The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins: A Study in the Theory of Multiple Modernities

Description

This original analysis of modern Greece’s political culture attempts to present a “total social fact”—a coherent and complex representation of Greek socio-political culture—to identify the cultural causes of Greece’s recent disastrous economic crisis. Using a culturalist frame inspired by the Yale Strong Program, Marangudakis argues that the core cultural orientations of Greece have determined its politics—Greek secular culture flows out of the religion of Eastern Orthodoxy with its mysticism, icons, and general “ortherworldly-nesses.” This theoretical discussion, bringing together Eisenstadt, Michael Mann, Banfield, and Taylor, is complemented by an innovative use of survey data, processed by political scientist and statistician Theodore Chadjipadelis. The carefully deployed quantitative data demonstrate that the culture previously described is actually shared by people living in Greece today. In his sweeping conclusion to this thorough cultural analysis, Marangudakis reflects on the prospects of Greek cultural recovery through the construction of a non-populist civil religion. Front Matter ....Pages i-xxx Front Matter ....Pages 1-1 An Analytic Model of Culture and Power (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 3-37 The Greek Self in Social Analysis (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 39-80 Clientelistic Social Structures and Cultural Orientations (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 81-108 Religion and Collective Representations of Communitas (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 109-152 Civil Religions of a Secular Communitas (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 153-164 The Metapolitefsis Civil Religion (1974–1989) (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 165-200 The Discourses of the Second Metapolitefsis and of the Deep Crisis (1989–2015) (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 201-252 Front Matter ....Pages 253-254 Data and Methods (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 255-260 Constitutive Goods (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 261-283 Internalized Code Orientations (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 285-299 The Patterned Orders of Ethics (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 301-316 The Ethics of the Collectivist Self and Conclusions of Part II (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 317-328 Front Matter ....Pages 329-333 Analysis of the ‘Democratic Self’ (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 335-366 Analysis of the ‘Democratic Relations’ (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 367-399 Civil-Liberal and Populist-Collectivist Democratic Institutions (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 401-417 The Semantic Map of the Greek Political Culture and Conclusions of Part III (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 419-425 Conclusions: Greek Political Culture and the Theory of Multiple Modernities (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 427-439 Back Matter ....Pages 441-460