Download or read book Demanding Democracy written by Marc Stears and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-04 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What today's political thinkers can learn from the radical democratic movements of twentieth-century America This is a major work of history and political theory that traces radical democratic thought in America across the twentieth century, seeking to recover ideas that could reenergize democratic activism today. The question of how citizens should behave as they struggle to create a more democratic society has haunted the United States throughout its history. Should citizens restrict themselves to patient persuasion or take to the streets and seek to impose change? Marc Stears argues that anyone who continues to wrestle with these questions could learn from the radical democratic tradition that was forged in the twentieth century by political activists, including progressives, trade unionists, civil rights campaigners, and members of the student New Left. These activists and their movements insisted that American campaigners for democratic change should be free to strike out in whatever ways they thought necessary, so long as their actions enhanced the political virtues of citizens and contributed to the eventual triumph of the democratic cause. Reevaluating the moral and strategic arguments, and the triumphs and excesses, of this radical democratic tradition, Stears contends that it still offers a compelling account of citizen behavior—one that is fairer, more inclusive, and more truly democratic than those advanced by political theorists today.
Download or read book Demanding Democracy written by Deborah Jane Yashar and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Demanding Democracy written by Marc Stears and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a major work of history and political theory that traces radical democratic thought in America across the twentieth century, seeking to recover ideas that could reenergize democratic activism today. The question of how citizens should behave as they struggle to create a more democratic society has haunted the United States throughout its history. Should citizens restrict themselves to patient persuasion or take to the streets and seek to impose change? Marc Stears argues that anyone who continues to wrestle with these questions could learn from the radical democratic tradition that was forged in the twentieth century by political activists, including progressives, trade unionists, civil rights campaigners, and members of the student New Left. These activists and their movements insisted that American campaigners for democratic change should be free to strike out in whatever ways they thought necessary, so long as their actions enhanced the political virtues of citizens and contributed to the eventual triumph of the democratic cause. Reevaluating the moral and strategic arguments, and the triumphs and excesses, of this radical democratic tradition, Stears contends that it still offers a compelling account of citizen behavior--one that is fairer, more inclusive, and more truly democratic than those advanced by political theorists today.
Download or read book Demanding Images written by Karen Strassler and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of authoritarian rule in 1998 ushered in an exhilarating but unsettled period of democratization in Indonesia. A more open political climate converged with a rapidly changing media landscape, yielding a vibrant and volatile public sphere within which Indonesians grappled with the possibilities and limits of democracy amid entrenched corruption, state violence, and rising forms of intolerance. In Demanding Images Karen Strassler theorizes image-events as political processes in which publicly circulating images become the material ground of struggles over the nation's past, present, and future. Considering photographs, posters, contemporary art, graffiti, selfies, memes, and other visual media, she argues that people increasingly engage with politics through acts of making, circulating, manipulating, and scrutinizing images. Demanding Images is both a closely observed account of Indonesia's turbulent democratic transition and a globally salient analysis of the work of images in the era of digital media and neoliberal democracy. Strassler reveals politics today to be an unruly enterprise profoundly shaped by the affective and evidentiary force of images.
Download or read book Demanding Democracy written by Robert Schmuhl and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the interplay among citizens, political figures and the media during the 1992 American election, arguing that a number of events resulted in the people reshaping political institutions and the media as they demanded a more proximate and participatory democracy.
Download or read book Demanding Choices written by Shaun Bowler and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2000-12-21 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVReferenda are becoming a more common way to resolve heated political questions. This book shows how voters make choices in referenda /div
Download or read book Demanding Development written by Adam Michael Auerbach and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the uneven success of India's slum dwellers in demanding and securing essential public services from the state.
Download or read book Infinitely Demanding written by Simon Critchley and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-01-16 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The clearest, boldest and most systematic statement of Simon Critchley’s influential views on philosophy, ethics, and politics, Infinitely Demanding identifies a massive political disappointment at the heart of liberal democracy. Arguing that what is called for is an ethics of commitment that can inform a radical politics, Critchley considers the possibility of political subjectivity and action after Marx and Marxism, taking in the work of Kant, Levinas, Badiou and Lacan. Infinitely Demanding culminates in an argument for anarchism as an ethical practice and a remotivating means of political organization.
Download or read book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism written by Shoshana Zuboff and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.
Download or read book Democracy as Problem Solving written by Xavier De Souza Briggs and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-07-18 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Case studies from around the world and theoretical discussion show how the capacity to act collectively on local problems can be developed, strengthening democracy while changing social and economic outcomes. Complexity, division, mistrust, and “process paralysis” can thwart leaders and others when they tackle local challenges. In Democracy as Problem Solving, Xavier de Souza Briggs shows how civic capacity—the capacity to create and sustain smart collective action—can be developed and used. In an era of sharp debate over the conditions under which democracy can develop while broadening participation and building community, Briggs argues that understanding and building civic capacity is crucial for strengthening governance and changing the state of the world in the process. More than managing a contest among interest groups or spurring deliberation to reframe issues, democracy can be what the public most desires: a recipe for significant progress on important problems. Briggs examines efforts in six cities, in the United States, Brazil, India, and South Africa, that face the millennial challenges of rapid urban growth, economic restructuring, and investing in the next generation. These challenges demand the engagement of government, business, and nongovernmental sectors. And the keys to progress include the ability to combine learning and bargaining continuously, forge multiple forms of accountability, and find ways to leverage the capacity of the grassroots and what Briggs terms the “grasstops,” regardless of who initiates change or who participates over time. Civic capacity, Briggs shows, can—and must—be developed even in places that lack traditions of cooperative civic action.
Download or read book Demanding Democracy After Three Mile Island written by Raymond L. Goldsteen and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 1991 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One didn't have to be a farmer to sense an intimacy between the land and the towns of Goldboro and Newberry Township, communities in central Pennsylvania characterized by brick farmhouses, fenced pastures, and two-lane roads. The four concrete towers rising out of the nearby Susquehanna River, visible some seven miles away, were incidental to most lives in the area. Then, in the spring of 1979, when local farmers were preparing the earth for planting, the worst nuclear accident in the history of commercial power in the United States took place there, at Three Mile Island. This volume furnishes the reactions of residents of those two communities to the accident.
Download or read book Challenging Democracy written by Madeleine Arnot and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citizenship education is currently the subject of worldwide attention, and this book reports on research in a range of countries including South Africa, Finland, Portugal, Argentina, Australia. the US and Canada.
Download or read book Democracy and Education written by John Dewey and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 1916 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
Download or read book How Democracies Die written by Steven Levitsky and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Time • Foreign Affairs • WBUR • Paste Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved. Praise for How Democracies Die “What we desperately need is a sober, dispassionate look at the current state of affairs. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two of the most respected scholars in the field of democracy studies, offer just that.”—The Washington Post “Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.”—Ezra Klein, Vox “If you only read one book for the rest of the year, read How Democracies Die. . . .This is not a book for just Democrats or Republicans. It is a book for all Americans. It is nonpartisan. It is fact based. It is deeply rooted in history. . . . The best commentary on our politics, no contest.”—Michael Morrell, former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (via Twitter) “A smart and deeply informed book about the ways in which democracy is being undermined in dozens of countries around the world, and in ways that are perfectly legal.”—Fareed Zakaria, CNN
Download or read book Against Democracy written by Jason Brennan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bracingly provocative challenge to one of our most cherished ideas and institutions Most people believe democracy is a uniquely just form of government. They believe people have the right to an equal share of political power. And they believe that political participation is good for us—it empowers us, helps us get what we want, and tends to make us smarter, more virtuous, and more caring for one another. These are some of our most cherished ideas about democracy. But Jason Brennan says they are all wrong. In this trenchant book, Brennan argues that democracy should be judged by its results—and the results are not good enough. Just as defendants have a right to a fair trial, citizens have a right to competent government. But democracy is the rule of the ignorant and the irrational, and it all too often falls short. Furthermore, no one has a fundamental right to any share of political power, and exercising political power does most of us little good. On the contrary, a wide range of social science research shows that political participation and democratic deliberation actually tend to make people worse—more irrational, biased, and mean. Given this grim picture, Brennan argues that a new system of government—epistocracy, the rule of the knowledgeable—may be better than democracy, and that it's time to experiment and find out. A challenging critique of democracy and the first sustained defense of the rule of the knowledgeable, Against Democracy is essential reading for scholars and students of politics across the disciplines. Featuring a new preface that situates the book within the current political climate and discusses other alternatives beyond epistocracy, Against Democracy is a challenging critique of democracy and the first sustained defense of the rule of the knowledgeable.
Download or read book Oral Democracy written by Vijayendra Rao and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies citizens' deliberation on governance and development in Indian democracy, and the influence of state policy and literacy, analysing three hundred village assemblies. This title is also available as Open Access.
Download or read book Democracy Declined written by Mallory E. SoRelle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-12-14 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Elizabeth Warren memorably wrote, “It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street.” More than a century after the government embraced credit to fuel the American economy, consumer financial protections in the increasingly complex financial system still place the onus on individuals to sift through fine print for assurance that they are not vulnerable to predatory lending and other pitfalls of consumer financing and growing debt. In Democracy Declined, Mallory E. SoRelle argues that the failure of federal policy makers to curb risky practices can be explained by the evolution of consumer finance policies aimed at encouraging easy credit in part by foregoing more stringent regulation. Furthermore, SoRelle explains how angry borrowers’ experiences with these policies teach them to focus their attention primarily on banks and lenders instead of demanding that lawmakers address predatory behavior. As a result, advocacy groups have been mostly unsuccessful in mobilizing borrowers in support of stronger consumer financial protections. The absence of safeguards on consumer financing is particularly dangerous because the consequences extend well beyond harm to individuals—they threaten the stability of entire economies. SoRelle identifies pathways to mitigate these potentially disastrous consequences through greater public participation.