The Ethics of Seeing Historically: Past, Present, and Future in Dark Times

摘要: Degenerations’ starting point is depressingly familiar: things aren’t looking good for democracy, anywhere, least of all in the United States, and this is not a problem we can resolve with a technical or institutional fix. Degenerations’ authors argue for the rebuilding of (little ‘r’) republican constitutions, norms of civic virtue, and the social conditions of citizenship. I’ve emphasized the ‘re’in rebuilding because, especially in the chapters written by Craig Calhoun (Gaonkar’s chapters read differently), a primary theme is of the loss of something we once had—specifically during the socalled trentes glorieuses, or the roughly 30-year period of ‘settlement’between the necessities of capital and the demands of representative democracy that characterized the period between the end of World War II and the 1970s. The collapse of this settlement has now spiraled, the authors argue, into three interwoven dynamics of degeneration …