Constellations 

About: Constellations is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Democracy & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 1351-0487. Over the lifetime, 1148 publications have been published receiving 21441 citations.

Three normative models of democracy

Abstract: This chapter provides a proceduralist view of democracy and deliberative politics which differs in relevant aspects from both the liberal and the republican paradigm. It describes the opposite features of these two established models. The chapter introduces a new proceduralist conception by way of a critique of the "ethical overload" of the republican view. It further elaborates the three normative models of democracy by comparing their corresponding images of state and society. The normative models are republican model, liberal model, and proceduralist model. In contrast to the ethical constriction of political discourse, the concept of deliberative politics acquires empirical reference only when we take account of the multiplicity of communicative forms of rational political will-formation. According to the communitarian view, there is a necessary connection between the deliberative concept of democracy and the reference to a concrete, substantively integrated ethical community.

Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High–Speed Society

Abstract: In 1999, James Gleick, exploring everyday life in contemporary American society, noted the “acceleration of just about everything”: love, life, speech, politics, work, TV, leisure, etc. 1 With this observation he certainly is not alone. In popular as well as scientific discourse about the current evolution of Western societies, acceleration figures as the single most striking and important feature. 2 But although there is a noticeable increase in the discourse about acceleration and the shortage of time in recent years, the feeling that history, culture, society, or even ‘time itself’ in some strange way acceleratesis not new at all; it rather seems to be a constitutive trait of modernity as such. As historians like Reinhart Koselleck have persuasively argued, the general sense of a “speed-up” has accompanied modern society at least since the middle of the eighteenth century. 3 And indeed, as many have observed and empirical evidence clearly suggests, the history of modernity seems to be characterized by a wide-ranging speed-up of all kinds of technological, economic, social, and cultural processes and by a picking up of the general pace of life. In terms of its structural and cultural impact on modern society, this change in the temporal structures and patterns of modernity appears to be just as pervasive as the impact of comparable processes of individualization or rationalization. Just as with the latter, it seems, social acceleration is not a steady process but evolves in waves (most often brought about by new technologies or forms of socio-economic organization), with each new wave meeting considerable resistance as well as partial reversals. Most often, a wave of acceleration is followed by a rise in the ‘discourse of acceleration,’ in which cries for deceleration in the name of human needs and values are voiced but eventually die down. 4