James Miller

Can Democracy Work?

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Today, democracy is the world's only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In Can Democracy Work? James Miller, the author of the classic history of 1960s protest Democracy Is in the Streets, offers a lively, surprising, and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present. As he shows, democracy has always been rife with inner tensions. The ancient Greeks preferred to choose leaders by lottery and regarded elections as inherently corrupt and undemocratic. The French revolutionaries sought to incarnate the popular will, but many of them came to see the people as the enemy. And in the United States, the franchise would be extended to some even as it was taken from others. Amid the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, communists, liberals, and nationalists all sought to claim the ideals of democracy for themselves - even as they manifestly failed to realize them. Ranging from the theaters of Athens to the tents of Occupy Wall Street, Can Democracy Work? is an entertaining and insightful guide to our most cherished - and vexed - ideal.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Macmillan US / Picador
• Artikelnr. des Verlages: 900210131
• Seitenzahl: 320
• Erscheinungstermin: 10. September 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 140mm x 19mm
• Gewicht: 362g
• ISBN-13: 9781250234674
• ISBN-10: 1250234670
• Artikelnr.: 54803744

Autorenporträt

James Miller is a professor of politics and the chair of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of The Passion of Michel Foucault and Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock & Roll, 1947-1977, among other books. He lives in New York City.

Inhaltsangabe

CONTENTS
PRELUDE: WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? 3
The riddle posed, and some answers explored, in five historical essays
ONE. A CLOSED COMMUNITY OF SELF-GOVERNING CITIZENS 19
The strangeness of Greek democracy Solon sets Athens on a path toward
aristocratic self-rule the Athenian uprising of 508 B.C.
Cleisthenes extends political power to ordinary citizens the use of
political lotteries, rather than elections, to select officers in Athens
the first appearance of the word demokratia excluding others:
Athenian autochthony Pericles as exemplary demagogue Thucydides
describes the Athenian democracy at war Plato's critique of democracy:
knowledge vs. opinion the resilience of Athenian democracy, and Hannah
Arendt's idealized view of it how Athenian democracy actually worked in
the fourth century B.C. classical democracy in decay and eclipse
the sublime value of unity, and the martial virtues as constitutive of the
ideal democratic citizen
TWO. A REVOLUTIONARY ASSERTION OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY 53
Radical democrats seize power in Paris Republican thought, from
Polybius to Rousseau the French Revolution, from the fall of the
Bastille to the fall of the monarchy the journée of August 10, 1792
a carnival of atrocities first calls for a democratic constitution
Condorcet in the French Convention drafting the world's first
democratic constitution Robespierre, Marat, and the debate over
Condorcet's democratic constitution the Terror, and fresh doubts about
the wisdom of direct democracy the appearance of a new idea,
"representative democracy" the retreat of democratic ideals in France
the human toll
THREE. A COMMERCIAL REPUBLIC OF FREE INDIVIDUALS 91
American distrust of popular passions; the tempering influence of commerce
in eighteenth-century America 1776: Thomas Paine, Common Sense, and the
Declaration of Independence the ambiguous place of democracy in America
during the revolutionary era modern democracy from France to America:
the democratic-republican
societies of the 1790s the American dream of a commercial democracy
America's first great demagogue, Andrew Jackson Tocqueville celebrates
the Fourth of July in Albany, New York, 1831 Tocqueville on democracy
as an egalitarian form of life the strange insurrection over the right
to vote in Rhode Island, 1842 Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, and the American struggle over the franchise demotic culture
in America: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, minstrelsy Walt
Whitman's Democratic Vistas and the fantasy of a democracy still to come
FOUR. A STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL AND SOCIAL EQUALITY 133
The Chartists and the London Democratic Association; the first Chartist
Convention and first Chartist petition, 1839 Karl Marx's ambivalence
about democracy; communism as the realization of individual freedom and
social equality conflict as the paradoxical essence of nascent modern
democratic societies Mazzini and his democratic faith in cosmopolitan
nationalism the Paris Commune of 1871 the Commune as revolutionary
icon the rise of mass political parties; the case of the German Social
Democratic Party the Russian general strike of 1905 and the St.
Petersburg soviet Rosa Luxemburg on revolutionary self-government
Robert Michels and Max Weber debate democracy vs. domination as the key
categories for modern social thought; the "iron law of oligarchy"
disenchanted democracy at the dawn of the twentieth century
FIVE. A HALL OF MIRRORS 173
What Woodrow Wilson meant by democracy in proposing a world "made safe for
democracy"; his 1885 manuscript "The Modern Democratic State" Wilson as
president; the Great War as a crusade to promote liberal democracy
Russia in revolution the improvisatory democracy of the Petrograd
soviet Lenin and the Bolsheviks seize power through Russia's soviets
existential conflict over the meaning of democracy: Wilsonian
liberalism vs.
Leninist communism; the Versailles Peace Treaty and the League of Nations
the Guild Socialism of G.D.H. Cole: a vision of democratic socialism
for an industrial society Walter Lippmann on the psychological limits
to an informed public John Dewey and the persistence of the democratic
faith Edward Bernays and the value of propaganda George Gallup and
the rise of survey research and public opinion polling Joseph
Schumpeter on democracy as "rule of the politician" the cruel game of
modern politics: sham democracies vs. democracy as a universal ideal,
solemnized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948
CODA: WHO ARE WE? 213
Manhattan, January 2017, protesting the election of Donald Trump: "This is
what democracy looks like"; but a democratic process also elected President
Trump when President Barack Obama said, "That's not who we are," who
are "we"? "There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide"
global democratization from an elite perspective: the life and times of
Samuel P. Huntington "Democracy is in the streets": the return of
participatory democracy in 2011; Occupy Wall Street problems with the
direct democratic program of the postwar global left protecting
pluralism in a framework of liberal rights the only viable approach to
realizing a modern democracy Condoleezza Rice keeps the American faith:
exporting democracy at gunpoint measuring the advance and retreat of
democracy worldwide as a form of government: the Freedom House index, The
Economist's Democracy Index, and the United Nations Human Development Index
challenges to democracy today as an ideology and ideal Václav Havel
on the dangers of political demoralization faced with the challenges of
self-government upholding Abraham Lincoln's conception of democratic
hope
NOTES 247
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING 283
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 287
INDEX 289