Epistemological Sources of the Crisis of Liberal Democracy. Two Arguments

Abstract

The starting point of the article is an attempt to describe the socio-economic changes that serve as the context in which the crisis of liberal democracy is currently discussed. In this article, the author puts forward the thesis that this crisis primarily concerns the narrative legitimising the system of liberal democracy. She points out that the reason for this situation is not so much the exhaustion of a language but the exhaustion of the formula describing the world at the epistemological level. The purpose of this analysis is to reconstruct two arguments that support this thesis. Firstly, it is the ambiguity of the notion of democracy and its self-reference indicated by Giorgio Agamben; secondly, it is the scope of the concept itself, or the inability to set its limits. The second argument is based on Bruno Latour’s concept of nature and his criticism of Plato’s allegory of the cave.