Comments: Serdar Tekin (University Ege de Izmir).

Abstract

In this paper at issue is the nature of the democratic ethos or of the spirit of democracy. In a world where many more regimes describe themselves as democratic than there are truly democratic ones, the difference is perhaps best conceived not so much with reference to rules as with reference to the ethos underlying the institutions, civil society, the citizens. As we have learnt from Max Weber, capitalism in a generic sense, as a disposition to seek profit by occasional speculation, is quite different from an economic activity inspired by the "spirit of capitalism". Following this track, how can we characterize the "spirit of democracy"? The “culture of democracy” has long been investigated in modern political thought: the received tradition has focused on republican virtue, or the passion for the common good, on the passion for equality, and on the "passion for individualism" as the affective bases of a stable and flourishing democracy.

A novel dimension of the democratic ethos, explored in the paper, is the nexus of democracy and a public propensity or passion for "openness”. This term captures an attitude of receptiveness to novelty, of exploration of new possibilities for a life form, for a historical horizon, for a social configuration -- an attitude for which Popper's notion of the "open society" represents only a reductive and somehow misleading version. The opposite of this propensity to openness consists of a tendency to perceive the new as always potentially dangerous, subversive, disquieting or threatening, of a longing for continuity at all cost and for the certainty that nothing will change. Also in this case, our reflection implicitly concerns the distinction of left and right, progressivism and conservatism, and combines them with openness and closure. The success of neoliberalism is somehow connected with the nexus of democracy and openness: progressive political forces can more easily prevail over a conservatism of closure, but face severe difficulties when confronted with a conservatism which appropriates the suggestiveness of openness and portrays the left as a defensor of closure. No progressive evolution of democracy will take place, perhaps no successful defence against the present and ubiquitous de-democratizing trends either, unless the progressive forces regain their ability to tap that sense of openness which is crucial for democracy and was reflected so effectively in the Rooseveltian New Deal.

 

Bio

Alessandro Ferrara, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" and currently serving as President of the Italian Association for Political Philosophy, has graduated in Philosophy in Italy (1975) and later, as a Harkness Fellow, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley (1984). He has conducted post-doctoral research in Munich and Frankfurt with Jürgen Habermas as a Von Humboldt Fellow and later at Berkeley again, leading to the publication of his first book Modernity and Authenticity (1993).
He has been an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" between 1984 and 1998, then an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Parma between 1998 and 2002, and since 2002 is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata". Since 2007 he also teaches "Multiculturalism and Theories of Justice" at the Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan.

Since 1991 he has been a Director of the Yearly Conference on Philosophy and Social Science, initially part of the regular activities of the Interuniversity Centre of Dubrovnik, but since 1993 relocated in Prague, under the auspices of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Science and later of Charles University. Since 1990 he has been a founder and a Co-Director of the Seminario di Teoria Critica, which meets yearly in Gallarate, Italy. And since 2007 he is on the Executive Committee of the Istanbul Seminars on religion and politics, held at Bilgi University in Istanbul under the auspices of the Association Reset - Dialogues of Civilizations.
He serves as editorial consultant on the board of a number of journals including Constellations, Philosophy and Social Criticism and The European Journal of Philosophy, and on the Advisory Board of the series New Directions in Critical Theory at Columbia University Press.
He has taught and lectured in various capacities in a number of universities and institutions, including Harvard University, Columbia University, Rice University, Cardozo Law School, The New School for Social Research and the Universities of Berkeley, Madrid, Chicago, Potsdam, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Exeter, Manchester.

Selected publications:
• The Force of the Example. Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008.
• The Uses of Judgment, special issue of Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 34, 1-2, 2008.
• "'Political' Cosmopolitanism and Judgment", in European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 10, n. 1, 2007, pp. 491-504.
• "Europe as a special area for human hope", in Constellations, 14:3, 2007, pp. 315-331.
• "Religion und postsäkulare Vernünftigkeit", in Transit, vol. 31, 2006, pp. 5-25.

Seminar linked to Doctoral Programme "Democracy in the Twenty-first Century" the and the research groups Humanities, Migration and Peace Studies (NHUMEP) and Democracy, Citizenship and Law (DECIDe)