Monday, May 26, 2025, 6 pm
Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, nám. Jana Palacha 1, room 300
Liberal democracy is failing, and the symptoms of this sombre breakdown are abundant everywhere. There seems to be no way to politically tackle the most disturbing failures of capitalist modernity: corporations continue to wreck the ecosystem; the rich are pillaging the common wealth, piling up resources in tax havens; Big Tech is controlling more and more of our social reality; oligarchs enjoy a grip on power incompatible with democratic principles; right-wing populists disrupt liberal politics, dragging us closer and closer to fascism; structures of international cooperation – like the UN or the EU – are being challenged, weakened, or even dismantled; xenophobia, racism, and other prejudices are becoming more and more vocal; and in a depressing return of Realpolitik, bare physical violence asserts its supremacy in many places around the world. What is additionally troubling in this already quite dramatic situation is the almost complete lack of any critical examination of liberal democracy among those who believe themselves to belong to the critical and progressive milieu. This point seems to be absolutely off the agenda for the contemporary “radical” Left – its goals are all limited to injecting its own points into parliamentary politics, as if the latter represented the absolute end of political history.
During his lecture, going back to the historical origins of both democracy in antiquity and modern parliamentarism in the late 18th century, Jan Sowa is going to present his diagnosis of the reasons behind the contemporary crisis of democratic politics as well as some concrete propositions of democratic alternatives to parliamentary politics.
Jan Sowa (born 1976) is a materialist dialectical social theorist and researcher. He holds a PhD in sociology and a habilitation in cultural studies. His research and teaching assignments have taken him to various academic and non-academic institutions in Poland and abroad, including the University of São Paulo, Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne, and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Jan Sowa has edited and authored several books and published numerous articles in Poland and internationally (including in France, the United States, Mexico, the Czech Republic, and Canada). From 2005 to 2016, he worked at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, first as an Assistant Professor and later as an Associate Professor. Since 2018, he has been employed as an Associate Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
