Crisis literature is booming. In recent years a great many books diagnosed a “crisis” of liberal democracy. That liberal democracy is in crisis is something almost everyone seems to agree on. However, there is considerably less agreement regarding the question of what this crisis actually consists of.
Disagreements concern, among other things, the following questions: How does the current crisis reveal itself? What are its signs or symptoms? Political disenchantment? The increasing influence of large corporations on what should in fact be democratic decisions? The rise of authoritarian populism? The decline of democratic regimes on a global scale?
And even more fundamental: What are the causes for these developments? Are these even new phenomena at all? Are we really living in a time of crisis? Or merely in a time of crisis diagnosis? And what is it exactly that is in crisis here? What would a democracy that is not in crisis look like?
The seminar will explore these and other questions by a close reading of recent crisis literature. We read, among other things, excerpts from Crises of Democracy (Przeworski 2019), How Democracy Ends (Runciman 2019), Democracy Rules (Müller 2021) and Post-Democracy After the Crises (Crouch 2020).
- Lehrende/r: Tobias Albrecht