From Crisis to Crisis: Democracy, Crisis and the Occupy Movement

Abstract

For a movement that emerged to spotlight the crisis of liberal democracy, it did not take long for the Occupy Movement to find itself embroiled in its own democratic crisis. Occupy's story has exposed just how central or constitutive crises are to democracy. But is crisis such a deleterious thing? Though scholars of democracy have customarily given it a bad name, should we consider democracies to be in trouble when they are met with crisis, when they themselves create a crisis? According to the three volumes reviewed in this article, crises can have the potential to hamper and destroy democracies, but they can also possess the uncanny capacity to reinvigorate them. For scholars of democracy – whether they choose to define ‘democracy’ using a liberal, participatory, deliberative, or some other paradigm – it is perhaps this latter interpretation of crisis that may provide the best way to grapple with what comes next for democracy post-Occupy.