070148 VO Further Historical Approaches - Lectures Series "History of Democracy" (2024W)

Contemporary democracy is ‘under stress’ (Wolfgang Merkel). In order to overcome this crisis, historians are repeatedly called upon in the hope of being able to draw orientation and legitimacy from history. And so the crisis of democracy is currently leading to a boom in the history of democracy. This new history of democracy always emphasises that it is not about writing a teleological success story, but rather that the plurality of historical understandings and projects of democracy deserve interest. Nevertheless, this does not change the fact that the history of political participation is all too often focussed on the democracy of our present. As a result, it can either appear and become understandable as the prehistory of this project - or not at all. With such a narrow focus, however, the history of democracy gives away the potential to recognise the different nature of past projects of freedom and equality.

Although there are no ready-made answers here, there are certainly initial approaches: The history of democracy could, for example, be practised as a ‘recursive historiography’, as proposed by Caroline Arni and Simon Teuscher following debates in (historical) anthropology: ‘What do we see when we [...] confront the present with questions that can be formulated on the basis of a recursive movement, i.e. via the diversions of the past?’ (C. Arni, S. Teuscher, Symmetrische Anthropologie, symmetrische Geschichte, in: Historische Anthropologie 28 (2020), 5-8, 5). Recursive should mean a perspective in which the alterity of past projects of freedom, equality and political participation is first explored before critically questioning contemporary democracy as a potential post-history from this position.

The lecture series therefore centres on the attempt to establish a recursive perspective in the history of democracy. Each lecture unit is based on a specific spatio-temporally localised event and is divided into three parts: In the first part, the concrete event is presented and contextualised in order to then, secondly, highlight a general problem of democracy from the contextualised material. In the third part, in the sense of a recursive approach, critical questions for contemporary democracy are developed from the examination of the historical material.