EDITORIAL: New Faces of Democracy. In Searching of the Global Health of Democracy

• Authors: Tănăsescu Gabriela
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

One of the contemporary sages of political science, Norberto Bobbio, considered about four decades before the “pandemic pedagogy” that “Democracy is not enjoying the best of health in the world today, and indeed has never enjoyed it in the past, but nor does it have one foot in the grave.” He preferred to talk of transformation rather than of crisis, “because ‘crisis’ suggests an imminent collapse” and because the process of “becoming,” of transformation, is the natural state of the democratic system. The transformation of democracy have been put by Bobbio in terms of “broken promises” or in terms of “the gap between the ideal of democracy as it was conceived by its founding fathers and the reality of democracy as we have come to experience it, with varying degrees of participation.” He wisely pointed out that the broken promises—among which the survival of invisible power, the persistence of oligarchies, the suppression of mediating bodies, the renewed vigour in the representation of particular interests, the break-down of participation, the failure to educate citizens (or to educate them properly)—some were illusions from the outset, others were misplaced hopes, still others came up against unforeseen obstacles. Accordingly, instead of speaking of the “degeneration” of democracy, it is more appropriate to speak in terms of adapting abstract principles to reality, or of “the inevitable contamination of theory when it is forced to submit to the demands of practice.”

• Publisher: Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk; Fundacja Filozofia Na Rzecz Dialogu
• Journal: Dialogue and Universalism
• Year: 2022
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 5-30

Contributors

author

Tănăsescu Gabriela

• Institute of Political Sciences and International Relation of the Romanian Academy