Where is democracy headed?
The breakdown of the democracy-republic link in the neoliberal era
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14295/2764-4979-RC_CR.2026.v6.188Keywords:
Politics, Modernity, Republic, Authoritarianism, DesubstantiationAbstract
The central argument rests on the republican content of the modern bourgeois state, based on two sections. In the first section, we will try to explain why we define the current crisis not as a crisis of democracy or liberal democracy in general, or as a rupture with liberal democracy, but rather as the breaking of the link between the claim to be a republic and democratic institutions and procedures, the purging of democracy of its republican content—in other words, the "desubstantiation of democracy." In the second part, we will draw attention to how the class and political dynamics that led to the identification of the idea of the State with a republican democratic institution within the historical development of capitalism have been radically transformed since the 1970s under the influence of neoliberal policies aimed at the historical gains of labor against capital, and we will argue that this world-historical shift is behind the current desubstantiation of democracy.
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