민주주의는 풍요 없이 계속될 수 있을까 －파국서사를 통해 민주주의 이미지 다시 읽기－ = Can Democracy Survive the State of Scarcity? －Rethinking Democracy through Catastrophic Narratives

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Modern democracy had its origin in the material abundance of Western European civilization, which had been developed and flourished through the discovery of New World, slave system, colonization and imperialism. In other words, the development of modern democracy had an inevitable connection with the development of modern capitalism. By expanding from commercial capitalism to industrial capitalism, and finally to financial and cognitive capitalism, modern capitalism has left the world no `frontier` whatsoever. Ecological devastation that modern capitalism has been accelerating makes possible the disappearance of environment itself, which modern capitalism has made its material foundation. This leads us to think about the collapse of modern capitalist civilization, on which modern democracy depends.
James Howard Kunstler`s World Made by Hand is a futuristic catastrophic narrative, in which the rational hypothesis of resource depletion, especially the question of peak-oil, plays a key role. Kunstler`s catastrophic narrative pushes us to consider the relationship between democracy and material abundance. In this post-oil world, modern democracy is not an essential political value but mere one political culture among many, e.g. socialist authoritarianism, theocratic authoritarianism, tyranny, etc. Kunstler speculate that democracy without material abundance necessarily has its own limitations.
Democracy viewed by catastrophic narratives is a limited democracy without material abundance. When democracy has been closely connected with material abundance made by capitalism, then it is hardly imaginable that the democracy would be still working smoothly without such abundance. One can see nowadays not a few examples of democratic variations and/or deteriorations under the global system of neoliberal capitalism. Politics in the world without material abundance could be not a democratic system but non-democratic systems that hinge on dominance of the powerful rich, which has been imagined by mainstream catastrophic narratives. By reading catastrophic narratives, it is urgent for us to think about the future of democracy. The question of scarcity and abundance is the key idea when one should think about when he/she considers the vague prospect of modern democracy. Democracy is not just a purely political, philosophical, and ethical matter. It is rather a material and economic matter that starts and ends with the problem of resources and its distribution.