Liberal articulations of the ‘Enlightenment’ in the Greek public sphere

Bibliographic Data

ID6085183
AuthorsYiannis Mylonas (0000-0001-5496-6714)
Year2017
Volume16
Issue2
Pages195-218
Publication date2017-05-18
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Language and Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1569-2159 • E-ISSN: 1569-9862
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/jlp.15022.myl
OpenAlexW2604592626
LanguageEN
References cited22

This study presents a scrutiny of ‘liberal’ discursive constructions of the ‘Enlightenment’ in the Greek public sphere. The study is based on the analysis of articles published in two news/lifestyle websites, ‘AthensVoice’ and ‘Protagon’, during the (ongoing), so-called, ‘Greek crisis’. Discourse theory, informed by critical discourse analysis, is deployed to analyze these discursive constructions. The analysis shows that Greece’s economic/social/political problems are constructed as symptoms that underline Greece’s fundamental deficit, which is the country’s alleged ‘lack of ‘Enlightenment’, as perceived by ‘liberal’ voices in Greece and elsewhere. The article concludes that such discourses are part of a biopolitical, disciplinary framework producing the object to be reformed by austerity: an ‘un-Enlightened’ ‘Greek character’, ‘guilty’ for ‘self-inflicting’ Greece’s crisis. This ‘reform of character’ envisioned by liberals in Greece and elsewhere, is supposed to emerge through the institutional advance of neoliberal restructuring processes that include austerity reforms, privatizations, and loss of labor and civic rights, conditions to foster the neoliberal, entrepreneurial, mobile and austere subject, to potentially meet the socio-political requirements of late capitalist growth

Austerity · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Liberalism · Neoliberalism (international relations · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Restructuring · Scrutiny · Sociology · Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Law

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