Professor John Keane lecture at SWPS University in Warsaw
In his lecture on “How Democracies Die, Fast and Slow” John proposes a different way of thinking about a basic question first posed by the skeptics and anti-democrats of the classical Greek world: why is it that the political form known as democracy is often so vulnerable to efforts by democrats and anti-democrats alike to destroy it? Pro. Keane notes that social scientists concerned with the subject of democide have typically relied upon two types of explanations: the death of democracy is either seen as a sudden cataclysm (as in a military coup d’état), or it is viewed as the result of numerous processes that unfold more gradually through protracted accumulations of high-level political grievances and knife-edged maneuverings.
The key thought of Prof. Keane’s lecture is that these “institutionalist” narrowly state-centered accounts of democide belong to the same paradigm, to a mode of thinking that is of declining relevance and incapable of grasping how democracies can be gradually destroyed by social deprivation and environmental ignorance and decay.
The argument is that democracy is a whole way of life whose delicate geo-social foundations are of prime explanatory importance. Democracy dies a slow-motion death not only when citizens suffer domestic violence, poor health care, religious and racial bigotry or daily shortages of food and housing. Democracies also destroy themselves when they give themselves over to a “great derangement” (The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable is a 2016 non-fiction book by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh), to the thoughtlessness that prevents them from seeing that extreme weather events, pestilences, and other environmental emergencies breed power grabs and that democracy will have no future unless its ideals and practices are rid of the deep-seated prejudice that “humans” live outside a “nature” whose dynamics are administratively controllable and commercially exploitable for the use and enjoyment of “the people.”
