Bodies of Democracy

Bodies of Democracy PDF Author: Machin Amanda
Publisher: Transcript Verlag, Roswitha Gost, Sigrid Nokel u. Dr. Karin Werner
ISBN: 9783837649239
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Amanda Machin considers six embodied modes of democratic politics: identification, deliberation, disagreement, protest, occupation and counsel. Drawing on diverse thinkers, she offers an absorbing illustration of the ways that human bodies are not only the disciplined objects of politics but also the generative subjects of democracy.

Bodies of Democracy

Bodies of Democracy PDF Author: Machin Amanda
Publisher: Transcript Verlag, Roswitha Gost, Sigrid Nokel u. Dr. Karin Werner
ISBN: 9783837649239
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Amanda Machin considers six embodied modes of democratic politics: identification, deliberation, disagreement, protest, occupation and counsel. Drawing on diverse thinkers, she offers an absorbing illustration of the ways that human bodies are not only the disciplined objects of politics but also the generative subjects of democracy.

Open Democracy

Open Democracy PDF Author: Hélène Landemore
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691212392
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
To the ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in public and debating laws set by a randomly selected assembly of several hundred citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings, democracy meant meeting every summer in a field to discuss issues until consensus was reached. Our contemporary representative democracies are very different. Modern parliaments are gated and guarded, and it seems as if only certain people are welcome. Diagnosing what is wrong with representative government and aiming to recover some of the openness of ancient democracies, Open Democracy presents a new paradigm of democracy. Supporting a fresh nonelectoral understanding of democratic representation, Hélène Landemore demonstrates that placing ordinary citizens, rather than elites, at the heart of democratic power is not only the true meaning of a government of, by, and for the people, but also feasible and, more than ever, urgently needed. -- Cover page 4.

Queer Democracy

Queer Democracy PDF Author: Daniel D. Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000418847
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Queer Democracy undertakes an interdisciplinary critical investigation of the centuries-old metaphor of society as a body, drawing on queer and transgender accounts of embodiment as a constructive resource for reimagining politics and society. Daniel Miller argues that this metaphor has consistently expressed a desire for social and political order, grounded in the social body’s imagined normative shape or morphology. The consistent result, from the “concord” discourses of the pre-Christian Stoics, all the way through to contemporary nationalism and populism, has been the suppression of any dissent that would unmake the social body’s presumed normativity. Miller argues that the conception of embodiment at the heart of the metaphor is a fantasy, and that negative social and political reactions to dissent represent visceral, dysphoric responses to its reshaping of the social body. He argues that social body’s essential queerness, defined by fluidity and lack of a fixed morphology, spawns queer democracy, expressed through ongoing social and political practices that aim to extend liberty and equality to new social domains. Queer Democracy articulates a new departure for the ongoing development of theoretical articulations linking queer and trans theory with political theory. It will appeal to both academic and non-academic readers engaged in research on political theory, populism, US religion, gender studies, and queer studies.

Democracy's Body

Democracy's Body PDF Author: Sally Banes
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822313991
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Judson Dance Theater involved such collaborators as Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Carolee Schneemann, Trisha Brown, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, et al.

Democracy Disfigured

Democracy Disfigured PDF Author: Nadia Urbinati
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674726383
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In Democracy Disfigured, Nadia Urbinati diagnoses the ills that beset the body politic in an age of hyper-partisanship and media monopolies and offers a spirited defense of the messy compromises and contentious outcomes that define democracy. Urbinati identifies three types of democratic disfiguration: the unpolitical, the populist, and the plebiscitarian. Each undermines a crucial division that a well-functioning democracy must preserve: the wall separating the free forum of public opinion from governmental institutions that enact the will of the people. Unpolitical democracy delegitimizes political opinion in favor of expertise. Populist democracy radically polarizes the public forum in which opinion is debated. And plebiscitary democracy overvalues the aesthetic and nonrational aspects of opinion. For Urbinati, democracy entails a permanent struggle to make visible the issues that citizens deem central to their lives. Opinion is thus a form of action as important as the mechanisms that organize votes and mobilize decisions. Urbinati focuses less on the overt enemies of democracy than on those who pose as its friends: technocrats wedded to procedure, demagogues who make glib appeals to "the people," and media operatives who, given their preference, would turn governance into a spectator sport and citizens into fans of opposing teams.

The Life and Death of Democracy

The Life and Death of Democracy PDF Author: John Keane
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1847377602
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 717

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Book Description
John Keane's The Life and Death of Democracy will inspire and shock its readers. Presenting the first grand history of democracy for well over a century, it poses along the way some tough and timely questions: can we really be sure that democracy had its origins in ancient Greece? How did democratic ideals and institutions come to have the shape they do today? Given all the recent fanfare about democracy promotion, why are many people now gripped by the feeling that a bad moon is rising over all the world's democracies? Do they indeed have a future? Or is perhaps democracy fated to melt away, along with our polar ice caps? The work of one of Britain's leading political writers, this is no mere antiquarian history. Stylishly written, this superb book confronts its readers with an entirely fresh and irreverent look at the past, present and future of democracy. It unearths the beginnings of such precious institutions and ideals as government by public assembly, votes for women, the secret ballot, trial by jury and press freedom. It tracks the changing, hotly disputed meanings of democracy and describes quite a few of the extraordinary characters, many of them long forgotten, who dedicated their lives to building or defending democracy. And it explains why democracy is still potentially the best form of government on earth -- and why democracies everywhere are sleepwalking their way into deep trouble.

Democracy’s Discontent

Democracy’s Discontent PDF Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674287444
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
A renowned political philosopher updates his classic book on the American political tradition to address the perils democracy confronts today. The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America’s version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface. So argued Michael Sandel, in his influential and widely debated book Democracy’s Discontent, published in 1996. The market faith was eroding the common life. A rising sense of disempowerment was likely to provoke backlash, he wrote, from those who would “shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to ‘take back our culture and take back our country,’ to ‘restore our sovereignty’ with a vengeance.” Now, a quarter century later, Sandel updates his classic work for an age when democracy’s discontent has hardened into a country divided against itself. In this new edition, he extends his account of America’s civic struggles from the 1990s to the present. He shows how Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a version of finance-driven globalization that created a society of winners and losers and fueled the toxic politics of our time. In a work celebrated when first published as “a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship” (Alan Brinkley), Sandel recalls moments in the American past when the country found ways to hold economic power to democratic account. To reinvigorate democracy, Sandel argues in a stirring new epilogue, we need to reconfigure the economy and empower citizens as participants in a shared public life.

Radical Democracy

Radical Democracy PDF Author: C. Douglas Lummis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501712985
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
C. Douglas Lummis writes as if he were talking with intelligent friends rather than articulating political theory. He reminds us that democracy literally means a political state in which the people (demos) have the power (kratia). The people referred to are not people of a certain class or gender or color. They are, in fact, the poorest and largest body of citizens. Democracy is and always has been the most radical proposal, and constitutes a critique of every sort of centralized power. Lummis distinguishes true democracy from the inequitable incarnations referred to in contemporary liberal usage. He weaves commentary on classic texts with personal anecdotes and reflections on current events. Writing from Japan and drawing on his own experience in the Philippines at the height of People's Power, Lummis brings a cross-cultural perspective to issues such as economic development and popular mobilization. He warns against the fallacy of associating free markets or the current world economic order with democracy and argues for transborder democratic action. Rejecting the ways in which technology imposes its own needs, Lummis asks what work would look like in a truly democratic society. He urges us to remember that democracy should mean a fundamental stance toward the world and toward one's fellow human beings. So understood, it offers an effective cure for what he terms "the social disease called political cynicism." Feisty and provocative, Radical Democracy is sure to inspire debate.

Experiments in Democracy

Experiments in Democracy PDF Author: Benjamin J. Hurlbut
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231542917
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Human embryo research touches upon strongly felt moral convictions, and it raises such deep questions about the promise and perils of scientific progress that debate over its development has become a moral and political imperative. From in vitro fertilization to embryonic stem cell research, cloning, and gene editing, Americans have repeatedly struggled with how to define the moral status of the human embryo, whether to limit its experimental uses, and how to contend with sharply divided public moral perspectives on governing science. Experiments in Democracy presents a history of American debates over human embryo research from the late 1960s to the present, exploring their crucial role in shaping norms, practices, and institutions of deliberation governing the ethical challenges of modern bioscience. J. Benjamin Hurlbut details how scientists, bioethicists, policymakers, and other public figures have attempted to answer a question of great consequence: how should the public reason about aspects of science and technology that effect fundamental dimensions of human life? Through a study of one of the most significant science policy controversies in the history of the United States, Experiments in Democracy paints a portrait of the complex relationship between science and democracy, and of U.S. society's evolving approaches to evaluating and governing science's most challenging breakthroughs.

A Government by the People

A Government by the People PDF Author: Thomas Goebel
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807853610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Between 1898 and 1918, many American states introduced the initiative, referendum, and recall--known collectively as direct democracy. Most interpreters have seen the motives for these reform measures as purely political, but Goebel demonstrates that the call for direct democracy was deeply rooted in antimonopoly sentiment. Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of direct democracy, particularly in California, and Goebel's analysis of direct democracy's history, evolution, and ultimate unsuitability as a grassroots tool is particularly timely.