Reading Friedrich Hayek's late work as a neoliberal myth of the state of nature, this article finds neoliberalism's hostilities to democracy to be animated in part by a romantic demand for belonging. Hayek's theory of spontaneous order expresses this desire for belonging as it pretends the market is capable of harmonizing differences so long as the state is prevented from interfering. Approaching Hayek's work in this way helps to explain why his conceptions of both pluralism and democracy are so thin. It also suggests that neoliberalism's assaults upon democracy are intimately linked to its relentless extractivism. Yet the romantic elements in Hayek's work might have led him toward a more radical democratic project and ecological politics had he affirmed plurality for what it enables. I conclude with the suggestion that democratic theory can benefit from learning to listen to what Hayek heard but failed to affirm: nature's active voice.

Focusing on selected “Western” conceptions of democracy, we expose and normatively evaluate their conflictual meanings. We unpack the white democracy of prominent ordoliberal Wilhelm Röpke, which comprises an elitist bias against the demos, and we discuss different assessments of his 1964 apologia of Apartheid South Africa. Our critical-historical study of Röpke's marginalized meaning of democracy traces a neglected anti-democratic continuity in his work that is to be contextualized within wider elitist (neo)liberal discourses: from his critique of Nazism in the 1930s to the defense of Apartheid in the 1960s. We provide an alternative, marginalized meaning of democracy that draws on Marxist political science. Such a meaning of democracy helps explain why liberal democratic theory is ill-equipped to tackle anti-democratic tendencies re-emerging in liberal-democratic polities.

This article suggests that a “crisis of democracy” can be understood not simply as a deterioration of specific representative institutions but as a repositioning of democratic politics vis-à-vis other principles of social coordination, most notably the capitalist market, and the attendant decline of democratic subjectivity—people’s attunement to claims appealing to the common good. I trace this process to the post–World War II era. I show that the crisis of democracy was shaped by the substantive imperative of fusing democracy with free-market capitalism. Many postwar democratic theorists believed that the welfare state could manage the tension latent in this fusion. But an analysis of Friedrich Hayek’s theory of neoliberal democracy, which recognizes that tension more acutely, reveals that the incorporation of free-market capitalism creates tendencies that undermine democracy from within.

Solidarity is a fundamental concept in social sciences, explaining the motivation for collective action and understanding how social cohesion institutions are structured. Its conceptualization, however, is often taken for granted in solidarity economy literature. This article investigates its emergence in solidarity economy organizations and the transformation through practices and discourse in public policies. We conducted a qualitative single-case study of COOPERCENTRAL VR, a family farming cooperative center with 13 organizations in Brazil. In conclusion, we demonstrate the paths of solidarity in the construction of a new socioeconomic reality and the role of the relationship between civil society and governments in forming and maintaining this process. The organization is indicated as an essential factor in bonding subjects and society.

This article is concerned primarily with the relationship between academic ideas and the ‘real world’ of politics. Disciplinary histories often assume a one-way influence of ideas, that of the academy into political practice. This article reverses that relationship and explores the way in which real-world ideas about politics have the potential to influence the way in which the academy develops, and the kind of responses it might offer. The primary focus is upon England and the marketisation of higher education; it asks are we burning all our books? This article also raises broader questions about the relationship between academia and that which it observes, with specific reference to political science.

Drawing on a range of fieldwork interviews, this paper discusses the opposition of civil society to nonferrous metals mining in Guatemala. Guatemala’s mineral resources, and government efforts to encourage their extraction, are discussed, as is the emergent civil society of that nation. Guatemalan civil society has opposed mining due to the impacts of its environmental effects upon the poor engaged in subsistence agriculture. This opposition has involved protests, community consultations against mining, and networking with the forces of global civil society. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this opposition to mining is a manifestation of the opposition to neoliberalism currently underway in Latin America.

This article argues that democracy is on life support in the United States. Throughout the social order, the forces of predatory capitalism are on the march—dismantling the welfare state, corrupting politics with outside money, defunding higher education, expanding the corporate-surveillance-military state, widening inequalities in wealth and income, and waging a war on low income and poor minorities. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish—from higher education to health care centers—there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values, and the common good. This article argues that given this current crisis, educators, artists, intellectuals, youth, and workers need a new political and pedagogical language centered around the notion of radical democracy in order to address the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resources—financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological—to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control.

The article examines the recent emergence of ‘volunteering’ as a publicly significant notion and practice. Based on an extensive fieldwork in a prominent intermediary NGO in Israel, the article follows the efforts to promote and expand ‘volunteering’ pursued by the organization’s board and staff members. Affiliated with the privileged social strata of Ashkenazi (European) Jews, whose hegemonic position has been eroded during the neoliberal transformations in Israel, the NGO staff seek to retain their privileged status through a managerial activity in the field of ‘volunteering’. They promote a particular, liberally inspired construction of ‘volunteering’, while universalizing it as a professional, a-political and consensual realm. Inspired by critical studies of ‘whiteness’, the article describes how the privileged character of this managerial activity is being successfully obscured through the representation of ‘volunteering’ as an all-inclusive aspiration.

This study offers a first empirical test at a truly global level of two contradictory models of global civil society in the global governance system that are put forth by neo-Gramscian thought. The first model posits that global civil society is coopted by hegemonic capitalist and political elites, and promotes hegemonic interests by distributing neoliberal values and providing a façade of opposition. The second model views global civil society as the infrastructure from which counter-hegemonic resistance, and ultimately a counter-hegemonic historic bloc will evolve and challenge neoliberal hegemony. The predictions that these two views make as to the structure of global civil society networks are tested through network analysis of a matrix of links between 10,001 international NGOs in a purposive sample of INGOs extracted from the database of the Union of International Associations. The findings provide partial support to the predictions of both models, and lead to the conclusion that at present global civil society is in a transitional phase, but that the current infrastructure provided by the global INGOs network is conducive to the development of a counter-hegemonic historic bloc in the future, providing the northern bias in network is decreased. Strategic steps needed to achieve this are presented.

Australia, like many Western liberal democracies, has experienced an unprecedented shift toward market driven policy governance in the past decade, influenced heavily by the demands of globalization but also the dominance of conservative ideas of liberal democracy and market oriented neoliberalism. In this context nonprofit advocacy organizations (NPAOs) have not only been subject to criticism and a reduction in governmental support, but have had their legitimacy challenged and questioned. This paper responds to an audible, visible, and highly contestable critique of NPAOs by exploring their contemporary place and role in Australian democracy. This discussion relies on a review of some key ideas and theories of liberal democracy and an overview of the current Australian context in which NPAOs operate, particularly in regard to their participation in policy governance. A key observation about how integral NPAOs are to ensure an active and open democracy, challenges the current directions of Australian governance and suggests a need for reflection on what actually constitutes a fully functioning democracy that fits the demands of the twenty-first century.

This article examines what McKnight (2018) refers to as “progressive populism” and argues that the rise of progressive populism in contemporary western democratic societies is directly related to the emergence of neoliberal governance regimes and the rise of global corporate power. Utilizing insights from both scholarly literature and popular commentary it outlines the rising counter assault by global corporations and governments since the 1960s to reverse and impede the increase of democratic rights for previously marginalized sections of many western democratic societies. It is crucial not to dismiss the power of global corporations and the rise of neoliberalism at the expense of the collective security of societies as just another form of elitism attacked by ordinary people. Corporations want freedom from democracy by usurping capitalist economic systems. They represent a disfiguration of representative democratic principles that culminates in paradoxes of liberty that progressive populists are contesting.

Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the New Orleans, Louisiana metropolitan area in August 2005, made many United States citizens more aware of how their national government undertakes its humanitarian relief responsibilities. Many learned for the first time, for example, that the federal government is a secondary responder and attends to natural disasters only when states and localities request such support and assistance. That U.S. framework and the international relief implementation structure are remarkably similar. This paper compares and contrasts these two aid implementation approaches with an eye to clarifying their similarities and differences and to identifying how each might better be understood for the future to secure improved coordination and more effective outcomes.

For many recent commentators, the association of citizenship with the nation-state is under siege, as transnational and even global forms of citizenship begin to emerge. The nascent phenomenon of global citizenship in particular is characterized by three components: the global discourse on human rights; a global account of citizenly responsibilities; and finally “global civil society.” This last component is supposed to give a new global citizenship its “political” character, and for many represents the most likely vehicle for the emergence of a global, democratic citizen politics. This paper critically examines this view, asking whether a global form of citizenship is indeed emerging, and if so whether “global civil society” is well-equipped to stand in as its political dimension. The paper examines two opposed narratives on the potential of global civil society to form a political arm of global citizenship, before returning by way of conclusion to the vexed notion of global citizenship itself.

This paper calls attention to the problematic use of the concept of social innovation which remains undefined despite its proliferation throughout academic and policy discourses. Extant research has thus far failed to capture the socio-political contentions which surround social innovation. This paper therefore draws upon the work of Thomas Kuhn and conducts a paradigmatic analysis of the field of social innovation which identifies two emerging schools: one technocratic, the other democratic. The paper identifies some of the key thinkers in each paradigm and explains how the struggle between these two paradigms reveals itself to be part of a broader conflict between neoliberalism and it opponents and concludes by arguing that future research focused upon local contextualised struggles will reveal which paradigm is in the ascendancy.

Historically Irish society has had a long tradition of grass roots voluntary community work. However, with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, the Irish community and voluntary sector became increasingly subjected to government controls and restrictions. As a result, voluntary community work became more formally organised, centrally regulated and depoliticised. Such ‘organised voluntarism’ (Fye and Mulligan in Prog Hum Geogr 27:397–413, 2003) has since become part and parcel of contemporary community development initiatives in Ireland. While some UK research has explored the impact that this discursive and policy shift is having on volunteering, there is a dearth of Irish literature on this issue. This article presents an account of how and why this form of voluntarism took hold in contemporary Ireland. The establishment of Family Resource Centres in Ireland will be recalled and assessed to further illustrate the observations being made about organised voluntarism in Ireland.

After analyzing the tension between capitalism and liberal democracy, this article explores two ways that the political left has tried to navigate this tension. Both these strategies prevent parties of the left and the center-left from exposing capitalism's undemocratic implications, while also helping to discredit political democracy. Unable to unify working people and ordinary citizens against the suffering that capitalism inflicts on them, the left inadvertently makes it possible for the far right to channel people's discontent in ways that attack liberal democracy and turn working people against each other. Last but not least, the discrediting of democracy that results from these processes gives rise to a vicious cycle by also encouraging the adoption of neoliberal policies, which further intensify the subordination of democratically elected governments to capitalist interests.

This critical commentary discusses Stephan Lessenich's recent work on democracy. It argues that—to understand the structural boundaries of welfare capitalist democracy—we must critically unearth the limits of liberal democracy. This article first maintains that the absence of an economic democratization dimension is an outcome of liberal democracy's shrinking of the meaning of the political. It next claims that defining democracy in terms of rights does not duly consider how these unfolded historically and recently, nor clarifies their relation with negative freedom. The article then contends that the environmentally destructive dialectic of democracy and the belittlement of reproductive work stem from the constitution of a narrowly defined economic sphere, from which “reproductive activities” are excluded. Finally, the text reflects on what “democratizing democracy” should entail.