ExcerptDemocracy of opinion? Television democracy? Market democracy? Whether one studies them in the context of the crisis or evaluates them in relation to the dynamic of postmodernism, the pathologies affecting contemporary democracies are attracting more and more attention. The general opinion is that these pathologies, far from being inherent to democracy itself, are the result of a corruption of its principles. The most superficial observers attribute this corruption to external factors or phenomena (hence the ritualistic denunciations of fundamentalism, populism, communitarianism, (...) globalization, etc.), which amounts to questioning solely the changes in morals and the transformation of society. Yet this confuses…. (shrink)

This article argues for the need to recover the concept of political myth in order to understand the crucial phenomena of our epoch. By drawing on Blumenberg’s philosophical reflections on myth, it proposes to understand political myth as the continual process of work on a common narrative by which the members of a social group can provide significance to their political conditions and experience. In order to show how this understanding of political myth can throw light on important aspects of (...) contemporary politics, the article analyses the work on one of the most conspicuous political myths of our time: the clash of civilizations. By reconstructing the mechanisms through which this myth works, the article shows how a paradigm that has been strongly criticized as too simplistic and scientifically inadequate could have turned into a successful political myth, i.e. into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (shrink)