Detailed Project Description

Democracy has been an important goal and widespread achievement throughout the modern era, but it has also sometimes been reversed, has often been subject to struggle, and is under stress and challenge today. 

Craig Calhoun's work has addressed popular struggles for public voice and democracy, the relationship of popular struggles to ‘republican’ projects of designing better laws and institutions, and the importance of social foundations for democracy. Most recently, with Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor, Craig Calhoun addressed the Degenerations of Democracy (link to where this appears under publications). This book focuses primarily on Europe and North America but in other work, he addresses global dimensions of democracy and related social transformations.

Recent Publications

• Degenerations of Democracy (2022)
• Degenerations of Democracy: Response to Comments (2023)

Works in Progress

• Good Elites? Insurgent subalterns are commonly blamed for ‘populism’ and other stresses on democracy. This obscures the role of manipulative, exploitative, and predatory elites. In collaboration with Dilip Gaonkar, this book explores republicanism and other traditions articulating norms for good elites and reasons why many formations of social elites are problematic. Special attention falls on the notions that ‘merit’ and expertise can justify elite privilege or domination.

• “Revolt against the Republic,” an analysis of efforts to disrupt the US electoral process and normative republican order in the name of direct expression of popular will, including the January 6th attack on the US Capitol.

Previous Publications (Selected)

Struggles for Democracy

• The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution.
• Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China. 
• Science, Democracy and the Politics of Identity
• Legacies of Radicalism: China’s Cultural Revolution and the Democracy Movement of 1989
• The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early 19th Century Social Movements.
• Occupy Wall Street in Perspective

Publics

• Habermas and the Public Sphere. 
• Social Theory and the Politics of Identity
• Civil Society and Public Sphere
• Critical Theory and the Public Sphere
• Nationalism and the Public Sphere
• Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics
• Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism and the Public Sphere
• The Democratic Integration of Europe: Interests, Identity, and the Public Sphere
• Information Technology and the International Public Sphere
• Media, Civil Society and the Rise of a Green Public Sphere
• Media, Power, and Protest in China: From Cultural Revolution to the Internet
• Citizenship, Secularism, and the Public Sphere
• The Public Sphere and the Field of Power
• Secularism, Citizenship and the Public Sphere
• The Problematic Public: Revisiting Dewey, Arendt, and Habermas

 Social Foundations

• Democracy, Autocracy and Intermediate Associations in Organizations: Flexibility or Un­restrained Change?
• Social Theory and the Law: Systems Theory, Normative Justification and Postmodernism
• Nationalism and Civil Society: Democracy, Diversity and Self-Determination
• The Elusive Ideal of Cosmopolitan Democracy
• Nationalism and the Cultures of Democracy
• Beyond Left and Right: A Cobbett for Our Times
• Religion, Government and the Public Good

Populism

• Populist Politics, Communications Media, and Large-Scale Social Integration
• Populism, Nationalism, and Brexit
• Populism and Democracy: The Long View