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Why is Associative Democracy still a ‘realist utopia’ even in the light of recent poly-crises?1
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Filosofie & Praktijk, Volume 45, Issue 2, jul. 2024, p. 133 - 146
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- 01 jul. 2024
Samenvatting
Defenders of Associative Democracy (AD) have presented ways to supplement and improve representative democracy but also alternatives to statist socialism and neo-liberal capitalism. In this article I focus on crises of representative democracies by explaining what makes AD an attractive realist utopia also compared with broader theories of civil society and governance: its combination of economic, societal and political democracy; its focus on democratic institutional pluralism in all these regards; its considered moral/political minimalism, and its practical experimentalism. Then I summarize some of the important economic, societal and political changes during the last decennia – particularly the consequences of the Crisis of Financial Capitalism – and the recent, urgent ‘poly-crises’ that seem to make AD plainly utopian again. I finish this article with a brief sketch of rethinking basic principles of democratic socialism and of what we could learn from socialist traditions. A second article (forthcoming in the next issue) discusses institutional proposals for realist democratic socialisms.