Can Democracy Recover?

Yaron Ezrahi (1940–2019) was an Israeli political theorist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Known for his work on the relations between modern science and the rise of the modern liberal democratic state, Ezrahi was a leading voice on Israeli politics and democracy on the Israeli and the international media. Dana Blander is a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and a clinical psychologist. Her Ph.D. dissertation, Ambivalence as a Challenge to the Political Order received the Berger Prize for 2008 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Blander is the co-author (with Itzhak Galnoor) of The Handbook of Israel's Political System (Cambridge, 2018).

'Can liberal democracy reinvent and reimagine itself? Can it be rescued from populism and authoritarianism? In this highly original book, Yaron Ezrahi, one of Israel's leading political philosophers, argues that post-Enlightenment democracy was constructed using language and lenses borrowed from modern science. However, nowadays concepts such as "objectivity" and "fact" have lost their consensus among the public, and the outcomes and impacts of science itself are frequently regarded with apprehension. Hence, Ezrahi posits that the future of political freedom hinges on purely ethical decisions and on citizens' capacity to collectively imagine and embrace self-constructed truths.' Eyal Chowers, School of Political Science, Tel-Aviv University, Israel

• Preface Ruth HaCohen; Words from the author; Introduction; Part I. The Rise of Western Politics Following the Collapse of Monistic Medieval Cosmology: 1. Nature as the transcendental imaginary of modern secular society: preliminary considerations; 2. The rise of the western cosmological dualistic nature/culture imaginary from a comparative perspective; 3. Risks and innovations inherent in the unstable borderline between nature and culture; Part II. The Emergence of the Epistemological Constitution of Modern Democracy: 4. The imaginary of the modern voluntary individual as a democratic political agency; 5. Democratic political causality; 6. Objective public facts as political currency; 7. The visibility and accountability of political power; 8. Objectivity as a fictional limit of the political; Part III. The Dialectics of Objectification: Limiting Overt and Enhancing Hidden Politics: 9. The objectifying gaze of science and technology in the political context; 10. Economics as politics by other means; 11. The virtual objectification of the law; Part IV. The Erosion of the Epistemological Constitution of Modern Democracy: 12. The political disempowerment of the individual citizen; 13. The elusiveness of political causality; 14. The loss of self-evident public facts and the crisis of the common-sense conceptions of reality; 15. The decay of the epistemological norm of political visibility and accountability; 16. The fall of objectivity and objectification; Part V. Democracy Beyond Modernity: Can a Self-Fulfilling Democracy be Imagined in our Time?: 17. Early modernizers of politics; 18. Critics of modern democracy; Concluding reflections; Epilogue: 'Depth skepticism' and the roots of democratic crisis Dana Blander.