Detailed Information on Publication Record
2024
People are born to struggle : Vladimír Čermák’s vision of democracy
BAROŠ, JiříBasic information
Original name
People are born to struggle : Vladimír Čermák’s vision of democracy
Authors
BAROŠ, Jiří (203 Czech Republic, guarantor, belonging to the institution)
Edition
Studies in East European Thought, Dordrecht, Springer, 2024, 0925-9392
Other information
Language
English
Type of outcome
Článek v odborném periodiku
Field of Study
60300 6.3 Philosophy, Ethics and Religion
Country of publisher
Netherlands
Confidentiality degree
není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství
References:
Impact factor
Impact factor: 0.200 in 2022
Organization unit
Faculty of Social Studies
UT WoS
000911236200001
Keywords in English
Agonism; Augustine; Consensus; Constitutional jurisprudence; Democracy; Political theory; Totalitarianism
Tags
International impact, Reviewed
Změněno: 6/6/2024 10:13, Mgr. Blanka Farkašová
Abstract
V originále
During the Czechoslovak normalization era (roughly from the 1970s to the 1980s), the Czech lawyer Vladimír Čermák, who later became a Justice of the newly established Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic after the breakdown of the Communist regime, authored a monumental piece called The Question of Democracy. Although this ambitious work has no equal in the Czech context, no attention has been paid to it in the English-speaking world. The present article aims to fill this gap by analyzing the most original aspects of Čermák’s political thought. First, I present Greek tragedy, Plato, and Augustine as the main influences on his thought, which was further shaped by Čermák’s experience with the First Czechoslovak Republic and the Communist era. Second, I show that the most important category permeating all of his intellectual project is the principle of polarity, combined with the concept of polémos as derived from Greek tragedy. Third, I focus on the consensually anchored value order of society, which is created through an interplay between positive and negative forces. Čermák’s idea that all law must be measured against the value order has deeply influenced the value-based jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. Finally, I position Čermák’s thought in the context of contemporary political theory, arguing that the contrast with the work of the radical political theorist Chantal Mouffe is particularly illuminating. Even though Čermák and Mouffe share a similar attitude to democracy—in that the primacy of strife renders universal rational consensus impossible—I maintain that Čermák’s theory, due to its emphasis on the categories of good and evil, can be more usefully described as “secular Augustinianism”.
Links
| GA19-11091S, research and development project |
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