Can Democracy Recover? : The Roots of a Crisis

Responding to growing public anxiety about the current state of democracy, this book will appeal to scholars in political theory, history and anthropology, as well as to the wider educated public. It provides an analysis of changes in the deep structure of Western democracy offering new imaginaries of political order.

''Can Democracy Recover?'' explores the roots of the contemporary democratic crisis. It scrutinizes the evolution and subsequent fragmentation of modern political epistemology, highlighting citizens increasing inability to make sense of the political universe in which they live, their loss of confidence in political causality, distinguishing facts from fiction and objective from partisan attitudes. The book culminates in a speculative discourse on democracy''s uncertain future. This work is the final part in Yaron Ezrahi''s trilogy. The first, ''The Descent of Icarus'' (1990), explored the scientific revolution''s role in shaping modern democracy. The second, ''Imagined Democracies'' (2012), examined the collective political imagination''s impact on the rise and fall of political regimes, emphasizing the modern partnership between science and democracy. ''Can Democracy Recover?'' traces the political implications of the erosion of the Nature-Culture dichotomy, the bedrock of modernity''s cosmological imagination, and anticipates the emergence of new political imaginaries.