Citizen Speak

Citizen Speak PDF Author: Andrew J. Perrin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226660788
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
When we think about what constitutes being a good citizen, routine activities like voting, letter writing, and paying attention to the news spring to mind. But in Citizen Speak, Andrew J. Perrin argues that these activities are only a small part of democratic citizenship—a standard of citizenship that requires creative thinking, talking, and acting. For Citizen Speak, Perrin met with labor, church, business, and sports organizations and proposed to them four fictive scenarios: what if your senator is involved in a scandal, or your police department is engaged in racial profiling, or a local factory violates pollution laws, or your nearby airport is slated for expansion? The conversations these challenges inspire, Perrin shows, require imagination. And what people can imagine doing in response to those scenarios depends on what’s possible, what’s important, what’s right, and what’s feasible. By talking with one another, an engaged citizenry draws from a repertoire of personal and institutional resources to understand and reimagine responses to situations as they arise. Building on such political discussions, Citizen Speak shows how a rich culture of association and democratic discourse provides the infrastructure for a healthy democracy.

Citizen Speak

Citizen Speak PDF Author: Andrew J. Perrin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226660788
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
When we think about what constitutes being a good citizen, routine activities like voting, letter writing, and paying attention to the news spring to mind. But in Citizen Speak, Andrew J. Perrin argues that these activities are only a small part of democratic citizenship—a standard of citizenship that requires creative thinking, talking, and acting. For Citizen Speak, Perrin met with labor, church, business, and sports organizations and proposed to them four fictive scenarios: what if your senator is involved in a scandal, or your police department is engaged in racial profiling, or a local factory violates pollution laws, or your nearby airport is slated for expansion? The conversations these challenges inspire, Perrin shows, require imagination. And what people can imagine doing in response to those scenarios depends on what’s possible, what’s important, what’s right, and what’s feasible. By talking with one another, an engaged citizenry draws from a repertoire of personal and institutional resources to understand and reimagine responses to situations as they arise. Building on such political discussions, Citizen Speak shows how a rich culture of association and democratic discourse provides the infrastructure for a healthy democracy.

The Democratic Imagination

The Democratic Imagination PDF Author: James Irvine Cairns
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442605286
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The Democratic Imagination examines different conceptions of democracy, exploring tensions that emerge in key moments and debates in the history of democracy, from Ancient Greece to the French Revolution to contemporary Egypt.

Collective Dreams

Collective Dreams PDF Author: Keally D. McBride
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271046120
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
How do we go about imagining different and better worlds for ourselves? Collective Dreams looks at ideals of community, frequently embraced as the basis for reform across the political spectrum, as the predominant form of political imagination in America today. Examining how these ideals circulate without having much real impact on social change provides an opportunity to explore the difficulties of practicing critical theory in a capitalist society. Different chapters investigate how ideals of community intersect with conceptions of self and identity, family, the public sphere and civil society, and the state, situating community at the core of the most contested political and social arenas of our time. Ideals of community also influence how we evaluate, choose, and build the spaces in which we live, as the author’s investigations of Celebration, Florida, and of West Philadelphia show.Following in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, Keally McBride reveals how consumer culture affects our collective experience of community as well as our ability to imagine alternative political and social orders. Taking ideals of community as a case study, Collective Dreams also explores the structure and function of political imagination to answer the following questions: What do these oppositional ideals reveal about our current political and social experiences? How is the way we imagine alternative communities nonetheless influenced by capitalism, liberalism, and individualism? How can these ideals of community be used more effectively to create social change?

The Democratic Imagination in America

The Democratic Imagination in America PDF Author: Russell L. Hanson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400857856
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
Russell Hanson discovers in the history of democratic rhetoric in the United States a series of essential contests" over the meaning of democracy that have occurred in periods of political and socio-economic change. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic

Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic PDF Author: Sandra M. Gustafson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226311295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Deliberation, in recent years, has emerged as a form of civic engagement worth reclaiming. In this persuasive book, Sandra M. Gustafson combines historical literary analysis and political theory in order to demonstrate that current democratic practices of deliberation are rooted in the civic rhetoric that flourished in the early American republic. Though the U.S. Constitution made deliberation central to republican self-governance, the ethical emphasis on group deliberation often conflicted with the rhetorical focus on persuasive speech. From Alexis de Tocqueville’s ideas about the deliberative basis of American democracy through the works of Walt Whitman, John Dewey, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., Gustafson shows how writers and speakers have made the aesthetic and political possibilities of deliberation central to their autobiographies, manifestos, novels, and orations. Examining seven key writers from the early American republic—including James Fenimore Cooper, David Crockett, and Daniel Webster—whose works of deliberative imagination explored the intersections of style and democratic substance, Gustafson offers a mode of historical and textual analysis that displays the wide range of resources imaginative language can contribute to political life.

The Democratic Century

The Democratic Century PDF Author: Seymour Martin Lipset
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806136189
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
In this study on democracy and democratic systems, two scholars offer an expansive view of democratic systems and explain why democracy has succeeded in some countries and has failed in others.

Why America Needs a Left

Why America Needs a Left PDF Author: Eli Zaretsky
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745656560
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
The United States today cries out for a robust, self-respecting, intellectually sophisticated left, yet the very idea of a left appears to have been discredited. In this brilliant new book, Eli Zaretsky rethinks the idea by examining three key moments in American history: the Civil War, the New Deal and the range of New Left movements in the 1960s and after including the civil rights movement, the women's movement and gay liberation.In each period, he argues, the active involvement of the left - especially its critical interaction with mainstream liberalism - proved indispensable. American liberalism, as represented by the Democratic Party, is necessarily spineless and ineffective without a left. Correspondingly, without a strong liberal center, the left becomes sectarian, authoritarian, and worse. Written in an accessible way for the general reader and the undergraduate student, this book provides a fresh perspective on American politics and political history. It has often been said that the idea of a left originated in the French Revolution and is distinctively European; Zaretsky argues, by contrast, that America has always had a vibrant and powerful left. And he shows that in those critical moments when the country returns to itself, it is on its left/liberal bases that it comes to feel most at home.

Democracy Matters

Democracy Matters PDF Author: Cornel West
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143035835
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
“Uncompromising and unconventional . . . Cornel West is an eloquent prophet with attitude.” — Newsweek“ "A timely analysis about the current state of democratic systems in America." — The Boston Globe In Democracy Matters, Cornel West argues that if America is to become a better steward of democratization around the world, we must first wake up to the long history of corruption that has plagued our own democracy: racism, free market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism. This impassioned and empowering call for the revitalization of America's democracy, by one of our most distinctive and compelling social critics, will reshape the raging national debate about America's role in today's troubled world.

American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith

American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith PDF Author: Robert J. Lacey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In June 1962, a group calling themselves the Students for a Democratic Society gathered at a retreat in rural Michigan to discuss and revise their founding manifesto. The result of that meeting was the famous Port Huron Statement, a document that not only reflected their disenchantment with America's elite-controlled social and political institutions but also called for the creation of a "participatory democracy" in which all citizens engage in public life and share the responsibility of political decision making. This demand for participatory democracy characterized the New Left ethos and captured the imagination of a generation of radicals and political activists from the late 1950s to the close of the 1960s. So, why did participatory democracy fail to materialize in any recognizable form? Why was it forced to retreat from mainstream public discourse into the academy? Its fate, political scientist Robert Lacey asserts, was determined in large part by its intellectual origins. The idea of participatory democracy germinated in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, founders of American pragmatism, and fully blossomed in the work of John Dewey, who argued that democracy should (and could) be a "way of life" for every person. Dewey rested his democratic faith on three pragmatist tenets: truth is probabilistic and socially determined; humans are malleable and educable; and humans, endowed with free will, can act collectively for their individual and social betterment. When the realities of modern life in the mid- to late-twentieth century posed serious challenges to these tenets, the very foundation of participatory democratic thought began to crumble. Yet, willfully disregarding the rubble, C. Wright Mills, Sheldon Wolin, Benjamin Barber, and other theorists have continued to support participatory democracy as a viable political idea. Today's participatory democrats have constructed a fragile theoretical enterprise that rests on questionable assumptions inherited from the pragmatist tradition about truth, human nature, and free will. Tracing the history of a salient idea in American political thought, Lacey elucidates the assumptions underlying participatory democracy, assesses both its usefulness and coherence, and ultimately reveals it to be less a theory than a faith--a faith that has largely failed to follow through on its promise.

Tocqueville and His America

Tocqueville and His America PDF Author: Arthur Kaledin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description