Andy Scerri

I have some reservations about this piece. First, the Abstract is too abstract to be useful. Second, sentences such as “Entangled political economy [EPE] sees the protection of liberalism from two perspectives” are problematic insofar as entangled po...

(2019). The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940. Socialism and Democracy. Ahead of Print.

Contemporary ‘crisis studies’ seek to advance democracy by emphasizing the threats that technocracy and populism pose to a specific form of it, liberal-democracy. Crisis studies argue that, since the 1970s, technocratic policymaking has deepened economic inequality. This has fostered citizenly anger, which populists exploit. Four well-known iterations of this argument are evaluated using a political realist lens. Political realism emphasizes the historical context of politics, actors’ possible motives, and a normative orientation derived from the political order itself, rather than an external ethico-moral ideal. The realist lens encourages comparison of crisis studies with historical political theory, which situates liberal-democracy within the long-term development of oligarchic systems of authority, and political history, which portrays technocracy as a product of the well-funded reaction to assertions of the democratic impulse that began in the 1970s. Populism is in this view not so much a perversion of liberal-democracy as it is a perhaps unintended consequence of anti-democratic reaction. The crisis studies make this error because based on a moral defence of the justice of the liberal-democratic order. Revealing the democratically unhelpful moralism at the core of crisis studies demonstrates the usefulness of political realism as a form of applied political theory, and not simply theory about theory.

(2019). The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization: A Manifesto for the Future. New Political Science. Ahead of Print.