Lecture - Narrative Democracy. Notes on the failure of Chile's constitutional process
- Date
- Wednesday 12 March 2025
- Time
- Address
- Academy Building Rapenburg
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden - Room
- Faculty Club
Abstract
Democracies today are facing an intensifying wave of political polarization over the principles and values that should organize social life. This deepening division unfolds amid multiple, interconnected global crises: from widening economic inequality and rising authoritarianism to accelerating ecological degradation and chronic war violence. In this climate, public and intellectual discourse is saturated with doomsday crisis narratives, many of which portray democracy as degenerating fast and dying before our own eyes.
This lecture proposes to shift the focus away from the prevailing narratives of democratic crisis to a less visible yet equally urgent phenomenon: the crisis of the democratic narrative itself. What is the value of narratives in democracy? Which stories have the power to become shared or polarizing narratives? What happens when the democratic narrative loses its audience, can no longer finds a space to be heard, or is weaponized against the very ideals of democratic life? To explore these questions, this lecture examines the puzzling experience of the failed Chilean constituent process and the stories that circulated about its democratic worth and purpose as a shared project of society. Drawing on this case, it invites a reconsideration of democracy as a narrative achievement. A narrative democracy does not call for societies to construct a single, unifying “good story” about themselves. Instead, it recognizes that addressing the crises and deep divisions that tear our worlds apart depends on the capacity to tell, hear, and confront diverse stories. The very survival of democracy requires challenging the narratives that threaten its demise, as well as making space for stories that contribute to repair the damaged fabric of our shared social worlds.
Speaker
Rodrigo Cordero is Professor of Sociology at Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. He is currently the Chile Visiting Chair at the University of Leiden. Previously, he has been a visiting scholar at the New School for Social Research, New York, and Birkbeck College, London, and distinguished as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His research is located at the intersection of critical theory, sociolegal studies, and political sociology, with a thematic focus on social crises and normative conflicts, relations between neoliberalism and law, legal imaginaries and juridical cultures, and the sociology of democracy and constitutions. He is the author of Crisis and Critique: On the Fragile Foundations of Social Life and La Fuerza de los Conceptos.
Programme
15.30 Welcome with coffee and tea
16.00 Talk followed by Q&A
17.30 Drinks
18.30 Closure
Registration
Everyone is welcome, but please register via this link.