@Olivier5,
Quote:Okay so which intellectual would you propose, which speaks authoratively of the crisis of western democracy?
You asked that of Old Europe and I expect he'll respond. But if you'd asked me...
First, I'm not at all sure I buy the proposition as you phrase it. I don't know what you mean, exactly. Perhaps the rise of far right parties? Or maybe the increasing gap between the very very wealthy and everyone else on the planet?
I'll presume you have the second in mind more than the first.
Obviously that gap is increasing. But I fail to see how the world wide left (if there even was such a thing) might have been prescient enough to perceive changes that have come about as a consequence of the information revolution, the destabilization of the middle east and Africa, or the evolution of finance entities, etc. And if they had been perceived, how the left might have set out to counter these events and forces in a manner equal to their magnitude and the incremental nature of each.
Twenty five years ago, I read an essay by Isaiah Berlin on what he saw as the emerging demise of the nation state as that arrangement of structures and power was being supplanted by international business entities and their arrangements of structures and power. But it was necessarily a rather abstract (if bright) description of trends and there was certainly no clear, bright lines in any of it.
And there aren't many clear, bright lines now either. And then there's the problem of romanticizing the past. My life has been far easier and more agreeable than was my father's. And unless things do go badly astray, my daughter's life will be much better than my father's though perhaps not better than mine. But it would seem foolish to imagine in a world as complex as ours that there will be an inevitable progression towards the better.
Assuming a world wide "crisis" for democracy as an evident axiom doesn't seem to me warrantable.
