Why Is Democracy So Hard? University of California, Berkeley Memorial Lecture for Erik Olin Wright, January 2020*

Wendy Brown

Politics & Society, 2020, vol. 48, issue 4, 539-552

Abstract: This lecture reflects on the difficulties of democracy in Erik Olin Wright’s democratic socialist vision, one he elaborates in How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century and Envisioning Real Utopias. It rejects the notion that radical democratic projects in cities, workplaces, and cooperatives can simply be scaled up for purposes of national or postnational political rule. It reflects on selected requirements of democracy apart from democratic governing institutions and practices: from democratic political culture, to education and accountability, to handling globalized powers and problems such as finance, capital, and the climate crisis. The lecture concludes ambivalently, suggesting that democracy may be both necessary and impossible in realizing a politically free, socially just, and ecologically sustainable future.

Keywords: Wright; Tocqueville; Marx; democracy; democratic socialism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032329220962655 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:polsoc:v:48:y:2020:i:4:p:539-552

DOI: 10.1177/0032329220962655

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics & Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().