Call for Papers - Ars Educandi 20 / 2024

Authoritarianism – do we ask the right questions?

Chaos, caused by successive global crises and the gradual weakening the previously dominant neoliberal institutions, seems to be the dominant feature of the modern world. The vacuum left by the decomposition of neoliberal hegemony is increasingly being occupied by authoritarian politics. This phenomenon occurs not only on the peripheries of the western world (Turkey, Hungary, Poland) or outside it (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia) but also in its centers (United States, Great Britain, France).

At the same time, and unlike in the 1930s, authoritarianism does not seem to be historically inevitable. The minimal (at least outside of the US) ideological involvement of citizens and the inability of authoritarian politicians to present themselves as people that have the best answers for the problems of the modern world, suggests that what we are experiencing might actually be a return to normal politics after more than two decades of post-political ossification. In this interpretation, authoritarianism would not be the dominant problem of modern politics but rather a symptom of our inability to find answers to the most important questions our societies face (the climate catastrophe, wars, and pandemics, growing economic inequality, etc.).

From an educational perspective, the question we would like to ask is: should we respond to the presence of authoritarian politics by employing the tools of critical analysis? The use of critical analysis was natural in the neoliberal era, when we were facing a hegemonic ideology. Today, when the hegemony broke down, a significant part of the population engages in some form of “criticism” or “hermeneutics of suspicion”. This tendency has a wide spectrum of manifestations – from questioning the legitimacy of the elites to anti-vaccine movements – and the progressive depletion of social trust that it causes may strengthen, rather than weaken the authoritarianism of today’s politics. On the other hand, the alternative to criticism – which might take the form of reflection and practice aiming to deal with the problems rather than their symptoms, carries the risk of ignoring the progress of authoritarian politics, of passively observing how it permeates the social fabric.

Our aim is to bring together research that will provide diverse perspectives concerning the current struggle with authoritarianism, but also the ambiguities and doubts concerning both the tools that should be used and the validity of the struggle itself.

Text submission deadline: June 30th 2024

Editors - Karolina Starego, PhD & Łukasz Stankiewicz PhD