What relationship can there be between ethics and politics in the era that has seen the global triumph of the market and the effusions of the worldwide web, along with ecological collapse and the hyperbolic dream of the post-human? With the catastrophe created by the collision between the techno-economy and the biosphere already starting to unfold, the form of existence that survives in an immunised and closed world, with nothing outside, turns inward, prey to an overwhelming fear of anything external, dominated by an unprecedented exophobia, and unable to see beyond itself. These days it is easier to imagine becoming immortal than to envisage the end of capitalism.

Tracing the history of democracy and its interruptions from the beginning of the 20th to the beginning of the 21st century, the sociologist and historian Manuel Villaverde Cabral, researcher emeritus of the University of Lisbon, shows how Max Weber’s theoretical pessimism is still relevant in this political time which has seen a fragmentation of parties – the organisations on which ‘bourgeois democracy’ are founded – and the emergence of new populisms.

Taking as his starting point the common observation that representational democracies have collapsed, Yves Citton, professor of Literature and Media at Paris 8 University, co-director of the magazine Multitudes and author, among many other books and articles, of Médiaarchie and Pour une écologie de l 'attention, reflects on a system of power which is structured by the logic of media and from which, for instance, conspiracism is born.

It is worth looking at the past as closely as we look to the future. In his 1991 book The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Samuel P. Huntington (the American political scientist whose theories on changes in the world order and the clash of civilisations caused heated controversies) said that the Portuguese Revolution of 25 April, 1974 began the third wave of democratisation that hit the Soviet Union and the whole of Eastern Europe, and led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and which continued in Latin America and Africa.

This is an original, previously unpublished story, written for Electra. With published novels, short stories and non-fiction books, the author, Navtej Sarna, is a recognised Indian writer. His recent historical novel Crimson Spring has been acclaimed by critics. He is a regular columnist on literary and political matters. A prestigious diplomat, he has represented India in several countries, having been ambassador to the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel.

The series of articles that compose the ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra deal with the topic of excess. Since the criterion behind these thematic sections, treated according to a regime of essayistic discourse, is to highlight and navigate some territories that have gained prominence within the contemporary panorama, excess, in its ceaseless and wild manifestations in every domain of social, cultural and political life, is the quintessential contemporary topic, the rule under which we live.

André Tavares is an architect, author of books on architecture and coordinator of Dafne Editora. He was the general curator of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale on The Form of Form in 2016. He begins his article by stating that the old town centres of Lisbon and Porto are full of rubble and waste from demolition and restoration work. What should be a promise for the future actually shows that we are building poorly and for immediate profit on the basis of principles bereft of the old idea of heritage.

Almeida Faria’s literary oeuvre is made up of different genres and registers, sometimes in the same novel. This is the case of Paixão, the first book in his ‘Lusitanian Tetralogy’, which is almost a polyphonic novel in its complex development of different voices. This time, he has made an incursion into journalling at the invitation of the Electra. The journal that he wrote for this section of the magazine, called ‘Book of Hours’, begins on a triumphant day, 16th June, the Bloomsday that Joyce included in the calendar of modern European literature. Thus, this journal starts as a tribute to literary fiction, to its magnificent deeds (a tribute which continues in an evocation of an important name in European literature, a European writer par excellence, the German Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 118with whom Almeida Faria has a long-standing dialogue). Recording a few days’ stay in Munich, starting with the day of his departure from Lisbon and ending on his return, this journal is also a record of his distancing himself from national matters. In a way, this distancing, which consists of getting away (and by away we mean to a foreign country) and casting a critical, cosmopolitan, look inwards, isa mechanism common to the narrative work of Almeida Faria.

In this article, written shortly after the most recent elections in Italy, the Italian philosopher Dario Gentili, author, among other books, of Crisi come arte di governo, reflects on the election results, developing the argument that the crisis of democracy has a long history and that there is no necessary link between democracy and liberalism.

This interview with the philosopher Didier Eribon, focussing necessarily on his autobiographical book Retour à Reims [Returning to Reims], which had tremendous international resonance, shows the potentialities of a ‘critical thinking’ that crosses disciplines, disregarding their respective borders, and creates theoretical instruments for a political and sociological analysis and critique.