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The day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, civic leaders began to organize four coalitions that aimed to give ordinary citizens a chance to meet, to heal, and to be heard in rebuilding decisions. This book tells the inside story of the civic renewal movement they founded.
The day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, civic leaders began to organize four coalitions that aimed to give ordinary citizens a chance to meet, to heal, and to be heard in rebuilding decisions. This book tells the inside story of the civic renewal movement they founded.
In Egypt, something that fails to live up to its advertised expectations is often called a watermelon: a grand promise that later turns out to be empty talk. The political transition in Egypt after protests overthrew Husni Mubarak in 2011 is one such watermelon. Stacher examines the uprising and its aftermath to show how the country’s new ruling incumbents deferred the democratic dreams of the people of Egypt. At the same time, he lays out in meticulous fashion the circumstances that gave the army’s well-armed and well-funded institution an advantage against its citizens during and after Egypt’s turbulent transition. Stacher outlines the ways in which Egypt’s military manipulated the country’s empowering uprising into a nightmare situation that now counts as the most repressive period in Egypt’s modern history. In particular, Stacher charts the opposition dynamics during uprisings, elections, state violence, and political economy to show the multiple ways autocratic state elites try to construct a new political regime on the ashes of a discredited one. As they encounter these different aspects working together as a larger process, readers come to grips with the totality of the military-led counterrevolution as well as understand why Egyptians rightfully feel they ended up living in a watermelon democracy.
In this magnificent and encyclopedic overview, James T. Kloppenberg presents the history of democracy from the perspective of those who struggled to envision and achieve it. The story of democracy remains one without an ending, a dynamic of progress and regress that continues to our own day. In the classical age "democracy" was seen as the failure rather than the ideal of good governance. Democracies were deemed chaotic and bloody, indicative of rule by the rabble rather than by enlightened minds. Beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries, however, first in Europe and then in England's North American colonies, the reputation of democracy began to rise, resulting in changes that were sometimes revolutionary and dramatic, sometimes gradual and incremental. Kloppenberg offers a fresh look at how concepts and institutions of representative government developed and how understandings of self-rule changed over time on both sides of the Atlantic. Notions about what constituted true democracy preoccupied many of the most influential thinkers of the Western world, from Montaigne and Roger Williams to Milton and John Locke; from Rousseau and Jefferson to Wollstonecraft and Madison; and from de Tocqueville and J. S. Mill to Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Over three centuries, explosive ideas and practices of democracy sparked revolutions--English, American, and French--that again and again culminated in civil wars, disastrous failures of democracy that impeded further progress. Comprehensive, provocative, and authoritative, Toward Democracy traces self-government through three pivotal centuries. The product of twenty years of research and reflection, this momentous work reveals how nations have repeatedly fallen short in their attempts to construct democratic societies based on the principles of autonomy, equality, deliberation, and reciprocity that they have claimed to prize. Underlying this exploration lies Kloppenberg's compelling conviction that democracy was and remains an ethical ideal rather than merely a set of institutions, a goal toward which we continue to struggle.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, foreign policy analysts and international relations scholars expected communist Cuba to undergo transitions to democracy and to markets as had the Eastern European nations of the former Soviet bloc. But more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Castro remains in power, with no sign that the Cuban government or economy is moving toward liberalization. In Democracy Delayed, political scientist Juan López offers a searching and detailed analysis of the factors behind Cuba's failure to liberalize. López begins by comparing the political systems of three Eastern European states—the former German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, and Romania—with that of Cuba, in order to identify the differences that have allowed Castro to maintain his hold over the government and the economy. López also shows the various conditions promoting change, including the development of civil society groups in Cuba, and discusses why some U.S. policies help the possibility of democratization in Cuba while others hinder it. While the Catholic Church in Poland and the Protestant Church in East Germany fostered change, the Catholic Church in Cuba has not taken a defiant stance against authoritarianism but seems instead to be biding its time until Castro is out of the picture. In conclusion, López argues that a political transition in Cuba is possible even under the government of Fidel Castro. Some necessary conditions have been missing, but it is possible that U.S. policies could lay the groundwork for democratic charge. -- Juan M. del Aguila, Emory University
This book defends the value of democratic participation. It aims to improve citizens' democratic control and vindicate the value of citizens' participation against conceptions that threaten to undermine it.
A bold call to reclaim an American tradition that argues the Constitution imposes a duty on government to fight oligarchy and ensure broadly shared wealth. Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the Òrepublican form of governmentÓ the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the Constitution as if it has almost nothing to say about this threat. But as Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show in this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought. Fishkin and Forbath demonstrate that reformers, legislators, and even judges working in this Òdemocracy of opportunityÓ tradition understood that the Constitution imposes a duty on legislatures to thwart oligarchy and promote a broad distribution of wealth and political power. These ideas led Jacksonians to fight special economic privileges for the few, Populists to try to break up monopoly power, and Progressives to fight for the constitutional right to form a union. During Reconstruction, Radical Republicans argued in this tradition that racial equality required breaking up the oligarchy of slave power and distributing wealth and opportunity to former slaves and their descendants. President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers built their politics around this tradition, winning the fight against the Òeconomic royalistsÓ and Òindustrial despots.Ó But today, as we enter a new Gilded Age, this tradition in progressive American economic and political thought lies dormant. The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution begins the work of recovering it and exploring its profound implications for our deeply unequal society and badly damaged democracy.
The democratic surge in the past twenty years has led many Americans to assume that all societies are, or should be, making progress toward becoming practicing democracies. Many in the United States approach countries such as China, Iran, and Vietnam with impatience and bewilderment. These seemingly intransigent holdouts are the subject of intense policy debates, not in the least because they also play important roles in U.S. security and economic policy. This book takes a fresh look at the prospects for political change in these countries and argues that immediate opportunities exist to advance political liberalization, with the possibility that democratization will follow in the mid to long term. But to encourage these trends, the United States must de-emphasize short-term human rights and democracy strategies to focus on more subtle attitudinal and institutional changes in both state and society, and develop new policy measures to enlarge political space.
'No democracy without deconstruction': Deconstruction and Democracy evaluates and substantiates Derrida's provocative claim, assessing the importance of this influential and controversial contemporary philosopher's work for political thought. Derrida addressed political questions more and more explicitly in his writing, yet there is still confusion over the politics of deconstruction. Alex Thomson argues for a fresh understanding of Derrida's work, which acknowledges both the political dimension of deconstruction and its potential contribution to our thinking about politics. The book provides cogent analysis and exegesis of Derrida's political writings; explores the implications for political theory and practice of Derrida's work; and brings Derrida's work into dialogue with other major strands of contemporary political thought. Deconstruction and Democracy is the clearest and most detailed engagement available with the politics of deconstruction, and is a major contribution to scholarship on the later works of Jacques Derrida, most notably his Politics of Friendship.