<i>The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain</i>, by Michal Shapira (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013; 272 pp) <i>The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America</i>, by Marga Vicedo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013; 321 pp); reviewed by Nick Midgley

Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism by Mary Chapman (review)

Mary Chapman. Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism. Oxford and New York: Oxford up, 2014. 273 pp. $65.00. Making Noise, Making News traces the connections between U.S. Progressive Era woman suffrage campaigns and modernist literary experimentation, brilliantly demonstrating the intersections between suffrage and modernism, aesthetics and politics, voice and print. Impeccably researched and lucidly argued, the book challenges scholars to revisit the deep (223) between strategies of expression in suffrage campaigns and the literary avant-garde, affinities that were likely obvious to writers, speakers, and activists before the great divide of the 1930s between high and mass culture severed our sense of their shared history and foreclosed the kinds of richly comparative readings Chapman offers here (87, 223). For example, chapter 1, Seditious Organs, examines suffragists' use of noise makers such as the hurdy-gurdy and bold lettering on news bags carried in the street (votes for women) alongside the noisy experiments in literary style and typography in little magazines like Wyndham Lewis's blast. In the third and fourth chapters, Chapman contrasts the writing of Alice Duer Miller and Marianne Moore, bringing Miller's doggerel into conversation with high modernist citational poetics. Miller's closed form verse for her popular poetry column in the New York Tribune parodied the male literary tradition while ironically ventriloquizing anti-suffrage arguments, anticipating the quoting poem and citationality of much high modernist poetry, such as The Waste Land. Chapman then goes on to question assumptions about Moore's supposed lack of political reference in her poetry, rereading her early work in relation to suffrage activities documented in recently unearthed archival documents such as Moore's unsigned suffrage propaganda. Like the work of several of the writers she examines, then, Chapman's book is a collage of voices, traditions, forms, and styles: Gertrude Stein's libretto for The Mother of Us All over here, the sentinels of suffrage street demonstrations over there. In this corner Henry James's grumpy pronouncements about the shrieks and dissonance of mass print culture; in that corner the quietly challenging short fiction and journalism of Chinese North American writer Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far, who brought her knowledge of China's growing feminist movement to her critique of mainstream U.S. feminism's individualist bias and nativist blind spots. All are brought into dialogue by the book's central theme of sonic modernity and its primary trope, that of voice. To her credit, Chapman doesn't try to pit the sonic over and against the visual in some kind of battle of the senses as so often happens in sound studies. Instead, suffrage modernism emerges as a heterogeneous phenomenon in which strategies of vocalization, noise-making, talk, and silence traveled freely across a range of both print and acoustic forms and genres. Print forms like the serial suffrage novel The Sturdy Oak (1917), a compilation of contributions by fourteen popular male and female writers, borrowed the power of dialogue between voiced interlocutors. Meanwhile, typically vocalic forms like the street demonstration invited a growing feminist public into silent acts of reading through suffragists' unvoiced display of placards and banners. Voice thus emerges powerfully in its many senses: as materially acoustic, embodied, and historically salient--as voice with no quotation marks--but also as hallmark of literary style and metaphor of democratic self expression and empowerment. Chapter 2, Voiceless Speech, is in my opinion the strongest in the book. Chapman shows how suffragists brilliantly responded to proscriptions and legal injunctions against the noise and nuisance they created in public (described in chapter 1), by performing acts of stylized silence. For instance, suffragists appropriated the polite drawing-room tradition of the silent female tableau, popular throughout the nineteenth century as an appropriate form of expression for women. …

Child Guidance in Britain, 1918-1955: The Dangerous Age of Childhood. By John Stewart. * The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain. By Michal Shapira.

Child Guidance in Britain, 1918-1955: The Dangerous Age of Childhood. By John Stewart. * The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain. By Michal Shapira.

Review of 'The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War and the Making of the Democratic Self in Post-War Britain'

Review of 'The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War and the Making of the Democratic Self in Post-War Britain'

Education for Democracy: reasons and strategies

According to social scientists Herfried Münkler in Germany and Colin Crouch in England, major developments in Western industrial societies — individualism, increasing social complexity, globalisation — present serious threats to basic requirements of stable societies and expose democracy to the corrosion of its socio‐moral resources such as social trust and civic commitment to the public good. In order to grow and to flourish, the competences and capabilities that constitute these resources require systematic cultivation through educational processes.The school is the only institution that can provide the appropriate experience of a democratic life to all members of society. At present, however, schools are generally far from this goal.This article describes strategies for providing the experience of schools as democratic lifeworlds from an early age: classroom councils as tools for democratic self government and sites for sociomoral learning; projects of service learning in the community which can be successfully organized by these councils; and early experiences of civic engagement in community contexts as part of democratic classroom practice.

Friendship in Democracy and in Tocqueville’s Democracy

If, as David Walsh has argued, the strength and weakness of the liberal order is its inability to articulate the moral impulse upon which it stands, then Alexis de Tocqueville offers the most profound reflections upon this paradox as well as exhibiting the symptoms of it. Tocqueville recognized that democratic theory could not reveal the basis as deeply as the practice of self-government, as seen in his famous observation of its fruits: “Feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal influence of men upon one another.” This paper considers the tensions of the liberal order, as identified and reflected by Tocqueville, by considering his thought in light of friendship and its relationship with the theory and practice of self-government. It will argue that Tocqueville looked to something resembling the ancient understanding of friendship, which the ancients viewed as something “beyond theory,” as a means of ennobling the individualism of the democratic self. However, democrat modes of thinking undercut the very notion of “ennobling,” which suggests limits on the capacity of democrats at least to understand themselves. Tocqueville’s own sense of personhood, which owes much to Pascal, also led him to distrust friendship and to be unsure of the depths upon which it rests. The paper concludes with a consideration of how Tocqueville understood his own political science as an attempt to understand practices whose nature lies beyond the capacity of theory to understand.

Alternatyvus pilietinis ugdymas ir socialinė propaganda

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama šiuolaikinės demokratinės visuomenės raida ir jos sąmoningumas, atsižvelgiant į santykį su spektaklio visuomene, su šiuolaikinėmis įtikinėjimo formomis ir pilietinio lavinimo problemomis. Šiuolaikinės visuomenės demokratinė savivalda sunkiai galima be viešųjų ryšių technologijų, socialinės propagandos. Jų aktualumą lemia heterogeninės, skirtingų kompetencijų, interesų ir aktyvumo socialinės grupės. Straipsnyje nagrinėjama socialinė inžinerija, socialinė propaganda, socialinė reklama ir pamatuota demokratinė visuomenės raida. Iš dalies kritikuojama K. Popperio utopinės ir dalinės socialinės inžinerijos perskyra nurodant, kad falibilizmo principas nėra tiesiogiai perkeliamas iš gamtos mokslų į socialinius. Šiuolaikinė visuomenė privalo plėtoti projektinį mąstymą ir projektų konkurenciją, o jų alternatyvumas užtikrina utopinio mąstymo žalos mažinimą ir išsaugo kūrybingumą. Taigi falibilizmas yra pakeičiamas alternatyvų raida. Atitinkamai yra nagrinėjamas žiniasklaidos vaidmuo remiant socialinę propagandą, atsižvelgiant į skirtingus jos dalyvavimo, įtrauktumo lygius. Straipsnis skiria: (a) vienpusę socialinę propagandą, kuri formuoja vienmatį žmogų, propagandos subjektą, skatina pakeistinį mąstymą, ir (b) alternatyvią socialinę, kultūrinę propagandą kaip demokratinį visuomenės savivaldos principą. Teigiama, kad alternatyvumas yra tiesiogiai susietas su viešosiomis erdvėmis. Viešuma užtikrina dialogizmą, kuriame esmingai gyvena ir savo rūpesčius apmąsto žmogus. Dialogizmo ir viešųjų erdvių, kur tas dialogas įmanomas, griovimas kartu reiškia ir demokratijos eroziją bei autoritarizmo ir vienpusės manipuliacijos didėjimą. Norint šių reiškinių išvengti, būtina skatinti alternatyvų pilietinį ugdymą, kurio tikslas – mokytis protesto, manifestacijų, alternatyvių reprezentacijų ir mikroakcijų formų. Pažymimos sąsajos tarp socialinės propagandos ir plakatų, šūkių, agitacinių straipsnių ir feljetonų žanrų. Svarbu kaupti ir analizuoti alternatyvių sąjūdžių patirtį ir kelti protesto kultūrą, kurios viena išraiškų yra alternatyvių socialinių ir kultūrinių projektų teikimas ir kompetencijų šioje sferoje didinimas, mažinant monopolistines ir valstybės centristines tendencijas, didinant bendruomenių savivaldą.

The need for European Union information amongst women in the United Kingdom: results of a survey

This paper describes the results of an exploratory survey by questionnaire distributed via a variety of information agencies, designed to investigate women’s information needs and patterns of information‐seeking behaviour in relation to the European Union. The results explore women’s attitudes to information and its value to them in a range of different life contexts, as well as their use of information agencies and of information and communications technologies. The results show that women value information highly and that they search for and use a wide range of categories of information in relation to education and their professional and personal life. Findings also suggest that respondents tend to predict high levels of future use of European information, in particular in relation to democratic participation and self development. Women were conscious of barriers to information access and suggested a range of measures that might improve access. They were generally positive about participating in training in the use of electronic networks and about the likelihood of their using networks to access information about the European Union.

The Democratic Self and Moral Community

The Democratic Self and Moral Community

Injury, community and the republic.

Injury and its prevention, like other areas of public health regulation, pose a number of interesting challenges to the theory of democratic self government. To understand these challenges, a good starting point is the Great Society era, when in a brief ten year period, major new agencies were created to promote safety in the workplace, the marketplace, and on our nation's highways—agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).The theory of injury that lay behind the new agencies was in sharp contrast to injury policy as pursued up to that time. The new public health and safety agencies were based on the idea that injury must be approached as an environment, not an individual, problem. The most articulate advocate of this view was William Haddon, Jr., the physician and injury researcher who became President Johnson's first head of NHTSA. Haddon argued for well over a decade for abandoning the view of injury as “accidents,” unpredictable and inevitable “acts of God.”

Supreme Contradictions: The American Poet Versus the Wilderness of American Experience

Bonnie Costello. Marianne Moore : Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. 281 pp. Ross Labrie. Howard Nemerov. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980. 159 pp. Cary Nelson. Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. 220 + xvii pp. The creative and democratic self in America must be "capable of absorbing contradictions as great as America itself"; in this way Lorelei Cederstrom has summed up the position of the artist as argued in recent works of literary criticism.1 The three studies under review here continue and extend this thesis, exploring its implications for a number of modern and contemporary poets.

Theory and Practice of Political Socialization in Childhood – Democracy vs. Neoliberalism

The text focuses on the efficiencyof school as one of the key agents of political socialization of early childhood students. Using the conceptual framework of J. Astuto and M.D. Ruck, a question is posed of how to effectively develop prosocial skills of children and therefore how to shape their later willingness to engage in civic actions in youth. According to various scholars, prosocial skills, such as respect for others’ feelings, helping, sharing and cooperating with others, have to be nurtured through classroom-based play. Unfortunately, in the age of neoliberal dominance of standardized tests, civic education is deemed less important, with an excessive focus on civic knowledge and the insufficien (not testable) focus on civic skills. In reference to research results (e.g. C. Flanagan and L.S. Gallay), the author of the article points out that democratic competence does not simply emerge as a result of top-down transmission of knowledge. The process of normative (moral) development in childhood knowledge of political facts is significantlyless important than the child’s social experience of civic participation and cooperation. Contrary to the neoliberal tendencies in educational reforms, democracy-learning – as pointed out by numerous studies – should be based on the development of a ‘democratic self’ (values, patterns of behavior, habits), prior to the development of political knowledge. Knowledge should be treated as a second important element of school political socialization of children. The primary focus should be the school’s commitment to the development of children’s democratic attitudes.