RETHINKING DEMOCRACY (reflections on John Dunn’s “Breaking democracy’s spell”)

This article analyzes a book “Breaking democracy’s spell”, the last work by John Dunn, world famous political scientist from Cambridge. Current discourse on democracy and tendencies of its development is seen through the lens of this book and John Dunn’s political thought. It is hard to question the fact that democracy is still one of the mightiest political symbols, although its core meaning still poses a lot of questions. Democracy is an unstable variable, which changes through time being influenced by multiple factors. This is why, before trying to understand where democracy’s mimicries are leading us, Dunn proposes to look closer at how it became a category which is so essential for legitimizing contemporary regimes. Is our understanding of democracy the same as it was 100, 50 or even 20 years ago? What determines the dynamics of democracy as a symbol of public power? Does democracy help nations in their quest for well being and effective government? Dunn’s work is not just an original analyses of democracy in political, sociological and historical perspectives, it is also a challenge to provoke a discussion on democracies failures both in developed and developing world. Dunn’s work divided scientific community on those who saw warning signs to democracy and those who considered author to be unjustified pessimist. In reality, Dunn’s work doesn’t give simple explanations because in relatively small text he managed to put complex set of questions, which can’t answered unequivocally. Author himself recognizes that he had to use absolutely new style to convey his thoughts. This article is an attempt to interpret Dunn’s ideas and react to his call to start a discussion on contents and perceptions of democracy which he sent to a political science community. This discourse is particularly important today for Russia where democracy not only encounters institutional difficulties and misunderstood by majority of the citizens, but where there are very few attempts to understand reasons of its failures not through the lens of political process but looking at its symbolic meanings. Democracy remains not only key political symbol of our age, which once started spreading from the United States and France where its antique experience had been revised, it is also a cognitive labyrinth in which one finds it difficult to orientate. That is why every attempt to understand the structure of the labyrinth is should not be neglected. This article will be of interest to students and scholars in political science, political sociology, political linguistics, history of political thought.

democracy, political development, legitimacy, power, representation, liberalism, liberty, civil society, political regime, dysfunctions of democracy

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