From Resentment to Resilience

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F67985955%3A_____%2F23%3A00577685" target="_blank" >RIV/67985955:_____/23:00577685 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

From Resentment to Resilience

Original language description

Democratic resilience scholarship (DRS) has long focused on the question of the role of political institutions in democratic backsliding or autocratization sequences. However, DRS tends to overlook what we might call the “phenomenology of democracy,” or how existing democracy and its operations are experienced and lived from the perspective of ordinary (i.e., non-elite) citizens. Many sociological and ethnographic research has pointed to the fact that the lived experience of democracy by ordinary citizens contains within it an awareness of the distance of politics from their everyday experience, of the actual inequality of political power or outright powerlessness, exclusion, disempowerment and the resentment that stems from it, which then becomes the source of political attitudes that threaten (not only) the liberal-democratic order. At the same time, others have pointed out that the awareness of the certain distance of ordinary citizens from political decision-making and the impossibility of participating effectively in it are inscribed in the very core of liberal democracy, and thus efforts to overcome them prove impossible within liberal democracy. In this situation, many theorists and policy experts are asking how to deal with this liberal-democratic paradox, legitimized by the rhetoric of equal share in political power, but which liberal democracy cannot fulfill. In response to this paradox, theorists seem to think in two ways. The first proposes to turn attention to ressentiment as the fundamental democratic experience of non-elite citizens and to ask whether it is possible to articulate this everyday experience in a way that distinguishes democratic ressentiment (i.e., ressentiment that turns to democratic institutions to fulfill their democratic potential) from non-democratic ressentiment that manifests itself in the form of exclusionary rhetoric of violence. The second path consists of – whether temporary or permanent – “extrapoliticism,” i.e., the renunciation of politics as such. This paper critiques both approaches and proposes a “therapeutic approach” leading to democratic resilience, which, while acknowledging the limits of liberal democracy, emphasizes democratic citizen activism as - among other things - a form of collective therapy that allows citizens to continue democratic participation in an imperfect world. This form of collective therapy can become a fundamental basis for increasing social resilience in the political sphere.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

O - Miscellaneous

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60301 - Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology

Project

<a href="/en/project/LX22NPO5101" target="_blank" >LX22NPO5101: The National Institute for Research on the Socioeconomic Impact of Diseases and Systemic Risks</a><br>

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2023

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů