The collapse of western bourgeois democracy. Why and what comes next?
The collapse of western bourgeois democracy. Why and what comes next? Toby Rogers I’m still chewing on this line from Giorgio Agamben’s book, Where are we now? The epidemic as politics (to read my earlier book review click here ). Agamben’s thesis, repeated throughout the book, is that: We are experiencing the end of an era in the political history of the West, the era of bourgeois democracy founded on constitutions, on rights, on parliaments, and on the division of powers. This model was already facing a crisis: constitutional principles were increasingly being ignored, and the executive power had almost entirely replaced the legislative by operating — as it now does exclusively — through legislative decrees [aka “executive orders”]. With the so-called pandemic, things went further: what American political analysts called the “Security State” — which was established in response to terrorism — has now given way to a health-based paradigm of governance that we term “biosecurity”. It
