|
Product Description
A new history of the world’s most embattled idea
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.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
- How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
- The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom
- The Conscience of a Liberal
- How Democracies Die
- This America: The Case for the Nation
- Democracy and Truth: A Short History
- The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History
- The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century
- On the Spirit of Rights (The Life of Ideas)
*If this is not the "Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Oct 11, 2024 19:44 +08.