Towards a new cosmopolitan social contract: social trends and political challenges
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Towards a new cosmopolitan social contract: social trends and political challenges Daniel Innerarity: Política para Perplexos. Lisboa: Porto Editora, 2019, 214pp, € 14,94, ISBN 978-972-0-03253-4 PB João Carlos Sousa1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Daniel Innerarity’s Politics for the Perplexed is a decisive contribution to the understanding of some of the dilemmas of contemporary societies, with particular relevance in the fields of politics, communication and technology, always anchored to their socio-cultural roots. Anchoring these axes of transformation to their respective socio-cultural roots, it seeks to deepen them in the melee of the Great Recession (cf. Innerarity 2016). Following an essayist style, it postulates uncertainty in contemporary societies, as a structuring element, seeking to understand the growing obsolescence of institutions and, above all, the inadequacy in the ways of doing politics. Innerarity’s central argument is to emphasize that societies have never before faced such uncertainty. This premise is premonitory in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, which revealed the imperative need for greater and better intra-state coordination and even in planning between different continents. Uncertainty is a sine qua non of the state of perplexity, since the perplexed citizen finds himself with an endless set of options, still without any guidance, which would guide him, at the institutional level. At the same time, Innerarity making use of its refined social and political sensibility, captures the contemporary “zeitgeist” with a unique capacity for synthesis and argumentative clarity in contemporary philosophy. The author stresses the need to improve the methods and techniques that the different scientific areas currently have at their disposal, in order to pursue a better and more shrewd capacity to carry out quality diagnoses and to overcome the current impasses, especially in the necessary reorganization, political and institutional, that economic globalization exposes. The work is organized into six major axes of argument, of which, the last two are clearly written in a proposal tone, revealing the cosmopolitan humanist in Daniel Innerarity.
* João Carlos Sousa Joao.carlos.sousa@iscte‑iul.pt 1
CIES, ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
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Metascience
The end of certainties is the result of opening up without limits what is possible in the social and political domain, expanding horizons beyond what was understood as impossible. In perplexed societies, politics has become an obsolete signalling field. In view of the conceptual rupture and the increase in unpredictability, there are two types of reactions: conservatives and innovators in political regulation and the state sphere. In this context, political options go through radical criticism, without an effective understanding of complexity by populists. On the other hand, there are the conformists who uncritically accept the “indisputable realities”. In this context, the debate in the public sphere is
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