Contemporary Democracy And The Sacred

Author : Jon Wittrock
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2018-07-26
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781350058828

Get Book

Contemporary Democracy and the Sacred by Jon Wittrock Pdf

Debates on the impact of religious traditions upon secular politics have raged throughout the last century and continue today. Exposing the ambiguity of secularity in political life, Jon Wittrock investigates the contemporary relevance of the scared beyond established religious communities and within wider civic society. In the context of globalization, characterized by the spread of capitalist commodification and new technologies of transportation and communication, determining the legitimacy of democratic nation-states is particularly urgent. Questioning ontological challenges to democracy, this book confronts the public narratives, symbols and rituals of the political domain. It analyses modern scholarship on the impact of eschatological figures of thought on government and political ideologies, what hopes there are for universal rights or justice, and the “public worship” of contemporary democracies. Bridging the analytical and continental sides of the philosophical divide, this book draws upon conceptual analysis as well as phenomenology and deconstruction. It advocates neither a left- nor a right-wing political approach, but seeks to outline what political secularization could and should mean.

Author : Jon Wittrock
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 195 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2018-07-26
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781350058842

Get Book

Contemporary Democracy and the Sacred by Jon Wittrock Pdf

Debates on the impact of religious traditions upon secular politics have raged throughout the last century and continue today. Exposing the ambiguity of secularity in political life, Jon Wittrock investigates the contemporary relevance of the scared beyond established religious communities and within wider civic society. In the context of globalization, characterized by the spread of capitalist commodification and new technologies of transportation and communication, determining the legitimacy of democratic nation-states is particularly urgent. Questioning ontological challenges to democracy, this book confronts the public narratives, symbols and rituals of the political domain. It analyses modern scholarship on the impact of eschatological figures of thought on government and political ideologies, what hopes there are for universal rights or justice, and the “public worship” of contemporary democracies. Bridging the analytical and continental sides of the philosophical divide, this book draws upon conceptual analysis as well as phenomenology and deconstruction. It advocates neither a left- nor a right-wing political approach, but seeks to outline what political secularization could and should mean.

Author : Lawrence Douglas,Austin Sarat,Martha Merrill Umphrey
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2022
Category : LAW
ISBN : 1503626393

Get Book

Law and the Sacred by Lawrence Douglas,Austin Sarat,Martha Merrill Umphrey Pdf

The specter of the sacred always haunts the law, even in the most resolute of contemporary secular democracies. Indeed, the more one considers the question of the relation between law and the sacred, the more it appears that endless debate over the proper relationship of government to religion is only the most "idian example of a problematic that lies at the heart of law itself. And currently, as some in the United States grapple with the seeming fragility of secular democracy in the face of threatening religious fundamentalisms, the question has gained a particular urgency. This book explores questions about the fundamental role of the sacred in the constitution of law, historically and theoretically. It examines contemporary efforts to separate law from the sacred and asks: How did the division of law and sacred come to be, in what ways, and with what effects? In doing so, it highlights the ambivalent place of the sacred in the self-image of modern states and jurisprudence. For if it is the case that, particularly in the developed West, contemporary law posits a fundamental conceptual divide between sacred and secular, it nevertheless remains true that the assertion of that divide has its own history, one that defines Western modernity itself.

Author : Miguel Vatter
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2020-11
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780190942359

Get Book

Divine Democracy by Miguel Vatter Pdf

"The 'return of religion' in the public sphere and the emergence of post-secular societies have propelled the discourse of political theology into the centre of contemporary democratic theory. This situation calls forth the question addressed in this book: Is a democratic political theology possible? Carl Schmitt first developed the idea of the Christian theological foundations of modern legal and political concepts in order to criticize the secular basis of liberal democracy. He employed political theology to argue for the continued legitimacy of the absolute sovereignty of the state against the claims raised by pluralist and globalized civil society. This book shows how, after Schmitt, some of the main political theorists of the 20th century, from Jacques Maritain to Jèurgen Habermas, sought to establish an affirmative connection between Christian political theology, popular sovereignty and the legitimacy of democratic government. In so doing, the political representation of God in the world was no longer placed in the hands of hierarchical and sovereign lieutenants (Church, Empire, Nation), but in a series of democratic institutions, practices and conceptions like direct representation, constitutionalism, universal human rights, and public reason that reject the primacy of sovereignty"--

Author : Alexandra Aidler
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2019-10-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781498598293

Get Book

Democracy and the Divine by Alexandra Aidler Pdf

Advancing the thesis that a contract between the political members of a community must lead to the highest form of social inclusion, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) has provided the groundwork for democracies around the world. Yet, Hobbes also states that this contract can only be upheld by a strong sovereign whose authority is derived from God. How can a democracy be defined, then, as truly inclusive when it essentially grows out of a theocracy that thinks about human beings in terms of “reduction”? In Democracy and the Divine: The Phenomenon of Political Romanticism Alexandra Aidler argues that despite modern democracy’s problematic heritage, one should not abandon its claims to religion. Articulating a democracy that is based on the religious principle of giving oneself to another, Aidler develops a political theology of democracy that is built upon two traditions in political thought that have rarely been examined thus far side by side for their contributions to this field: German Romanticism, as exemplified by Franz von Baader and Friedrich Schlegel, and the “theological turn” in French philosophy, as represented by Jacques Derrida and Jacques Rancière.

Author : DEMOCRATIZATION.
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2024-06-03
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0190942398

Get Book

DIVINE DEMOCRACY by DEMOCRATIZATION. Pdf

Author : Harald Wydra
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2015-04-30
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781107075375

Get Book

Politics and the Sacred by Harald Wydra Pdf

Argues that practices of the sacred have shaped the frames of modern secular politics.

Author : Aristotle Papanikolaou
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2012-10-30
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780268089832

Get Book

The Mystical as Political by Aristotle Papanikolaou Pdf

Theosis, or the principle of divine-human communion, sparks the theological imagination of Orthodox Christians and has been historically important to questions of political theology. In The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy, Aristotle Papanikolaou argues that a political theology grounded in the principle of divine-human communion must be one that unequivocally endorses a political community that is democratic in a way that structures itself around the modern liberal principles of freedom of religion, the protection of human rights, and church-state separation. Papanikolaou hopes to forge a non-radical Orthodox political theology that extends beyond a reflexive opposition to the West and a nostalgic return to a Byzantine-like unified political-religious culture. His exploration is prompted by two trends: the fall of communism in traditionally Orthodox countries has revealed an unpreparedness on the part of Orthodox Christianity to address the question of political theology in a way that is consistent with its core axiom of theosis; and recent Christian political theology, some of it evoking the notion of “deification,” has been critical of liberal democracy, implying a mutual incompatibility between a Christian worldview and that of modern liberal democracy. The first comprehensive treatment from an Orthodox theological perspective of the issue of the compatibility between Orthodoxy and liberal democracy, Papanikolaou’s is an affirmation that Orthodox support for liberal forms of democracy is justified within the framework of Orthodox understandings of God and the human person. His overtly theological approach shows that the basic principles of liberal democracy are not tied exclusively to the language and categories of Enlightenment philosophy and, so, are not inherently secular.

Author : Jean L. Cohen,Cécile Laborde
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2015-12-22
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780231540735

Get Book

Religion, Secularism, and Constitutional Democracy by Jean L. Cohen,Cécile Laborde Pdf

Polarization between political religionists and militant secularists on both sides of the Atlantic is on the rise. Critically engaging with traditional secularism and religious accommodationism, this collection introduces a constitutional secularism that robustly meets contemporary challenges. It identifies which connections between religion and the state are compatible with the liberal, republican, and democratic principles of constitutional democracy and assesses the success of their implementation in the birthplace of political secularism: the United States and Western Europe. Approaching this issue from philosophical, legal, historical, political, and sociological perspectives, the contributors wage a thorough defense of their project's theoretical and institutional legitimacy. Their work brings fresh insight to debates over the balance of human rights and religious freedom, the proper definition of a nonestablishment norm, and the relationship between sovereignty and legal pluralism. They discuss the genealogy of and tensions involving international legal rights to religious freedom, religious symbols in public spaces, religious arguments in public debates, the jurisdiction of religious authorities in personal law, and the dilemmas of religious accommodation in national constitutions and public policy when it violates international human rights agreements or liberal-democratic principles. If we profoundly rethink the concepts of religion and secularism, these thinkers argue, a principled adjudication of competing claims becomes possible.

Author : G. Bingham POWELL,G. Bingham Powell
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780674042353

Get Book

Contemporary Democracies by G. Bingham POWELL,G. Bingham Powell Pdf

Why do some democracies succeed while others fail? In seeking an answer to this classic problem, G. Bingham Powell, Jr., examines the record of voter participation, government stability, and violence in 29 democracies during the 1960s and 1970s. The core of the book and its most distinguishing feature is the treatment of the role of political parties in mobilizing citizens and containing violence.

Author : Justice Stephen Breyer,Robert Badinter
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2004-06-01
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780814789711

Get Book

Judges in Contemporary Democracy by Justice Stephen Breyer,Robert Badinter Pdf

Law, politics, and society in the modern West have been marked by the increasing power of the judge: the development of constitutional justice, the evolution of international judiciaries, and judicial systems that extend even further into social life. Judges make decisions that not only enforce the law, but also codify the values of our times. In the summer of 2000, an esteemed group of judges and legal scholars met in Provence, France, to consider the role of the judge in modern society. They included Robert Badinter, former president of the Constitutional Council in France; Stephen Breyer, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; Antonio Cassese, the first president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia; Dieter Grimm, former vice president of the Constitutional Court of Germany; Gil Carlos Rodriguez, president of the Court of Justice of the European Union; and Ronald Dworkin, formerly of Oxford University, now professor of philosophy and law at the New York University Law School. What followed was an animated discussion ranging from the influence of the media on the judiciary to the development of an international criminal law to the judge's consideration of the judge's own role. Judges in Contemporary Democracy offers a rare and intimate glimpse into the powers and the role of judges in today's society.

Author : Ralph Ketcham
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2021-10-08
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780700631599

Get Book

The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era by Ralph Ketcham Pdf

Although the last half of the twentieth century has been called the Age of Democracy, the twenty-first has already demonstrated the fragility of its apparent triumph as the dominant form of government throughout the world. Reassessing the fate of democracy for our time, distinguished political theorist Ralph Ketcham traces the evolution of this idea over the course of four hundred years. He traces democracy's bumpy ride in a book that is both an exercise in the history of ideas and an explication of democratic theory. Ketcham examines the rationales for democratic government, identifies the fault lines that separate democracy from good government, and suggests ways to strengthen it in order to meet future challenges. Drawing on an encyclopedic command of history and politics, he examines the rationales that have been offered for democratic government over the course of four manifestations of modernity that he identifies in the Western and East Asian world since 1600. Ketcham first considers the fundamental axioms established by theorists of the Enlightenment—Bacon, Locke, Jefferson—and reflected in America's founding, then moves on to the mostly post-Darwinian critiques by Bentham, Veblen, Dewey, and others that produced theories of the liberal corporate state. He explains late-nineteenth-century Asian responses to democracy as the third manifestation, grounded in Confucian respect for communal and hierarchical norms, followed by late-twentieth-century postmodernist thought that views democratic states as oppressive and seeks to empower marginalized groups. Ketcham critiques the first, second, and fourth modernity rationales for democracy and suggests that the Asian approach may represent a reconciliation of ancient wisdom and modern science better suited to today's world. He advocates a reorientation of democracy that de-emphasizes group or identity politics and restores the wholeness of the civic community, proposing a return to the Jeffersonian universalism—that which informed the founding of the United States—if democracy is to flourish in a fifth manifestation. The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era is an erudite, interdisciplinary work of great breadth and complexity that looks to the past in order to reframe the future. With its global overview and comparative insights, it will stimulate discussion of how democracy can survive-and thrive-in the coming era.

Author : Sofia Näsström
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780192898869

Get Book

The Spirit of Democracy by Sofia Näsström Pdf

This book develops a new theoretical framework for studying the corruption, disintegration, and renewal of democracy: what it is, how it begins, and where in society it plays out. Näsström argues that modern democracy is a sui generis political form animated and sustained by a spirit of emancipation.

Author : Peter Augustine Lawler
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0739107623

Get Book

Democracy and Its Friendly Critics by Peter Augustine Lawler Pdf

In this edited collection, Peter Lawler presents a lucid and comprehensive introduction to a diverse set of political issues according to Tocqueville. Democracy and Its Friendly Critics addresses a variety of modern political and social concerns, such as the moral dimension of democracy, the theoretical challenges to democracy in our time, the religious dimension of liberty, and the meaning of work in contemporary American Life. Taking innovative and unexpected approaches toward familiar topics, the essays present engaging insights into a democratic society, and the contributors include some of today's leading figures in political philosophy. No other collection on Tocqueville addresses contemporary American political issues in such a direct and accessible fashion, making this book a valuable resource for the study of political theory in America.

Author : David Stasavage
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 424 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2021-08-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691228976

Get Book

The Decline and Rise of Democracy by David Stasavage Pdf

"Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer--democratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa. Delving into the prevalence of early democracy throughout the world, David Stasavage makes the case that understanding how and where these democracies flourished--and when and why they declined--can provide crucial information not just about the history of governance, but also about the ways modern democracies work and where they could manifest in the future."--