Myth and Reality in Contemporary Democracies

Prof. Yaron Ezrahi is a professor of Political Science at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also a senior fellow emeritus at the Israel Democracy Institute.
Professor Ezrahi earned his doctorate in Political Science from Harvard University in 1972. He served as Director of the Advanced Program for the History and Sociology of the Sciences and as Chairman of the Academic Committee of the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History, Philosophy and Sociology of the Sciences at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a visiting professor at the universities of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Duke.
Professor Ezrahi also served as consultant to a variety of institutions, including the White House, the OECD, the Israel National Academy of Science and, more recently, the Carnegie Commission on Science and Government. In the context of Israeli policy, he has been active on a number of public issues such as, the Middle East Peace Process, the politization of Israel’s public and private television, and the state of Israel’s system of higher education.
Winner of the 1997 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Israel and Zionism, Professor Ezrahi has written and published extensively on the impact of modern science and technology on democratic governments and on the conduct of public affairs. His publications include: Israel Towards a Constitutional Democracy (with Mordechai Kremnitzer and with the assistance of Margit Cohen and Eytan Alimi, The Israel Democracy Institute, 2001 [Hebrew]); Rubber Bullets, Power and Conscience in Modern Israel  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997); Of Technology, Pessimism and Postmodernism, (co-edited with Everett Mendelsohn and Howard Siegal, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994); and The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Harvard University Press, 1990).

My presentation will elaborate on the thesis that the authority and effectiveness of the concepts of "democratic citizenship", like "representation" or "nationhood", as regulating collective political imagery is diminishing due to the increasing distance between the way we imagine or interpret democratic citizens' political behavior and the way we actually experience it. The historical changes in the way political systems are imagined redistributes resources of political legitimation and political structures. Studies of the slow, but comprehensive, transition from the "divine right of kings" to "popular sovereignty" as hegemonic, collective, political imagery and of their corresponding institutional structures are instructive. There is currently much evidence of a significant change that is occurring within the general category of democracy, from versions of deliberative democracy, which are the vestiges of Enlightenment, to very different contemporary versions. The vision of active, informed democratic citizenry is increasingly repudiated by the practices of a small, heterogeneous "community" of active and, often, informed citizens, like those who create and raise issues by means of popular Internet sites; and by a large mass of more passive citizen-observers whose civic energies are diffused by the impact of a constant barrage of political shows and rapidly shifting moods and by what often appears to be the influence of celebrities rather than of experts. I will also deal with Luc Boltansky's thesis about the impact of mass electronic visual communications on the connection between witnessing suffering and injustice and actively reacting to it, and their dissociation.

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