Response to Justin Buchler's review of <i>Attention Deficit Democracy: The Paradox of Civic Engagement</i>

Berger, Ben

doi:10.1017/s1537592712001569

Cited by 3 publications

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“…The fact remains that disengagement was a significant part of what universities "did". Berger, who has written extensively about engagement in a number of contexts (Berger 2011(Berger , 2015 ends up defending engagement, but it is a disengaged kind of engagement that still reinforces the disconnected way in which the University used to see itself.…”

Section: John Rawls Religion and Public Reason And The "In Between" S...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Public Justification and Civil Religion: Shared Values in a Divided Time

2023

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Civil religion as formulated in Robert Bellah’s seminal 1967 article, recalling Rousseau’s Social Contract, has recently been proposed to build shared values and bridge deep partisan divides. A competing approach to shared values, based on public reason, relies on overlapping consensus in the works of John Rawls. In this paper, we present an in-between strategy that recognizes the insuperable empirical and normative problems of civil religion while using university civic engagement programs to bring about a public square in which religious reasons are found alongside neutral ones, ultimately for the sake of public justification. Having documented recent polarization trends, we consider the last major attempt to defend civil religion from the perspective of democratic solidarity, Phil Gorski’s American Covenant, but believe it falls short: based on sociological work and Augustinian insights, we show the risk of domination that Gorski’s strategy still entails, not least because of the definitional indeterminacy of civil religion and its overlap with religious nationalism. Paradoxically, a late Rawlsian approach that allows for the initial use of religious reasons, with a generosity proviso of necessary translation into public reason at some point, can lead to a public square with more religious arguments than one theorized explicitly from the perspective of civil religion. This is especially important because, given the discussed polarization trends, universities have taken on an increasingly important civic engagement role even as some still rely on a civil religion approach. We insist on public justification in university civic engagement, and for the sake of doing so take as a starting point Ben Berger’s work in favoring civil engagement, which we define as combining moral, political, and social rather than exclusively political commitments. In proposing a novel university shared values mechanism, intended to expose learners to a maximum diversity of opinions and lived experiences, we offer a fresh approach to building trust in cohorts that increases the likelihood of true dialogue across difference.

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Section: John Rawls Religion and Public Reason And The "In Between" S...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Public Justification and Civil Religion: Shared Values in a Divided Time

2023

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“…Lebih tajam tajam lagi, Ben Berger (2011) berpendapat kualitas demokrasi tidak hanya melibatkan publik dalam berbagai kegiatan (public engagement) secara formal, namun publik harus memiliki kesadaran bahwa partisipasi mereka dalam proses penentuan kebijakan akan mempengaruhi kepentingan dan kondisinya di masa depan. Kondisi demokrasi di Indonesia masih jauh dari memadai 11 .…”

Section: Defisit Demokrasiunclassified

Grand Corruption dan Defisit Demokrasi: Studi Kasus KTP Elektronik

Waluyo¹

2016

j. inform. terpadu

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Korupsi sistemik dan endemik telah melanda Indonesia sejak lama. Bahkan, pasca reformasi 1998, proses demokratisasi tidak mampu menekan gejala korupsi. Penelitian ini berupaya menjawab pertanyaan penting, bagaimana dampak korupsi bagi efektivitas lembaga-lembaga demokrasi? Fenomena defisit demokrasi muncul di tengah merebaknya korupsi yang telah menggerus kepercayaan publik di berbagai sektor kehidupan masyarakat. Analisis liputan media dan data sekunder dilakukan untuk menyorot studi kasus korupsi KTP Elektronik bedasarkan tiga pendekatan utama: legal, institusional dan politikal. Hasil analisis perbandingan menunjukkan perlunya pendekatan yang lebih komprehensif untuk mengkaji akar masalah korupsi berskala besar (grand corruption). Penelitian ini menguji daya eksplanasi teori-teori sosiologi korupsi dalam menguraikan kasus aktual.

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“…However, Boltanski does not conceive of social reality in terms of "deep" structures such as the capitalist mode of production which "underlies" symbolic interaction. Boltanski's perspective puts less emphasis on the vertical axis of domination, the legitimizing of a deep societal structure such as capitalism by suppressing its "internal" objective contradictions, and more on the horizontal axis of suppressing the "external" threat of contingency.6 For more about the possibility of creating institutional facts through declarations see:(Searle, 1995).7 cf (Berger, 2009(Berger, , 2011(Cameron, 1972).9 See also:(Cahoone, 2019; Joas, 1997, p. 182;Mead, 2002).10 We do not wish to claim by this that the abstract "we" dictates the collective attitude, but rather that selfhood emerges from an experiential interaction of individuals and their mutual engagements (cf Loidolt, 2018;Zahavi, 2015)…”

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confidence: 99%

Contingency and Social Change: Collective Engagement in Conditions of Radical Uncertainty

Cvejić¹,

Ivković²,

Prodanović³

2022

J Theory Soc Behav

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This paper addresses the nexus between contingency, social engagement and change, through investigating the potential of severe ("disruptive") contingency to bring about new forms of joint agency. By challenging Boltanski's notion of existential tests (which can only be experienced in isolation), the paper argues that social actors can experience disruptive contingent events in an inherently intersubjective manner. Although they severely hinder social interaction, disruptive contingent events enable a possibility of what might be called "negative common knowledge" between social actors which in turn renders certain societal norms meaningless. This possibility is mediated through processes of mutual engagement (calls between actors) that could, further, be transformed into a new "norm circle" (Dave Elder-Vass). Social domination -in particular its "complex" variety -in this context appears as the obstructing of such transformation. A recent political episode in Serbia is analyzed to demonstrate the emancipatory potential of contingency and the logic of complex domination.

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Response to Justin Buchler's review of Attention Deficit Democracy: The Paradox of Civic Engagement

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Between Public Justification and Civil Religion: Shared Values in a Divided Time

Between Public Justification and Civil Religion: Shared Values in a Divided Time

Grand Corruption dan Defisit Demokrasi: Studi Kasus KTP Elektronik

Contingency and Social Change: Collective Engagement in Conditions of Radical Uncertainty

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