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Title

Defending democracy against neo-liberalism: process philosophy, democracy and the environment

Author(s)

Gare, Arran

Abstract

The growing appreciation of the global environmental crisis has generated what should have been a predictable response: those with power are using it to appropriate for themselves the world’s diminishing resources, augmenting their power to do so while further undermining the power of the weak to oppose them. In taking this path, they are at the same time blocking efforts to create forms of society that would be ecologically sustainable. If there is one word that could bring into focus what is wrong with this response it is ‘democracy’. Democracy means power in the hands of the people, which, by definition, means opposition to the concentration of power. It is inconceivable that if we had genuine democracy, where people were fully informed of the issues, they would not choose to share the burdens of scarcity and organize to live in accordance with the limits of their environment. Yet the notion of democracy is problematic. Those striving to concentrate power are pursuing this in the name of democracy. They have identified democracy with the imposition of free markets and the freedom of people to use their wealth to dominate others. In this paper I will show how process philosophy provides the basis for justifying and further developing the traditional notion of democracy to counter this reformed notion, providing a vision of a democratic form of society that could address environmental problems. To achieve this, I will argue, it is necessary to reformulate the grand narrative of civilization on the basis of human ecology, a science which, construing humans as participants in a creative nature, can replace economics as the master science for formulating public policy.

Publication type

Journal article

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Life and Social Sciences

Source

Concrescence: the Australasian journal of process thought, Vol. 5 (June 2004), pp. 1-21

Publication year

2004

Keyword(s)

Environment;  Democracy;  Neo-liberalism;  Neo-conservativism;  Liberal fascism;  Economics;  Freedom;  Culture;  Hobbes;  Castoriadis;  Montesquieu;  Fichte;  Schelling;  Herder;  Hegel;  John Stuart Mill;  Grand narrative;  Human ecology

Publisher

Australasian Association for Process Thought

ISSN

1445-4297

Publisher URL

http://concrescence.org

Copyright

Copyright © 2004 Arran Gare. Published version of article reproduced here with the permission of the journal.

Full text

Peer reviewed