New book: Habermas and the Crisis of Democracy

Habermas and the Crisis of Democracy

Interviews with Leading Thinkers

Ed. by Emilie Prattico

(London: Routledge, June 2022)

220 pages

Table of contents 

Foreword [Preview], by Jürgen Habermas

Introduction, by Emilie Prattico 

1. Can some basic rights and liberties be given up to safeguard democracy? (With an interview with Hauke Brunkhorst)

2. How does actual deliberation confer legitimacy to democratic decisions? (With an interview with Cristina Lafont)

3. Why is "fake news" a crisis of democracy? (With an interview with Michael Lynch)

4. How can we build a public sphere together and share it in a world characterized by divisiveness and tribalism? (With an interview with Barbara Fultner)

5. Can democracy survive without the voice of experts? (With an interview with Kenneth Baynes)

6. How dangerous are the current forms of authoritarianism we are seeing take hold all over the world? (With an interview with Maria Pia Lara)

7. What does the public sphere look like with new technologies? (With an interview with Gertrud Koch)

8. What duties do we owe descendants of slaves and how do we reckon with our antidemocratic and oppressive past? (With an interview with Lorenzo Simpson).

From Jürgen Habermas's foreword:

"Emilie Prattico has used the lens of a discourse-theoretic conception of deliberative democracy to engage eight prominent colleagues in stimulating interviews. They critically illuminate the various ways that a sound democratic regime depends upon the deliberative milieu of an inclusive public sphere. The deliberative conception of democracy directs our attention to recent trends that point to another structural transformation of the public sphere in the digital age. Given the demands that democratic opinion- and will-formation place upon a more or less well-functioning public sphere, the emergence of “new media” has been a mixed blessing. Indeed, certain aspects of social media communication signal a worrisome backslide toward a special kind of political regression." 

Emilie Prattico is Director of Strategy at BCG BrightHouse, Paris. She studied philosophy at the University of Oxford, and at Northwestern University, where she studied with Habermas. Since completing her doctoral work "Is Democracy Egalitarian or Epistemic? A Habermasian Perspective on Deliberative Democracy" (2013), she has focused her work on pushing for more ambitious climate action on the part of governments and companies. She co-author (with Edward Cameron) of the book "The New Corporate Climate Leadership" (Routledge, 2021).