Abstract
The title of this chapter may sound paradoxical. On the one hand, it puts the emphasis on the concrete, personal, existential, ‘subjective’ components of a socio-political process, democratisation. It evokes the conviction that — to use a poem quoted by the anthropologist Victor Turner in a major study on the different meanings of the word ‘experience’ — ‘[i]f you have not lived through something, it is not true’.1 On the other hand, it purports to work towards an ‘objective’, theoretical framework.
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Notes
Victor Turner, On the Edge of the Bush (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1985), p. 225.
The concept is from Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), and Anamnesis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978).
See René Descartes, ‘Discourse on Method’, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
See Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981)
Charles de Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Paris: Flammarion, 1968).
See Franz Borkenau, End and Beginning: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origins of the West, edited by Richard Lowenthal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), and Henri Pirenne, Mohamed and Charlemagne (London: Allen, 1939). The Pirenne thesis has recently been reconfirmed: see Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe (London: Duckworth, 1983).
See Borkenau, End and Beginning; Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, Vols 1 and 2 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978–82);
idem, The Court Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983);
idem, ‘The Changing Balance of Power between the Sexes: A Process-Sociological Study: The Example of the Ancient Roman State’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 4, Nos 2–3 (1987), pp. 287–317;
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1986);
idem, The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage, 1986);
Lewis Mumford, The City in History (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961);
idem, Technics and Civilisation, 2nd edn (New York: Harcourt, 1963);
idem, Technics and Human Development, Vol. 1 of The Myth of the Machine (New York: Harcourt, 1967);
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1967);
Eric Voegelin, Order and History, 5 vols (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1956–87);
Max Weber, ‘Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions’ (Zwischenbetrachtung), and ‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions’ (Einleitung), in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber (London: Routledge, 1948);
idem, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976),
idem, Ancient Judaism (New York: Free Press, 1952);
idem, The Religion of China (New York: Free Press, 1951).
See A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
On the axial age, see Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953)
Lewis Mumford, The Transformations of Man (New York: Collier, 1956)
S.N. Eisenstadt (ed.) The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilisations (New York: State University of New York Press, 1986)
Béla Hamvas, Scientia Sacra (Budapest: Magveta, 1988).
For more detail, see Árpád Szakolczai, ‘In a Permanent State of Transition: Theorising the East European Condition’, EUI Working Paper SPS, No. 96/11 (Florence: 1996).
See Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960).
Not surprisingly, liberalism and Protestantism are often tightly connected. For a critique of this connection, see Michael Walzer, ‘Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology’, in S.N. Eisenstadt (ed.), The Protestant Ethic and Modernization: A Comparative View (New York: Basic Books, 1967). The identity of English liberalism and French Enlightenment is a central tenet of the current defenders of the ‘Enlightenment project’, while many of the most ardent liberals today are former Marxists.
The point has been made in detail in Ágnes Horváth and Árpád Szakolczai, The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary (London: Routledge, 1992), Chapter 8.
The idea of a totalitarian democracy, proposed by J.L. Talmon in his The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), is one-sided and ideological, dominated by a search for culpability.
See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930)
Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979)
Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977)
Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). In 1982 Foucault defined the techniques of self in the following way: they ‘permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’: Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (London: Tavistock, 1988), p. 18. The concept of ‘subjectification’ is again taken from Foucault, especially in the sense used in the last years of the lectures of the College de France, still not published in a written form.
For studies of the ‘subjective’ factor, see Yuri Glazov, To Be or Not to Be in the Party (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988)
Richard Sakwa, ‘Subjectivity, Politics and Order in Russian Political Evolution’, Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 4 (1995), pp. 943–64;
Árpád Szakolczai, ‘On the Exercise of Power in Modern Societies, East and West’, EUI Working Paper SPS, No. 92/22 (Florence, 1992).
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 1980/1976);
Alois Hahn, ‘Contribution à la sociologie de la confession et autres formes institutionnalisées d’aveu: autothématisation et processus de civilisation’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Nos 62–63 (1986), pp. 54–68;
Richard K. Fenn, The Persistence of Purgatory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
For an example, see Murray Kempton, ‘Notes from Underground’, New York Review of Books, Vol. 42, No. 12 (1995), p. 31.
In his recent work, Eisenstadt makes the point that Japan is the only major example of a non-axial civilisation: see S.N. Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilisation: A Comparative View (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London: Edward Arnold, 1924)
The term ‘residue’ is taken from Pareto: see Sociological Writings, edited by S.E. Finer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966)), but is used in a different sense.
The establishment of the institution of the Commune in the Italian city-states occurred at just about the time of the first Crusade (1095). Following the pioneering case of Pisa (about 1081–85), the formation of Communes suddenly intensified in the last decade of the eleventh century (Biandrate 1093, Asti 1095, Milan 1097, Arezzo 1098, Genoa 1099), followed by a number of other cases in the first half of the twelfth century: see Daniel Waley, Le città-repubblica dell’Italia medioevale (Milan: Mondadori, 1969), p. 61.
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Szakolczai, Á. (1999). Experiences of Democratisation. In: Sakwa, R. (eds) The Experience of Democratization in Eastern Europe. International Council for Central and East European Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14511-9_2
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