Democracy, who really governs?

We pronounce the word democracy almost every day. Yet do we still know what it covers?

Going back to Athenian democracy, Barbara Stiegler and Christophe Pébarthe will trace the great transformations of the democratic idea up to our contemporary democracies. Classical liberalism, neoliberalism, ultraliberalism, libertarianism, social-liberalism… so many political traditions that we often mention without always understanding what distinguishes them, nor the different conceptions of democracy they carry.

This point of view is not self-evident. Since Plato, a large part of philosophy has been suspicious of democracy, often reduced to the reign of opinion, doxa. History, for its part, generally tends to describe rather than take sides.

Barbara Stiegler and Christophe Pébarthe propose here to interrogate democracy from a resolutely democratic perspective.

True to the spirit of Le Banquet, this encounter will take the form of a three-voice conference: that of the philosopher, that of the historian… and that of the audience. Through several moments of exchange, everyone will be invited to take part in the reflection, in a spirit of discussion, deliberation and shared thought.