Can Democracy Work?
A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Democracy today is widely regarded as an ideal form of government. Yet in practice it sometimes seems a sham, a political puppet show in which hidden elites pull all the strings.
As trust in elected representatives around the world plunges, it is no wonder that democratic revolts have erupted – from Cairo to Kiev and beyond – in an effort to ‘take back control’.
In this urgent and lively history, James Miller reminds us that democracy has always generated tensions and contradictions. Through philosophical debates and violent uprisings, it has been contested, corrupted, and refined. In different times and different places – from ancient Athens to revolutionary France to post-war America – its meaning has shifted in surprising ways.
For over two thousand years, the world has experimented with democracy. But can it really work – especially in complex modern societies?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Government by the people exercising power themselves without delegating it to representatives or administrators remains a conflicted, elusive goal, according to this incisive study of direct democracy. Politics professor Miller (Examined Lives) explores examples of direct and participatory democracy: ancient Athens, where 60,000 citizens assembled regularly to vote on law, policy, and war, and random people were appointed to government offices by lottery; the French Revolution, when Parisian neighborhood assemblies overthrew the national legislature; the rise of America's Jacksonian democracy, granting the vote to all white men; the Russian Revolution, when local soviets of workers and soldiers became a rival government; and Occupy Wall Street's experiment in all-inclusive consensus decision-making. Drawing on political thought from Aristotle to Rousseau to Walter Lipmann, Miller cogently identifies both the strengths of direct democracy (challenging unresponsive representative government and propelling change) and its weaknesses: instability and violence, vulnerability to demagogues, the difficulty of telling what a divided people really want, the need for specialist legislators and bureaucrats in a complex modern society, and a legacy of "destructive and illiberal totalitarian democracy." Miller's engaging, thoughtful exploration of some of history's most dramatic episodes illuminates the ongoing discontent with flawed systems of self-rule.