Yaron Ezrahi

Imagined Democracies (eBook, PDF)

Necessary Political Fictions

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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 and how to found the political order on checks and balances between alternative political imaginaries of freedom and justice.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. Oktober 2012
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781139575300
• Artikelnr.: 38277351

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

Part I. Necessary Fictions of the Political and the Reality of Political
Fictions: 1. The contest over the rightful domain of the imagination; 2.
The revival and contemporary legacy of Giambatista Vico (1668-1744) as a
modern theorist of the political imagination; 3. Modes of imagining:
elements of a theory of the political imagination; 4. Naturalization and
historicization as strategies of the political imagination; Part II. Modern
Common Sense and the Rise of Modern Political Imaginaries: 5. The
historicity of common sense and the role of scientism in the modern
political imagination; 6. Empiricism, induction, and visibility: the moral
epistemology of democratic political power; 7. The performing arts and the
performance of politics: the dialectics between the transparent and
self-concealing imagination; Part III. Modern Imaginaries of Democratic
Political Agencies and Causality: 8. Voluntary action, the fear of
theatricality, and the materialization of the political; 9. Animated
fictions: self (as) fulfilling prophecy and the performative imaginaries of
democratic political agencies; 10. Individuals between liberal and
illiberal corporations; 11. The impact of culture, the cultivation of the
individual interior in literature, painting, and music; Part IV. The
Postmodern Turn and the Return of Political Theatricality: 12. Mass media
and the refictionalization of agency and reality; 13. The ethics and
pragmatics of the democratic political imagination: on choosing the
imaginaries we want to live by.