Democracy as a Genre: Comparative Imaginaries Facing the Crisis

Abstract

Abstract This essay argues that democracy should be understood not simply as a constitutional order or a political regime but as a narrative mode of collective self-understanding. As a cultural form, democracy organises historical experience, articulates political temporality and renders plurality meaningful. Because democratic societies continually narrate themselves, these practices gradually stabilise into recognisable genres through which political imagination is historically mediated. The inquiry begins from a paradox: contemporary democratic life appears inseparable from an enduring discourse of crisis. Rather than focusing on the causes of democratic instability, the article investigates why democratic societies consistently interpret their political experience through the language of crisis and whether this recurrence discloses a deeper affinity between the two concepts. The argument develops along three interconnected lines. First, it reconstructs the shared genealogy of democracy and crisis, by tracing both concepts to the vocabulary of the Greek polis and examining their parallel secularisation in modernity. Second, it explains how the disappearance of embodied sovereignty establishes narrative as the principal mode of democratic mediation. Third, it contends that constitutional cultures inhabit historical time according to distinct temporal logics, which generate different genres through which democratic uncertainty and crisis become intelligible. The essay concludes that the contemporary crisis of democracy cannot be reduced to institutional dysfunction or constitutional decline. At a deeper level, it concerns the erosion of the narrative genres through which democratic societies have historically interpreted themselves and imagined their political futures.