Harvard University Press has accepted the manuscript of Jack Miller Center Fellow, Steven Bilakovics. Prof. Bilakovics is currently a JMC Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University where he is teaching a course on the American Founding and an upper division course entitled “The American Dream.” Excerpts from his forthcoming volume appear below:

Political Cynicism and the Democratic Way of Life

(Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2011)

Every government harbors within itself a natural flaw that seems
inextricably intertwined with the very principle of its existence
- Tocqueville

My project offers an explanation of the remarkable divergence between the status of democratic principles and the status of democratic political practices – of the paradoxical simultaneity of the enormous faith we place in the ideal of democracy and our near-total loss of faith in the actual political practice of democracy. On one hand we hear that democracy is triumphant, the recipient of near-universal acclaim and the sole remaining source of political legitimacy. This triumph is hardly surprising once we recognize that democracy is linked to most everything good in the world: peace, prosperity, human rights, freedom, equality, justice, deliberative reason, even ethical self-development. On the other hand our attitudes and beliefs regarding everyday democratic politics are characterized by a deeply ingrained – almost reflexive – cynicism. Three decades of the General Social Survey, for instance, attests to an utter loss of confidence and trust in the elected representatives and political institutions of liberal democracy. The same is true of our view of ourselves as participants in democratic politics; the only thing we have less confidence in than our politicians is ourselves as citizens. It seems an almost a priori contempt for all things political – an anti-political prejudice – has taken hold. Indeed, beyond the concept of corruption, politics is increasingly experienced as quite literally a theater of the absurd: a play full of trite, repetitive, clichéd, nonsensical jargon that obstructs authentic expression and meaningful communication. Today, we are reduced to “playing politics” in the electoral “silly season.”

We are left with the contradictory sense that democracy (or maybe better, democratization) is as inevitable as the political practice of democracy is impossible. We expect ever more from, but ever less of, democracy. A gap between principle and practice hardly requires explanation, but how can we account for this opposite movement – this simultaneous waxing of democratic ideals and waning of democratic political practices? How is it that democracy has taken on the characteristics of a utopia?

(continue reading)

Democracy as Self-Subverting
(Introduction)

More Than Kings Yet Less Than Men:
Tocqueville on Elevation and Degradation in the Democratic Imagination
(chapter 1)

Civilization Without the Discontents:
Tocqueville on Democracy as the Social State of Nature
(chapter 2)

The Regime of Revolution:
Claude Lefort on History, Nature, and Convention After the Democratic Revolution
(chapter 3)

Political Phoenix:
Sheldon Wolin on the Limits and Limitlessness of Democracy
(chapter 4)

Democratic Silence
(Conclusion)

Research

Tags: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democratic Theory, Harvard University Press, Jack Miller Center, Liberal democracy, Steven Bilakovics, Yale University

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