Abstract:
In the words of its author, “this book had no other ambition than to contribute to [a] democratic critique of democracy” (p. 224). This critique consists basically in labelling as “ambiguous”, “ambivalent”, “paradoxical” or even “ironical” most of the processes that have to do with “democracy and human rights to have become de organizing principles of a new international order” (p. 1). Guilhot traces a genealogy that encompasses several case studies on institutions, scientific theories and individual actors, in order to demonstrate that there has been a “transformation of the nature, the form and the function of emancipatory activism” which “corresponds to the migration of socially progressive repertoires of collective action (…) from social movements often opposing state institutions to the most dominant state institutions themselves” (pp. 3-4)...
