1. Democracy’s Crisis: On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism
- Author:
- Nancy Fraser
- Publication Date:
- 09-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Centerpiece
- Institution:
- Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- We are currently facing a crisis of democracy. That much is beyond dispute. What is less well understood, however, is that this crisis is not freestanding, and its sources do not lie exclusively in the political realm. Contra bien-pensant commonsense, it cannot be solved by restoring civility, cultivating bipartisanship, opposing tribalism, or defending truth-oriented, fact-based discourse. Nor, contra recent democratic theory, can our political crisis be resolved by reforming the political realm—not by strengthening “the democratic ethos,” reactivating “the constituent power,” unleashing the force of “agonism” or fostering “democratic iterations.”1 All these proposals fall prey to an error I call “politicism.” By analogy with economism, politicist thinking overlooks the causal force of extra-political society. Treating the political order as self-determining, it fails to problematize the larger societal matrix that generates its deformations. In fact, democracy’s present crisis is firmly anchored in a social matrix. It represents one strand of a broader, more far-reaching crisis, which also encompasses other strands—ecological, economic, and social. Inextricably entwined with these others, it cannot be understood in isolation from them. Neither freestanding nor merely sectoral, today’s democratic ills form the specifically political strand of a general crisis that is engulfing our social order in its entirety. Their underlying bases lie in the sinews of that social order—in the latter’s institutional structures and constitutive dynamics. Bound up with processes that transcend the political, democratic crisis can only be grasped by a critical perspective on the social totality.
- Topic:
- Democracy, Capitalism, Social Contract, and Social Order
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus