Imagined Democracies - Softcover

Ezrahi, Yaron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1107529921 ISBN 13: 9781107529922

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2015

Synopsis

This book proposes a revisionist approach to democratic politics. Yaron Ezrahi focuses on the creative unconscious collective imagination that generates ever-changing visions of legitimate power and authority, which compete for enactment and institutionalization in the political arena. If, in the past, political authority was grounded in fictions such as the divine right of kings, the laws of nature, historical determinism, and scientism, today the space of democratic politics is filled with multiple alternative social imaginaries of the desirable political order. Exposure to electronic mass media has made contemporary democratic publics more aware that credible popular fictions have greater impact on shaping our political realities than do rational social choices or moral arguments. The pressing political question in contemporary democracy is, therefore, how to select and enact political fictions that promote peace, not violence, and how to found the political order on checks and balances between alternative political imaginaries of freedom and justice.

About this title

Book Description

Yaron Ezrahi proposes a revisionist theory of democracy. His theory is based on evidence that publics that lost their faith in extra-human sources of authority during the Enlightenment are now equally skeptical about the role of rational deliberation in politics. This book argues that in our era of mass electronic communications, political realities are produced by believable fictions that echo popular desires. Hence the pressing question facing contemporary democracies is how to privilege the performance of political fictions that promote peace and welfare, rather than violence and poverty, and how to evolve checks and balances between competing imaginaries of freedom and justice.

About the Author

Yaron Ezrahi studied political science and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and holds a PhD from Harvard University. He has served as an advisor on science policy to the White House, the US National Academy of Science, the OECD (1969-70), the Israeli Academy of Science and Humanities (1973-83) and the Carnegie Commission on Science (1992). He is the recipient of a National Jewish Book award and of the Israeli Political Science Association's Prize for Life Work (2009). He has been a member of the Hebrew University faculty since 1972. Other appointments include a fellowship at the Center of Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and visiting professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, Harvard University, Princeton University, ETH Zurich and Brown University. His works include The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy; Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism (edited with Everett Mendelsohn and Howard Segal); Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel; and Israel Towards a Constitutional Democracy (with M. Kremnitzer). He is a co-founder and board member of The Seventh Eye, Israel's leading journal of press criticism in Hebrew. His work has also appeared in Minerva, Science Studies, Social Research, Inquiry, Foreign Affairs, Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences and The New York Times Magazine.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1107529921
• ISBN 13: 9781107529922
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 340