Truth And Democracy

Author : Sophia Rosenfeld
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812250842
Total Pages : 221 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democracy and Truth written by Sophia Rosenfeld and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fake news," wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies—citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way. The problem may be novel in some of its details—including the role of today's political leaders, along with broadcast and digital media, in intensifying the epistemic anarchy—but the challenge of determining truth in a democratic world has a backstory. In this lively and illuminating book, historian Sophia Rosenfeld explores a longstanding and largely unspoken tension at the heart of democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite made up of trusted experts. What we are witnessing now is the unraveling of the détente between these competing aspects of democratic culture. In four bracing chapters, Rosenfeld substantiates her claim by tracing the history of the vexed relationship between democracy and truth. She begins with an examination of the period prior to the eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions, where she uncovers the political and epistemological foundations of our democratic world. Subsequent chapters move from the Enlightenment to the rise of both populist and technocratic notions of democracy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the troubling trends—including the collapse of social trust—that have led to the rise of our "post-truth" public life. Rosenfeld concludes by offering suggestions for how to defend the idea of truth against the forces that would undermine it.

Author : Jean-Luc Nancy
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 0823232441
Total Pages : 55 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Truth of Democracy written by Jean-Luc Nancy and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in a direct and accessible, almost manifesto-like style, The Truth of Democracy presents a forceful plea that we rethink democracy not as one political regime or form among others but as that which opens up the very experience of being in common. --Book Jacket.

Author : Johan Farkas
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000507289
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy written by Johan Farkas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-23 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western societies are under siege, as fake news, post-truth and alternative facts are undermining the very core of democracy. This dystopian narrative is currently circulated by intellectuals, journalists and policy makers worldwide. In this book, Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou deliver a comprehensive study of post-truth discourses. They critically map the normative ideas contained in these and present a forceful call for deepening democracy. The dominant narrative of our time is that democracy is in a state of emergency caused by social media, changes to journalism and misinformed masses. This crisis needs to be resolved by reinstating truth at the heart of democracy, even if this means curtailing civic participation and popular sovereignty. Engaging with critical political philosophy, Farkas and Schou argue that these solutions neglect the fact that democracy has never been about truth alone: it is equally about the voice of the democratic people. Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy delivers a sobering diagnosis of our times. It maps contemporary discourses on truth and democracy, foregrounds their normative foundations and connects these to historical changes within liberal democracies. The book will be of interest to students and scholars studying the current state and future of democracy, as well as to a politically informed readership.

Author : Jeremy Elkins
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812206223
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Truth and Democracy written by Jeremy Elkins and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political theorists Jeremy Elkins and Andrew Norris observe that American political culture is deeply ambivalent about truth. On the one hand, voices on both the left and right make confident appeals to the truth of claims about the status of the market in public life and the role of scientific evidence and argument in public life, human rights, and even religion. On the other hand, there is considerable anxiety that such appeals threaten individualism and political plurality. This anxiety, Elkins and Norris contend, has perhaps been greatest in the humanities and in political theory, where many have responded by either rejecting or neglecting the whole topic of truth. The essays in this volume question whether democratic politics requires discussion of truth and, if so, how truth should matter to democratic politics. While individual essays approach the subject from different angles, the volume as a whole suggests that the character of our politics depends in part on what kinds of truthful inquiries it promotes and how it deals with various kinds of disputes about truth. The contributors to the volume, including prominent political and legal theorists, philosophers, and intellectual historians, argue that these are important political and not merely theoretical questions.

Author : Serena Giusti
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000286738
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democracy and Fake News written by Serena Giusti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the challenges that disinformation, fake news, and post-truth politics pose to democracy from a multidisciplinary perspective. The authors analyse and interpret how the use of technology and social media as well as the emergence of new political narratives has been progressively changing the information landscape, undermining some of the pillars of democracy. The volume sheds light on some topical questions connected to fake news, thereby contributing to a fuller understanding of its impact on democracy. In the Introduction, the editors offer some orientating definitions of post-truth politics, building a theoretical framework where various different aspects of fake news can be understood. The book is then divided into three parts: Part I helps to contextualise the phenomena investigated, offering definitions and discussing key concepts as well as aspects linked to the manipulation of information systems, especially considering its reverberation on democracy. Part II considers the phenomena of disinformation, fake news, and post-truth politics in the context of Russia, which emerges as a laboratory where the phases of creation and diffusion of fake news can be broken down and analysed; consequently, Part II also reflects on the ways to counteract disinformation and fake news. Part III moves from case studies in Western and Central Europe to reflect on the methodological difficulty of investigating disinformation, as well as tackling the very delicate question of detection, combat, and prevention of fake news. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, law, political philosophy, journalism, media studies, and computer science, since it provides a multidisciplinary approach to the analysis of post-truth politics.

Author : Spoma Jovanovic
Publisher : University of Arkansas Press
ISBN 13 : 161075509X
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democracy, Dialogue, and Community Action written by Spoma Jovanovic and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On November 3, 1979, five protest marchers in Greensboro, North Carolina, were shot and killed by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. There were no police present, but television crews captured the shootings on video. Despite two criminal trials, none of the killers ever served time for their crimes, exposing what many believed to be the inadequacy of judicial, political, and economic systems in the United States. Twenty-five years later, in 2004, Greensboro residents, inspired by post-apartheid South Africa, initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to take public testimony and examine the causes, sequence of events, and consequences of the massacre. The TRC was to be a process and a tool by which citizens could feel confident about the truth of the city's history in order to reconcile divergent understandings of past and current city values, and it became the foundation for the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the United States. Spoma Jovanovic, who worked alongside other community members to document the grassroots effort to convene the first TRC in the United States, provides a resource and case study of how citizens in one community used their TRC as a way to understand the past and conceive the future. This book preserves the historical significance of a people's effort to seek truth and work for reconciliation, shows a variety of discourse models for other communities to use in seeking to redress past harms, and demonstrates the power of community action to promote participatory democracy.

Author : Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135189714
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Truth Commissions and Transitional Societies written by Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-01-05 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the increasing frequency of truth commissions, there has been little agreement as to their long-term impact on a state's political and social development. This book uses a multi-method approach to examine the impact of truth commissions on subsequent human rights protection and democratic practice. Providing the first cross-national analysis of the impact of truth commissions and presenting detailed analytical case studies on South Africa, El Salvador, Chile, and Uganda, author Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm examines how truth commission investigations and their final reports have shaped the respective societies. The author demonstrates that in the longer term, truth commissions have often had appreciable effects on human rights, but more limited impact in terms of democratic development. The book concludes by considering how future research can build upon these findings to provide policymakers with strong recommendations on whether and how a truth commission is likely to help fragile post-conflict societies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Transition Justice, Human Rights, Peace and Conflict Studies, Democratization Studies, International Law and International Relations.

Author : Nadia Urbinati
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674726383
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democracy Disfigured written by Nadia Urbinati and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Democracy Disfigured, Nadia Urbinati diagnoses the ills that beset the body politic in an age of hyper-partisanship and media monopolies and offers a spirited defense of the messy compromises and contentious outcomes that define democracy. Urbinati identifies three types of democratic disfiguration: the unpolitical, the populist, and the plebiscitarian. Each undermines a crucial division that a well-functioning democracy must preserve: the wall separating the free forum of public opinion from governmental institutions that enact the will of the people. Unpolitical democracy delegitimizes political opinion in favor of expertise. Populist democracy radically polarizes the public forum in which opinion is debated. And plebiscitary democracy overvalues the aesthetic and nonrational aspects of opinion. For Urbinati, democracy entails a permanent struggle to make visible the issues that citizens deem central to their lives. Opinion is thus a form of action as important as the mechanisms that organize votes and mobilize decisions. Urbinati focuses less on the overt enemies of democracy than on those who pose as its friends: technocrats wedded to procedure, demagogues who make glib appeals to "the people," and media operatives who, given their preference, would turn governance into a spectator sport and citizens into fans of opposing teams.

Author : Mark Christopher Navin
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 9783030434236
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democracy, Populism, and Truth written by Mark Christopher Navin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tackles questions related to democracy, populism and truth, with results that are sure to inform pressing academic and popular debates. It is common to describe many of today’s most energizing politicians and political movements as populist. Some are progressive advocates of greater economic democracy or individual rights, while others are recognizably authoritarian and anti-democratic, even while claiming to defend democracy. What all populist leaders share in common is a rhetorical approach: their ability to articulate, or at least profess to channel, the wishes of ‘the people’, a group that populist leaders claim a unique ability to understand and govern, especially with regard to their dissatisfaction with ruling elites. They decry corruption (although not necessarily with any sincerity), and they sometimes identify more mainstream politicians and bureaucrats as ‘enemies of the people.’ The rise of populist politics raises pressing questions about the nature of populism, but also about relationships between populism and democratic institutions. For example, is populism ever a democratic tendency, or does its invocation of a monolithic demos (‘the people’) signify a fundamentally anti-democratic worldview? Populist political rhetoric also raises concerns about the relationship between truth, democracy, and journalistic integrity. While the history of anti-democratic advocacy (famously illustrated by Plato) has often highlighted the tendency of a democratic style of politics to prioritize popularity over truth, the development of social media—and evolving norms of journalistic communication and public political discourse—raise these misgivings in new forms.

Author : Snjezana Priji Samarzija
Publisher : Mimesis
ISBN 13 : 9788869771255
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democracy and Truth written by Snjezana Priji Samarzija and published by Mimesis. This book was released on 2018-06-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is concerned with the recent discussions in social epistemology about epistemic justification of democracy. While standard approaches to epistemic justification of democracy base their thinking on the assumption that democratic legitimacy must be grounded on the production of epistemically high-quality decisions (true, truth-sensitive, truth-conductive, correct, justified, rational, epistemically responsible and so on), this assumption is often challenged by those who do not hold that epistemic justification is either necessary or conducive to democratic legitimacy or, on the other hand, those who accept the necessity of the epistemic justification of democracy but deem that it cannot be reduced to the production of true or justified decisions. Such reactions are highly influenced by a stance regarding the status of experts within the democratic decision-making process. The book offers both a unique perspective on this debate and registers the challenge of a new discipline of applied or real word epistemology.