Author: Charles KrauthammerPublisher: A E I Press
ISBN: 9780844713885
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This essay examines four contending schools of American foreign policy.
Democratic Realism
Author: Charles KrauthammerPublisher: A E I Press
ISBN: 9780844713885
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This essay examines four contending schools of American foreign policy.
Realism and Democracy
Author: Elliott AbramsPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415628
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
This book makes a realpolitik argument for supporting democracy in the Arab world, drawing on four decades of policy experience.
Democracy for Realists
Author: Christopher H. AchenPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400888743
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408
Book Description
Why our belief in government by the people is unrealistic—and what we can do about it Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate that voters—even those who are well informed and politically engaged—mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly. Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters. Now with new analysis of the 2016 elections, Democracy for Realists provides a powerful challenge to conventional thinking, pointing the way toward a fundamentally different understanding of the realities and potential of democratic government.
Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?
Author: Alan GilbertPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400823285
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335
Book Description
As each power vies for its national interests on the world stage, how do its own citizens' democratic interests fare at home? Alan Gilbert speaks to an issue at the heart of current international-relations debate. He contends that, in spite of neo-realists' assumptions, a vocal citizen democracy can and must have a role in global politics. Further, he shows that all the major versions of realism and neo-realism, if properly stated with a view of the national interest as a common good, surprisingly lead to democracy. His most striking example focuses on realist criticisms of the Vietnam War. Democratic internationalism, as Gilbert terms it, is really the linking of citizens' interests across national boundaries to overcome the antidemocratic actions of their own governments. Realist misinterpretations have overlooked Thucydides' theme about how a democracy corrupts itself through imperial expansion as well as Karl Marx's observations about the positive effects of democratic movements in one country on events in others. Gilbert also explodes the democratic peace myth that democratic states do not wage war on one another. He suggests instead policies to accord with the interests of ordinary citizens whose shared bond is a desire for peace. Gilbert shows, through such successes as recent treaties on land mines and policies to slow global warming that citizen movements can have salutary effects. His theory of "deliberative democracy" proposes institutional changes that would give the voice of ordinary citizens a greater influence on the international actions of their own government.
Democratic Faith
Author: Patrick DeneenPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400826896
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 389
Book Description
The American political reformer Herbert Croly wrote, "For better or worse, democracy cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility." Democratic Faith is at once a trenchant analysis and a powerful critique of this underlying assumption that informs democratic theory. Patrick Deneen argues that among democracy's most ardent supporters there is an oft-expressed belief in the need to "transform" human beings in order to reconcile the sometimes disappointing reality of human self-interest with the democratic ideal of selfless commitment. This "transformative impulse" is frequently couched in religious language, such as the need for political "redemption." This is all the more striking given the frequent accompanying condemnation of traditional religious belief that informs the "democratic faith.? At the same time, because so often this democratic ideal fails to materialize, democratic faith is often subject to a particularly intense form of disappointment. A mutually reinforcing cycle of faith and disillusionment is frequently exhibited by those who profess a democratic faith--in effect imperiling democratic commitments due to the cynicism of its most fervent erstwhile supporters. Deneen argues that democracy is ill-served by such faith. Instead, he proposes a form of "democratic realism" that recognizes democracy not as a regime with aspirations to perfection, but that justifies democracy as the regime most appropriate for imperfect humans. If democratic faith aspires to transformation, democratic realism insists on the central importance of humility, hope, and charity.
Politics Recovered
Author: Matt SleatPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547552
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 423
Book Description
Is political theory political enough? Or does a tendency toward abstraction, idealization, moralism, and utopianism leave contemporary political theory out of touch with real politics as it actually takes place, and hence unable to speak meaningfully to or about our world? Realist political thought, which has enjoyed a significant revival of interest in recent years, seeks to avoid such pitfalls by remaining attentive to the distinctiveness of politics and the ways its realities ought to shape how we think and act in the political realm. Politics Recovered brings together prominent scholars to develop what it might mean to theorize politics “realistically.” Intervening in philosophical debates such as the relationship between politics and morality and the role that facts and emotions should play in the theorization of political values, the volume addresses how a realist approach aids our understanding of pressing issues such as global justice, inequality, poverty, political corruption, the value of democracy, governmental secrecy, and demands for transparency. Contributors open up fruitful dialogues with a variety of other realist approaches, such as feminist theory, democratic theory, and international relations. By exploring the nature and prospects of realist thought, Politics Recovered shows how political theory can affirm reality in order to provide meaningful and compelling answers to the fundamental questions of political life.
Scientific Realism and Democratic Society
Author: Wenceslao J. GonzalezPublisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789401207355
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Philip Kitcher is among the key philosophers of science of our times. This volume offers an up to date analysis of his philosophical perspective taking into account his views on scientific realism and democratic society. The contributors to the volume focus on four different aspects of Kitcher’s thought: the evolution of his philosophy, his present views on scientific realism, the epistemological analysis of his modest (“real” or “piecemeal”) realism, and his conception of scientific practice. In the final chapter, the philosopher replies to his critics. The volume will be of interest to philosophers as well as anyone interested in the relation between science and society.
Democracy and Complexity
Author: Danilo ZoloPublisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074566931X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
This book is a highly original and provocative contribution to democratic theory. Zolo argues that the increasing complexity of modern societies represents a fundamental challenge to the basic assumptions of the Western democratic tradition and calls for a reformulation of some of the key questions of political theory. Zolo maintains that, as modern societies become more complex and more involved in the `information revolution', they are subjected to new and unprecedented forms of evolutionary stress - as manifested, for instance, in the growing autonomy and power of political parties, and in new kinds of political communication which create and sustain the fiction of consensus. These forms of stress have become so serious that they threaten to undermine some of the values traditionally associated with democracy, such as the rationality and autonomy of the individual, and the visibility and accountability of power.
The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism
Author: Phillip J. BarrishPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139502654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Between the Civil War and the First World War, realism was the most prominent form of American fiction. Realist writers of the period include some of America's greatest, such as Henry James, Edith Wharton and Mark Twain, but also many lesser-known writers whose work still speaks to us today, for instance Charles Chesnutt, Zitkala-Ša and Sarah Orne Jewett. Emphasizing realism's historical context, this introduction traces the genre's relationship with powerful, often violent, social conflicts involving race, gender, class and national origin. It also examines how the realist style was created; the necessarily ambiguous relationship between realism produced on the page and reality outside the book; and the different, often contradictory, forms 'realism' took in literary works by different authors. The most accessible yet sophisticated account of American literary realism currently available, this volume will be of great value to students, teachers and readers of the American novel.
The Democratic Surround
Author: Fred TurnerPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022606414X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374
Book Description
A “smart and fascinating” reassessment of postwar American culture and the politics of the 1960s from the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Reason Magazine). We tend to think of the sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in The Democratic Surround, the decades that brought us the Korean War and communist witch hunts also witnessed an extraordinary turn toward explicitly democratic, open, and inclusive ideas of communication—and with them new, flexible models of social order. Surprisingly, he shows that it was this turn that brought us the revolutionary multimedia and wild-eyed individualism of the 1960s counterculture. In this prequel to his celebrated book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Turner rewrites the history of postwar America, showing how in the 1940s and ‘50s American liberalism offered a far more radical social vision than we now remember. He tracks the influential mid-century entwining of Bauhaus aesthetics with American social science and psychology. From the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the New Bauhaus in Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Turner shows how some of the best-known artists and intellectuals of the forties developed new models of media, new theories of interpersonal and international collaboration, and new visions of an open, tolerant, and democratic self in direct contrast to the repression and conformity associated with the fascist and communist movements. He then shows how their work shaped some of the most significant media events of the Cold War, including Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, the multimedia performances of John Cage, and, ultimately, the psychedelic Be-Ins of the sixties. Turner demonstrates that by the end of the 1950s this vision of the democratic self and the media built to promote it would actually become part of the mainstream, even shaping American propaganda efforts in Europe. Overturning common misconceptions of these transformational years, The Democratic Surround shows just how much the artistic and social radicalism of the sixties owed to the liberal ideals of Cold War America, a democratic vision that still underlies our hopes for digital media today. “Brilliant . . . [an] excellent and thought-provoking book.” —Tropics of Meta