Till van Rahden

To this day, the conceptual couple of majority and minority is viewed as a harmless way of identifying an arithmetic relationship to make sense of cultural differences. In his current work, Till van Rahden argues that a history of the binary juxtaposition between a majority and one or several minorities suggests that it is both a recent neologism and an essentially contested conceptual couple. Based on an analysis of sources in several European languages, van Rahden studies when, where, and why it became seemingly self-evident to neatly compartmentalize societies and their history into a majority and minorities. He argues that the idea of a dichotomy between majority and minority as a shorthand to describe relations between ethnic or religious groups is recent; in fact, it did not exist before 1919, when in the wake of World War I, four empires collapsed and the ideas of democracy and of the homogeneous nation-state triumphed simultaneously.

Everyone is talking about a crisis of democracy. Till van Rahden challenges the prevailing sense of despair. Instead of obsessing about how democracies die, it might be more useful to explore what keeps them alive. Democracy is not just a system of government, but a fragile way of life grounded in democratic manners and a democratic ethos. It is sustained and revived in democratic encounters and conflicts that allow for aesthetic experiences of freedom and equality.

We are all democrats now. Yet concerns over the future viability of democracy pervade scholarly and public controversies. To date, the humanities have contributed comparatively little to our understanding of democracy's fragile and contingent nature in the past and in the present. The focus of my research project is the democratic content of aesthetic forms, styles, and manners. Is it possible to identify which forms and styles stimulate, sustain and revive democracy as a way of life?