Can Democracy Recover?

The Roots of a Crisis

Yaron Ezrahi, Dana Blander

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009350914
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Words from the Author
• Introduction
• Part I The Rise of Western Politics following the Collapse of the Monistic Medieval Cosmology
• Part II The Emergence of the Epistemological Constitution of Modern Democracy
• Part III The Dialectics of Objectification: Limiting Overt and Enhancing Hidden Politics
• Part IV The Erosion of the Epistemological Constitution of Modern Democracy
• Part V Democracy beyond Modernity: Can a Self-Fulfilling Democracy Be Imagined in Our Time?
• Index