S05E08: Charles Tay­lor on Degen­er­a­tions and Regen­er­a­tions of Democracy

Why is democ­ra­cy prone to degen­er­a­tion, and how does this affect our con­ven­tion­al notions of democ­ra­cy itself? Do we usu­al­ly depend too much on a thin for­mal insti­tu­tion­al con­cep­tion of democ­ra­cy focused on elec­toral rou­tines, and thus, neglect broad­er ques­tions of class, cul­ture, equal­i­ty, and sol­i­dar­i­ty? How can we reimag­ine and also regen­er­ate pro­gres­sive democ­ra­cy with the right bal­ance of free­dom, equal­i­ty, and sol­i­dar­i­ty on the local, nation­al, as well as supra­na­tion­al lev­els? And how can we over­come the per­va­sive sense of pow­er­less­ness in the face of abstract imper­son­al forces, forces that Charles Tay­lor refers to not only as opaque, but also as those sig­nalling the loss of cit­i­zen efficacy?

Guests fea­tured in this episode: 

Charles Tay­lor, one of the most pre­em­i­nent con­tem­po­rary philoso­phers of our times. He is Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus of Phi­los­o­phy at McGill Uni­ver­si­ty in Mon­tre­al. He was Fel­low of All Souls Col­lege and Pro­fes­sor of Social and Polit­i­cal The­o­ry at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty. His remark­ably vast oeu­vre includes land­mark mono­graphs on Hegel, social the­o­ry, reli­gion, lan­guage, and mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. Among his books let me men­tion Sources of the Self: The Mak­ing of Mod­ern Iden­ti­ty (1989), Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and the Pol­i­tics of Recog­ni­tion (1992), or A Sec­u­lar Age (2007) which have deci­sive­ly shaped con­tem­po­rary debates in their respec­tive fields. His lat­est book, co-authored with Craig Cal­houn and Dilip Gaonkar is called Degen­er­a­tions of Democracy.