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Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics in South Africa

Online ISBN:
9780520959866
Print ISBN:
9780520284227
Publisher:
University of California Press
Book

Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics in South Africa

Jason Hickel
Jason Hickel
London School of Economics
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Published:
25 February 2015
Online ISBN:
9780520959866
Print ISBN:
9780520284227
Publisher:
University of California Press

Abstract

This book explores how the values that underpin Western liberal democracy are contested and resisted in contemporary South Africa. During the 1980s, migrant workers from rural Zululand attempted to sabotage the revolution that was being led by the urban-based African National Congress (ANC), igniting a civil war that claimed thousands of lives. While the violence of that period has largely subsided, migrants continue to express discontent with the ANC government, which they articulate as a critique of liberal democracy itself. Migrants claim that democracy undermines the moral order that is crucial to good fortune and social reproduction in their rural homesteads—a fear that has heightened as neoliberalism renders family livelihoods ever more precarious. This antiliberal stance must be understood in the context of colonial governance in KwaZulu-Natal, which manipulated social differences between urban and rural areas. These differences continue to inform popular politics in the region today, particularly for migrant workers, who link their critique of democracy to a disapproval of the social forms that characterize contemporary urbanism. This study provides grist for a number of broader theoretical discussions. By paying attention to subaltern perspectives on democratization, it compels us to question common assumptions about the nature of liberal freedom and the forms of personhood that it seeks to produce. It also pushes us to rethink the social-scientific theories that seek to explain antiliberal politics, which rely on the very same assumptions that underpin the project of liberal democracy itself.

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