Event Detail

Lecture II (The Decision in History) moves the focus to the historicity of decision-making: how do the narratives that structure our understanding of past and present use the moment of decision? What status or functionality do they assign to it? By means of a whistle-stop tour of decisional narratives drawn from areas of which I happen to be less ignorant, we examine the idea of the decision as an attribute of sovereignty in principal and practice, non-decisional understandings of sovereignty, and the rise of the modern idea of the states(wo)man was a ‘decision-maker’. We reflect on the need to discriminate between real and ostensible decision-making and on cases where an environment supersaturated with determinism can shrink the space for decision-making by focusing the political process on supposedly foreordained outcomes. The lecture closes with reflections on decision-making in our time. Has deciding become harder, and if so, why? What are the challenges facing today’s decision-makers and how do they seek to meet them? How different are decision-making processes in democratic/pluralist and authoritarian political cultures? How should we understand the impact of a predicament like global climate change on traditional decision-making practices? Have we got better at decision-making, or does the moment of decision rest on residual behaviours that are resistant to rationalization and progressive evolution?