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36538 results in Social and population history

Page 141 of 1827

  • 2 - Does the World Have a Spatio-political Form? Preliminaries

  • Edited by Peter Wagner, University of Barcelona
  • Book:
    The Moral Mappings of South and North
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    02 June 2017, pp 18-50

  • Summary

    Framing the question

    FROM A GLOBAL perspective, democracy seems to be nowadays the political regime that in discursive terms is implicitly considered the sole legitimate political order. Now, in contrast to the past, whenever democracy is not acknowledged as the only suitable regime to institute an order, either explicit ad hoc justifications have to be provided to show why temporarily democracy should not rule, or resistance to democracy is associated locally with resistance to domination. Paradoxically, at the moment in history when the reputation of democracy is at its best globally, a series of elements seem to suggest that its workings are in trouble (Rosich and Wagner 2016). Or, in other words, the constitution of a new global order that connects all human beings, arising as a response to the crisis of the previous order and possessing a commonly understood need to be democratic in its outlook, appears as tension-ridden. It is the first time in history that a socio-political ordering of the totality of human beings has to be normatively justifiable on democratic premises. Thus, it is an urgent task to collectively reconstruct socio-political thinking in the light of this present challenge.

    Nevertheless, in both intellectual and historical terms the challenge itself is not new. Cosmopolitanism is the intellectual tradition that focuses on this problematique, though until very recently it did so only from a normative point of view and addressed it as a politicophilosophical project. However, Immanuel Kant, who remains the most representative thinker of this cosmopolitan project, did not believe that it was reconcilable with democracy (Kant [1784] 1989). From a historical point of view, the two ‘world’ wars of the twentieth century gave birth to two consecutive global political institutions, first the League of Nations and afterwards the United Nations. The failure of the Wilsonian utopia of ‘making the world safe for democracy’ after the First World War led the founders of the United Nations to envisage a much less ambitious political programme, putting human rights at the centre of their normative project and leaving to the principle of state sovereignty the political regime of member states.

Cultures of Anyone
  • Studies on Cultural Democratization in the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis
  • Luis Moreno-Caballud
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    27 May 2017
    Print publication:
    21 July 2015
  • Cultures of Anyone studies the emergence of collaborative and non-hierarchical cultures in the context of the Spanish economic crisis of 2008. It explains how peer-to-peer social networks that have arisen online and through social movements such as the Indignados have challenged a longstanding cultural tradition of intellectual elitism and capitalist technocracy in Spain. From the establishment of a technocratic and consumerist culture during the second part of the Franco dictatorship to the transition to neoliberalism that accompanied the ‘transition to democracy’, intellectuals and ‘experts’ have legitimized contemporary Spanish history as a series of unavoidable steps in a process of ‘modernization’. But when unemployment skyrocketed and a growing number of people began to feel that the consequences of this Spanish ‘modernization’ had increasingly led to precariousness, this paradigm collapsed. In the wake of Spain’s financial meltdown of 2008, new ‘cultures of anyone’ have emerged around the idea that the people affected by or involved in a situation should be the ones to participate in changing it. Growing through grassroots social movements, digital networks, and spaces traditionally reserved for ‘high culture’ and institutional politics, these cultures promote processes of empowerment and collaborative learning that allow the development of the abilities and knowledge base of ‘anyone’, regardless of their economic status or institutional affiliations.

    The text of Cultures of Anyone is freelyavailable online at the Modern Languages Open platform www.modernlanguagesopen.org

Page 141 of 1827