![]() ![]() ![]() And we all know that there’s perhaps no subject more talked about in the history of art than Vincent Van Gogh cutting off his right ear. Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinical psychologist and the author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, made a connection between mood disorders and creativity. Ginsborg’s book demands that we be not just subjects but also agents of democracy.In 2009, a Hungarian researcher named Szabolcs Keri, in the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Budapest, stated that genetic polymorphisms related to mental disorders were more likely to be found among people with the highest creative thinking scores. Just as virtue is proved not by theoretical knowledge of the good but by good actions, says Mill, so too democracy, which we understand to be “virtue in its political guise", can be established only through regular practice at big and small levels. Ginsborg tries to present answers to these problems at a number of levels, and his book closes with a thrilling dialogue in which Mill and Marx are seen carrying on their running debate from “a cloud somewhere over Europe". The “classic liberal distinction between the political and economic spheres", of the kind maintained by Mill and today by his more determinedly ideological modern-day followers, can ignore serious issues about the relationship of democracy and economics. ![]() This not only makes a charade of democracy’s putative egalitarianism, it also makes it vulnerable to the Marxist critique of the state, which charges it with being the preserve of a particular class and of economic interests. ![]() Lastly, in many of the world’s mature democracies, politics and big money have joined hands, and election spending has spiralled to preposterous levels. This crisis was foreseen by thinkers such as Benjamin Constant, who wrote in 1819, “The danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily". The better-off classes are rich in comforts but often perceive themselves to be poor in time the logic of choice and self-interest, while beneficial in many ways, has produced “an extraordinary passivity and disinterest in politics". Second, consumer capitalism has profoundly affected the rhythms and emphases of our lives, which are increasingly organized on a work-and-spend axis. It is representative, but not participatory, when ideally it should be both. Thus, democracy has been “hollowed out" it is not vigorous, but operates on a kind of autopilot. But in many modern nation-states, politics and the political class have now become excessively professionalized at the same time, citizens have retreated into the private sphere, and are often involved in politics only to the extent of bemoaning its quality. First (and this is a kind of paradox), liberal democracy has its roots in 19th century European liberalism, which held that every adult citizen deserved, on the one hand, greater autonomy and private freedoms, and on the other, a right to vote and participate in representative government. In Ginsborg’s reading, democracy is being undermined by a complex of interrelated problems. ![]()
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