“I left Gabon in a wheelchair; I’ll come back on my two legs. People that have said I’m dead andMore…
All posts tagged electoral politics
An African Lysistrata in Togo
On Saturday 25 August in Lomé Togo, a group of female civil society activists from the organization Let’s Save TogoMore…
Occupy: Rediscovering the General Will in Hard Times
“Democracy,” wrote John Dewey, “is more than a form of government.”The image we are given of democracy is often reduced to administration, the implementation and management of the necessary, but the legitimacy of the state in democracies is inseparable from some notion of the general will. Democracy, as Rousseau argued, requires some process for the formation of the “general will,” by reference to which decision-making can be measured. The Occupy movement is an attempt to form the general will in new ways. As such, it is a potentially fundamental contribution to resolving the contemporary crisis of democracy.
Interpreting Occupy
The appearance of OWS has been a thrilling event and incipient movement. It has already shifted the terms of debate in national and electoral politics, even as it has stimulated intense intellectual excitement among academics. How do we (and might we) understand what it is, characterize what it portends, and engage it? My goal here is to wonder out loud about the relationship between this movement or event, and the inherited (or even recently minted) categories we use to interpret it, and so also about how we relate thought and action.
