Filozofska istraživanja, Vol. 24 No. 2, 2004.
Original scientific paper
Cultural Pessimism and Democracy
Alen Tafra
Abstract
The belief in the decline of a nation, a civilisation or of humanity is at least old as culture itself. If we understand ‘culture’ in its broadest sense as a ‘whole way of life’ of a period or a specific group (Williams), it is not difficult to notice in each cultural pessimism a critical stance towards the idea and praxis of democracy. As a sharp critique of existing order, cultural pessimism displays the other side of the optimistic idea of progress, which makes it even compatible with evolutionary prospective, eschatology or utopism (Marx, Frankfurt School). However, philosophy of history of this opinion primarily departs from the idealized, mytho-poetical vision of a superior past. Because of evil fate and untenability of former shift, a restauration of the primordial order is dreamed of, or insistingly called for reactionarily, conservatively, or through modem, revolutionary synthesis. The condition of post- modernity as a crisis of modernity (Harvey), after the thesis on the crisis of contractualism (Sorokin), the end of democracy (Spengler), and the end of ideology (Bell), leads towards even a more radical thesis on the end of society and the birth of non-society, the end of subject and the end of politics (Guehenno). In the time of its paroxysm, cultural pessimism may be defended as a sort of depressive realism (Bennett). In a crumbled era of nets and permanent civil war (Koselleck), desired renewal of democracy may confront us formistical, new synthesis of thinking.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
202907
URI
Publication date:
2.6.2004.
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