KON_F_02 Narratives of Liberalism

Objective / Research Question

The current debate on populism is a debate on the principles of liberal democracies. In this context, it is easily forgotten that for a long time liberal and democratic claims were in conflict with each other. The great inventors of classic liberalism (James Madison, Benjamin Constant, and John Stuart Mill) saw in the establishment of a non-party authority based on reason and law a curative curtailment of the principle of popular sovereignty. To them, only within limits did the decision-making power of democratic majorities seem reconcilable with liberal demands. It was only after the Second World War that the model of liberal democracy asserted itself as an example that would be emulated worldwide. Today, the two tendencies are moving apart again.

The most important element that connects liberal and democratic principles is the representative system of modern states governed by the rule of law. Representation as action by the few on behalf of the many is, however, not just a political mechanism. It implies questions of social stratification and collective impact modelling, as well as the cognitive management and communicative control of complexity. In addition, it can only then be justified successfully in the long term if it is based on narratives of inclusion and if it promises a future for everyone. The project devotes itself primarily to these narrative and – in the further sense – cultural operating conditions of liberal systems of government from a macro-perspective that reaches beyond the (Western) European horizon. It aims to make a historically substantial contribution to understanding better the current crisis of acceptance. Through the research work conducted in the project, narratological methods – that is to say, methods for understanding social dynamics derived from literary studies – will be put to use. Current diagnoses regarding the crisis of liberal democracy will be placed in a broader historical context, but their drama also relativized as a consequence. The question of how narrativized self-perceptions and perceptions of society correlate with empirically measurable social data offers inroads for a subsequent further methodological development of the project design. Of interest here is, above all, the degree of power of collectively valid narratives as it will by no means be possible to assume a simple convergence.