A dialogical perspective of social representations of responsibility

Abstract

Discourse about responsibility has become a fashionable contemporary subject. Much of it, at least in the social sciences and humanities, is related to claims that in traditional democracies we can observe decreasing demands on taking individual and collective responsibilities. Instead, we witness an increase in, and magnified claims for, more and more rights for individuals and specific groups. Charles Taylor's (1995) analysis of this phenomenon has become classic, but many others have joined in. Rights mania has been viewed as a phenomenon of the twentieth century (e.g. Donahue 1990) continuing well to the present one; rights have become licenses of the media to make caricatures of whatever they like. Strong institutions have the power to judge and misrepresent the positions of their opponents. No wonder that balancing rights and responsibilities (Etzioni 1991, O'Neill 2002) has become an essential requirement of a civil society and democracy. © 2008 Springer.