Week 13—Making a home at the end of the world: Futures for progress

Week 13—Making a home at the end of the world: Futures for progress

Main reading: Honig (2013); Honig (2015)

One can argue that the idea of liberal democracy requires that a society operate with the assumption that the future is unwritten and that a group of citizens can through their deliberations direct the course of their future progress. In an era in which we confront the possibility of the end of the world almost daily, and after a history in which many communities and cultures have already experienced their own kinds of apocalyptic disasters, what would be the best way to make things better for ourselves and others? Is there another kind of progress we can pursue after the dream of modernity?

References

Honig, Bonnie. 2013. “The Politics of Public Things: Neoliberalism and the Routine of Privatization.” No Foundations 10: 59–76. http://nofoundations.com/issues/NoFo10HONIG.pdf.

———. 2015. “Public Things: Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and the Democratic Need.” Political Research Quarterly 68 (3): 623–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912915594464.