The Predicament Of Democracy
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| Author | : Sophia Rosenfeld |
| Publisher | : University of Pennsylvania Press |
| Total Pages | : 221 |
| Release | : 2018-12-31 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0812250842 |
"Fake news," wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies—citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way. The problem may be novel in some of its details—including the role of today's political leaders, along with broadcast and digital media, in intensifying the epistemic anarchy—but the challenge of determining truth in a democratic world has a backstory. In this lively and illuminating book, historian Sophia Rosenfeld explores a longstanding and largely unspoken tension at the heart of democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite made up of trusted experts. What we are witnessing now is the unraveling of the détente between these competing aspects of democratic culture. In four bracing chapters, Rosenfeld substantiates her claim by tracing the history of the vexed relationship between democracy and truth. She begins with an examination of the period prior to the eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions, where she uncovers the political and epistemological foundations of our democratic world. Subsequent chapters move from the Enlightenment to the rise of both populist and technocratic notions of democracy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the troubling trends—including the collapse of social trust—that have led to the rise of our "post-truth" public life. Rosenfeld concludes by offering suggestions for how to defend the idea of truth against the forces that would undermine it.
| Author | : Astra Taylor |
| Publisher | : Metropolitan Books |
| Total Pages | : 219 |
| Release | : 2019-05-07 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 1250179858 |
“A New Civil Rights Leader” explores what we mean when we speak of democracy and if democracy can truly ever exist (LA Times). There is no shortage of democracy, at least in name, and yet it is in crisis everywhere we look. From a cabal of plutocrats in the White House to gerrymandering and dark-money campaign contributions, it is clear that the principle of government by and for the people is not living up to its promise. The problems lie deeper than any one election cycle. As Astra Taylor demonstrates, real democracy—fully inclusive and completely egalitarian—has in fact never existed. In a tone that is both philosophical and anecdotal, weaving together history, theory, the stories of individuals, and interviews with such leading thinkers as Cornel West and Wendy Brown, Taylor invites us to reexamine the term. Is democracy a means or an end, a process or a set of desired outcomes? What if those outcomes, whatever they may be—peace, prosperity, equality, liberty, an engaged citizenry—can be achieved by non-democratic means? In what areas of life should democratic principles apply? If democracy means rule by the people, what does it mean to rule and who counts as the people? Democracy’s inherent paradoxes often go unnamed and unrecognized. Exploring such questions, Democracy May Not Exist offers a better understanding of what is possible, what we want, why democracy is so hard to realize, and why it is worth striving for. “Astra Taylor will change how you think about democracy. . . . She unpacks it, wrestles with it, with the question of who gets included and how, and excavates the invisible assumptions that have been bred into our idea of democracy.” —Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show “An impressive contribution. . . . Taylor sets out to impart some coherence and substance to the term in order to rescue it from ignorance and obfuscation and displays considerable intellectual nimbleness.” —Randall Kennedy, The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent, paradigm-shifting . . . Taylor’s deep and wide examination of democratic movements, conversations, and grassroots institutions makes the reader feel . . . democracy as pleasure of thinking and acting.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books
| Author | : Pratap Bhanu Mehta |
| Publisher | : Penguin Random House India Private Limited |
| Total Pages | : 100 |
| Release | : 2017-09-30 |
| Genre | : Literary Collections |
| ISBN | : 9387326446 |
After nearly seven decades of its existence, there is a pervasive feeling that India's democracy is in crisis. But what is the nature of this threat? In this essay, republished now with a new foreword from the author, Pratap Bhanu Mehtareminds us what a bold experiment bringing democracy to a largely illiterate and unpropertied India was. He argues that the sphere of politics has truly created opportunities for people to participate in society. Looking at various facts, he also finds that persistent social inequality on the one hand and a mistaken view of the state's proper function and organization on the other have modified and hindered the workings of democracy and its effects in innumerable ways. Posting the quest for self-respect as democracy's deepest aspiration, this essay explores how inequality and the crisis of accountability have together impeded collective action to achieve such an end. To recover this sense of moral well-being and responsibility, Mehta suggests, is the core of the democratic challenge before us. Optimistic, lively and closely argued, The Burden of Democracy offers a new ideological imagination that throws light on our discontents. By returning to the basics of democracy it serves to illuminate our predicament, even while perceiving the broad contours for change.
| Author | : David Litt |
| Publisher | : HarperCollins |
| Total Pages | : 473 |
| Release | : 2020-06-16 |
| Genre | : Humor |
| ISBN | : 0062879383 |
New York Times–Bestselling Author: “Brings Dave Barry-style humor to an illuminating book on what is wrong with American democracy—and how to put it right.” —The Washington Post The democracy you live in today is different—completely different—from the democracy you were born into. You probably don't realize just how radically your republic has been altered during your lifetime. Yet more than any policy issue, political trend, or even Donald Trump himself, our redesigned system of government is responsible for the peril America faces today. What explains the gap between what We, the People want and what our elected leaders do? How can we fix our politics before it's too late? And how can we truly understand the state of our democracy without wanting to crawl under a rock? That’s what former Obama speechwriter David Litt set out to answer. Poking into forgotten corners of history, translating political science into plain English, and traveling the country to meet experts and activists, Litt explains how the world’s greatest experiment in democracy went awry. (He also tries to crash a party at Mitch McConnell’s former frat house. It goes poorly.) The result is something you might not have thought possible: an unexpectedly funny page-turner about the political process. You’ll meet the Supreme Court justice charged with murder, learn how James Madison’s college roommate broke the Senate, encounter a citrus thief who embodies what’s wrong with our elections, and join Belle the bill as she tries to become a law (a quest far more harrowing than the one in Schoolhouse Rock!). Yet despite his clear-eyed assessment of the dangers we face, Litt remains audaciously optimistic. He offers a to-do list of bold yet achievable changes—a blueprint for restoring the balance of power in America. “In the book’s strongest contribution, Litt shows how radically our democracy has been altered in recent decades . . . [making] the case that nearly all of these negative trends are occurring by design.” —The Washington Post “Wry, quickly readable, yet informed.” —The Atlantic “Equal parts how-to, historical, and hilarious.” —Keegan-Michael Key
| Author | : Amartya Kumar Sen |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 11 |
| Release | : 1999 |
| Genre | : Democracy |
| ISBN | : |
| Author | : Sheldon S. Wolin |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 400 |
| Release | : 2017-08-29 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 0691178488 |
Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level. Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come. Now with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges, Democracy Incorporated remains an essential work for understanding the state of democracy in America.
| Author | : Martha C. Nussbaum |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 200 |
| Release | : 2016-11-08 |
| Genre | : Education |
| ISBN | : 069117332X |
A passionate defense of the humanities from one of today's foremost public intellectuals In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad. We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. In a new preface, Nussbaum explores the current state of humanistic education globally and shows why the crisis of the humanities has far from abated. Translated into over twenty languages, Not for Profit draws on the stories of troubling—and hopeful—global educational developments. Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.
| Author | : David Runciman |
| Publisher | : Basic Books |
| Total Pages | : 205 |
| Release | : 2018-06-05 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 1541616790 |
How will democracy end? And what will replace it? A preeminent political scientist examines the past, present, and future of an endangered political philosophy Since the end of World War II, democracy's sweep across the globe seemed inexorable. Yet today, it seems radically imperiled, even in some of the world's most stable democracies. How bad could things get? In How Democracy Ends, David Runciman argues that we are trapped in outdated twentieth-century ideas of democratic failure. By fixating on coups and violence, we are focusing on the wrong threats. Our societies are too affluent, too elderly, and too networked to fall apart as they did in the past. We need new ways of thinking the unthinkable -- a twenty-first-century vision of the end of democracy, and whether its collapse might allow us to move forward to something better. A provocative book by a major political philosopher, How Democracy Ends asks the most trenchant questions that underlie the disturbing patterns of our contemporary political life.
| Author | : Steven B. Smith |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 325 |
| Release | : 2009-05-11 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 1139828258 |
Leo Strauss was a central figure in the twentieth century renaissance of political philosophy. The essays of The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss provide a comprehensive and non-partisan survey of the major themes and problems that constituted Strauss's work. These include his revival of the great 'quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,' his examination of tension between Jerusalem and Athens, and most controversially his recovery of the tradition of esoteric writing. The volume also examines Strauss's complex relation to a range of contemporary political movements and thinkers, including Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Gershom Scholem, as well as the creation of a distinctive school of 'Straussian' political philosophy.
| Author | : Elizabeth Markovits |
| Publisher | : Penn State Press |
| Total Pages | : 246 |
| Release | : 2010-11 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0271046112 |
A growing frustration with “spin doctors,” doublespeak, and outright lying by public officials has resulted in a deep public cynicism regarding politics today. It has also led many voters to seek out politicians who engage in “straight talk,” out of a hope that sincerity signifies a dedication to the truth. While this is an understandable reaction to the degradation of public discourse inflicted by political hype, Elizabeth Markovits argues that the search for sincerity in the public arena actually constitutes a dangerous distraction from more important concerns, including factual truth and the ethical import of political statements. Her argument takes her back to an examination of the Greek notion of parrhesia (frank speech), and she draws from her study of the Platonic dialogues a nuanced understanding of this ancient analogue of “straight talk.” She shows Plato to have an appreciation for rhetoric rather than a desire to purge it from public life, providing insights into the ways it can contribute to a fruitful form of deliberative democracy today.
