The Making And Unmaking Of Democracy

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The Making and Unmaking of Democracy

Author : Theodore K. Rabb
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113670468X
Total Pages : 398 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (367 download)

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Book Synopsis The Making and Unmaking of Democracy by : Theodore K. Rabb

Download or read book The Making and Unmaking of Democracy written by Theodore K. Rabb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For every citizen of the world, there is no more urgent issue than the spread of democracy. Democracy is what the WTO-protestors are calling for; it's the main concern of human rights advocates; and it's only long-term way to end terrorism. But how does democracy spread? What can be done to encourage and support. This remarkable new collection brings together some of the best minds in variety of fields to discuss the conditions that promote and sustain, or undermine and extinguish democratic institutions and ideas. Spanning political thought from ancient Athens to contemporary sub-Saharan Africa, the contributors develop an outline of how democracy develops. Several key factors emerge: Democratic transitions are always heavily shaped by the ideas and practices of past regimes (like tribal traditions in Africa), international political and economic pressure to liberalize (as in Asia) and current economic conditions. The quality of democracy is almost always improved by the elimination of religion as the center of the state, by the move from democracy as protection of the individual from the state to democracy as enhancer of rights, and by the progression from a focus on the individual to a focus on the community. Expansive in its coverage and fundamental in its significance, The Making and Unmaking of Democracy is a volume to learn from, argue against, and expand upon.

Torture and Democracy

Author : Darius Rejali
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400830877
Total Pages : 865 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Torture and Democracy by : Darius Rejali

Download or read book Torture and Democracy written by Darius Rejali and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-08 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods. Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research--conducted in multiple languages and on several continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.

Democratic Transition in the Middle East

Author : Larbi Sadiki
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136181660
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (361 download)

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Book Synopsis Democratic Transition in the Middle East by : Larbi Sadiki

Download or read book Democratic Transition in the Middle East written by Larbi Sadiki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular uprisings and revolts across the Arab Middle East have often resulted in a democratic faragh or void in power. How society seeks to fill that void, regardless of whether the regime falls or survives, is the common trajectory followed by the seven empirical case studies published here for the first time. This edited volume seeks to unpack the state of the democratic void in three interrelated fields: democracy, legitimacy and social relations. In doing so, the conventional treatment of democratization as a linear, formal, systemic and systematic process is challenged and the power politics of democratic transition reassessed. Through a close examination of case studies focusing on Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, this collection introduces the reader to indigenous narratives on how power is wrested and negotiated from the bottom up. It will be of interest to those seeking a fresh perspective on democratization models as well as those seeking to understand the reshaping of the Arab Middle East in the lead-up to the Arab Spring.

The Ends of Resistance

Author : Alix Olson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780231204989
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (49 download)

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Book Synopsis The Ends of Resistance by : Alix Olson

Download or read book The Ends of Resistance written by Alix Olson and published by . This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the rise of Donald Trump and other right-wing authoritarians worldwide, we have been told to "resist." But this kind of opposition looks surprisingly like restoring the status quo. Under the banner of resistance, liberals and progressives have encouraged voting for Democrats, reading the mainstream media, trusting the science, putting up yard signs, buying the right products, and celebrating a "return to normal." How was "resistance" diluted, and where can we find alternative forms of resistance for present and future struggles? Alix Olson and Alex Zamalin offer a clear-eyed critical account of how neoliberalism has redefined resistance to thwart social movements and consolidate power. Elites have domesticated and coopted some once-radical concepts and practices into "restorative resistance" that bolsters support for an unjust social order while marginalizing, racializing, and criminalizing many others. Olson and Zamalin argue that true resistance to racial neoliberalism must instead be deeply antirestorative: collective, horizontal, counterhegemonic, radically democratic insurrectionary movements that cannot be redirected into shoring up the existing order. This "unruly world-building"--exemplified by Occupy Wall Street, the Movement for Black Lives, Indigenous activism at Standing Rock, and more--pushes us to live, think, and dream beyond profit maximization, democratic civility, and individual freedom. Powerfully and accessibly written with manifesto-like urgency, The Ends of Resistance shows how marginalized voices and social movements deepen our thinking for confronting power.

Making and Unmaking Nations

Author : Scott Straus
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801455677
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis Making and Unmaking Nations by : Scott Straus

Download or read book Making and Unmaking Nations written by Scott Straus and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Grawmeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, 2018 Winner of the Joseph Lepgold Prize Winner of the Best Books in Conflict Studies (APSA) Winner of the Best Book in Human Rights (ISA) In Making and Unmaking Nations, Scott Straus seeks to explain why and how genocide takes place—and, perhaps more important, how it has been avoided in places where it may have seemed likely or even inevitable. To solve that puzzle, he examines postcolonial Africa, analyzing countries in which genocide occurred and where it could have but did not. Why have there not been other Rwandas? Straus finds that deep-rooted ideologies—how leaders make their nations—shape strategies of violence and are central to what leads to or away from genocide. Other critical factors include the dynamics of war, the role of restraint, and the interaction between national and local actors in the staging of campaigns of large-scale violence. Grounded in Straus's extensive fieldwork in contemporary Africa, the study of major twentieth-century cases of genocide, and the literature on genocide and political violence, Making and Unmaking Nations centers on cogent analyses of three nongenocide cases (Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal) and two in which genocide took place (Rwanda and Sudan). Straus's empirical analysis is based in part on an original database of presidential speeches from 1960 to 2005. The book also includes a broad-gauge analysis of all major cases of large-scale violence in Africa since decolonization. Straus's insights into the causes of genocide will inform the study of political violence as well as giving policymakers and nongovernmental organizations valuable tools for the future.

The Unmaking of Israel

Author : Gershom Gorenberg
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0062097318
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis The Unmaking of Israel by : Gershom Gorenberg

Download or read book The Unmaking of Israel written by Gershom Gorenberg and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prominent Israeli journalist GershomGorenbergoffers a penetrating and provocativelook at how the balance of power in Israel has shifted toward extremism,threatening the prospects for peace and democracy as the Israeli-Palestinianconflict intensifies. Informing his examination using interviews in Israel andthe West Bank and with access to previously classified Israeli documents, Gorenberg delivers an incisive discussion of the causes andtrends of extremism in Israel’s government and society. Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The AmazingAdventures of Kavalier and Clay, writes, "until I read The Unmaking of Israel, I didn't think it could bepossible to feel more despairing, and then more terribly hopeful, about Israel,a place that I began at last, under the spell of GershomGorenberg's lucid and dispassionate yet intenselypersonal writing, to understand."

The Making and Unmaking of Democracy

Author : Theodore K. Rabb
Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 9780415933810
Total Pages : 398 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (338 download)

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Book Synopsis The Making and Unmaking of Democracy by : Theodore K. Rabb

Download or read book The Making and Unmaking of Democracy written by Theodore K. Rabb and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Nested Nationalism

Author : Krista A. Goff
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501753282
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Nested Nationalism by : Krista A. Goff

Download or read book Nested Nationalism written by Krista A. Goff and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nested Nationalism is a study of the politics and practices of managing national minority identifications, rights, and communities in the Soviet Union and the personal and political consequences of such efforts. Titular nationalities that had republics named after them in the USSR were comparatively privileged within the boundaries of "their" republics, but they still often chafed both at Moscow's influence over republican affairs and at broader Russian hegemony across the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, members of nontitular communities frequently complained that nationalist republican leaders sought to build titular nations on the back of minority assimilation and erasure. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, and Moscow, Krista A. Goff argues that Soviet nationality policies produced recursive, nested relationships between majority and minority nationalisms and national identifications in the USSR. Goff pays particular attention to how these asymmetries of power played out in minority communities, following them from Azerbaijan to Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran in pursuit of the national ideas, identifications, and histories that were layered across internal and international borders. What mechanisms supported cultural development and minority identifications in communities subjected to assimilationist politics? How did separatist movements coalesce among nontitular minority activists? And how does this historicization help us to understand the tenuous space occupied by minorities in nationalizing states across contemporary Eurasia? Ranging from the early days of Soviet power to post-Soviet ethnic conflicts, Nested Nationalism explains how Soviet-era experiences and policies continue to shape interethnic relationships and expectations today.

Neither Settler nor Native

Author : Mahmood Mamdani
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674987322
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis Neither Settler nor Native by : Mahmood Mamdani

Download or read book Neither Settler nor Native written by Mahmood Mamdani and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities. In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.

Democracy in Chains

Author : Nancy MacLean
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101980974
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (19 download)

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Book Synopsis Democracy in Chains by : Nancy MacLean

Download or read book Democracy in Chains written by Nancy MacLean and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's "Most Valuable Book" “[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic “This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.”—NPR An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution. Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

Fragile Victory

Author : James E. Cronin
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300247850
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Fragile Victory by : James E. Cronin

Download or read book Fragile Victory written by James E. Cronin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the history of liberal order and democratic politics since the 1930s explains ongoing threats to democracy and international order The liberal democratic order that seemed so stable in North America and Western Europe has become precarious. James E. Cronin argues that liberalism has never been secure and that since the 1930s the international order has had to be crafted, redeployed, and extended in response to both victories and setbacks. Beginning with the German and Japanese efforts in the 1930s to establish a system based on empire, race, economic protectionism, and militant nationalism, Cronin shows how the postwar system, established out of a revulsion at the ideas of fascism, repeatedly reinvented itself in the face of the Cold War, anticolonial insurgencies, the economic and political crises of the 1970s, the collapse of communism, the rise of globalization, and the financial crisis of 2008. Cronin emphasizes the links between internal and external politics in sustaining liberal order internationally and the domestic origins and correlates of present difficulties. Fragile Victory provides the context necessary to understand such diverse challenges as the triumph of Brexit, the election of Trump, the rise of populism, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950

Author : James R. Lothian
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 520 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950 by : James R. Lothian

Download or read book The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950 written by James R. Lothian and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the engagement of interwar Catholic writers and artists both with modernity and with the political and economic upheavals in England and continental Europe.

Unmaking the Public University

Author : Christopher Newfield
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674060369
Total Pages : 406 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Unmaking the Public University by : Christopher Newfield

Download or read book Unmaking the Public University written by Christopher Newfield and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-30 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential American dream—equal access to higher education—was becoming a reality with the GI Bill and civil rights movements after World War II. But this vital American promise has been broken. Christopher Newfield argues that the financial and political crises of public universities are not the result of economic downturns or of ultimately valuable restructuring, but of a conservative campaign to end public education’s democratizing influence on American society. Unmaking the Public University is the story of how conservatives have maligned and restructured public universities, deceiving the public to serve their own ends. It is a deep and revealing analysis that is long overdue. Newfield carefully describes how this campaign operated, using extensive research into public university archives. He launches the story with the expansive vision of an equitable and creative America that emerged from the post-war boom in college access, and traces the gradual emergence of the anti-egalitarian “corporate university,” practices that ranged from racial policies to research budgeting. Newfield shows that the culture wars have actually been an economic war that a conservative coalition in business, government, and academia have waged on that economically necessary but often independent group, the college-educated middle class. Newfield’s research exposes the crucial fact that the culture wars have functioned as a kind of neutron bomb, one that pulverizes the social and culture claims of college grads while leaving their technical expertise untouched. Unmaking the Public University incisively sets the record straight, describing a forty-year economic war waged on the college-educated public, and awakening us to a vision of social development shared by scientists and humanists alike.

Rule of Law, Misrule of Men

Author : Elaine Scarry
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 026226577X
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (622 download)

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Book Synopsis Rule of Law, Misrule of Men by : Elaine Scarry

Download or read book Rule of Law, Misrule of Men written by Elaine Scarry and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-04-02 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A passionate call for citizen action to uphold the rule of law when government does not. This book is a passionate call for citizen action to uphold the rule of law when government does not. Arguing that post-9/11 legislation and foreign policy severed the executive branch from the will of the people, Elaine Scarry in Rule of Law, Misrule of Men offers a fierce defense of the people's role as guarantor of our democracy. She begins with the groundswell of local resistance to the 2001 Patriot Act, when hundreds of towns, cities, and counties passed resolutions refusing compliance with the information-gathering the act demanded, showing that citizens can take action against laws that undermine the rights of citizens and noncitizens alike. Scarry, once described in the New York Times Sunday Magazine as “known for her unflinching investigations of war, torture, and pain,” then turns to the conduct of the Iraqi occupation, arguing that the Bush administration led the country onto treacherous moral terrain, violating the Geneva Conventions and the armed forces' own most fundamental standards. She warns of the damage done to democracy when military personnel must choose between their own codes of warfare and the illegal orders of their civilian superiors. If our military leaders uphold the rule of law when civilian leaders do not, might we come to prefer them? Finally, reviewing what we know now about the Bush administration's crimes, Scarry insists that prosecution—whether local, national, or international—is essential to restoring the rule of law, and she shows how a brave town in Vermont has taken up the challenge. Throughout the book, Scarry finds hope in moments where citizens withheld their consent to grievous crimes, finding creative ways to stand by their patriotism.

Making and Unmaking Authoriarian Peru

Author : Catherine M. Conaghan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 48 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (318 download)

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Book Synopsis Making and Unmaking Authoriarian Peru by : Catherine M. Conaghan

Download or read book Making and Unmaking Authoriarian Peru written by Catherine M. Conaghan and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper Professor Conaghan reconstructs the last five years of Alberto Fujimori, drawing on Vladi-videos coming out on a weekly basis. It examines how the plan to re-elect President Alberto Fujimori deepened authoritarianism in Peru and how the opposition's struggle against re-election reshaped the political landscape and laid the groundwork for a surprising opening to to regime transition.

The Eyes of the People

Author : Jeffrey Edward Green
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN 13 : 0195372646
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (953 download)

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Book Synopsis The Eyes of the People by : Jeffrey Edward Green

Download or read book The Eyes of the People written by Jeffrey Edward Green and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2010 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the empowerment of the People's voice. In this book, Green argues that it is both possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the People gets to see instead of the traditional focus on what it gets to say.

Where Power Stops

Author : David Runciman
Publisher : Profile Books
ISBN 13 : 1782835997
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (828 download)

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Book Synopsis Where Power Stops by : David Runciman

Download or read book Where Power Stops written by David Runciman and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Theresa May, and Donald Trump: each had different motivations, methods, and paths, but they all sought the highest office. And yet when they reached their goal, they often found that the power they had imagined was illusory. Their sweeping visions of reform faltered. They faced bureaucratic obstructions, but often the biggest obstruction was their own character. However, their personalities could help them as much as hurt them. Arguably the most successful of them, LBJ showed little indication that he supported what he is best known for - the Civil Rights Act - but his grit, resolve, and brute political skill saw him bend Congress to his will. David Runciman tackles the limitations of high office and how the personal histories of those who achieved the very pinnacles of power helped to define their successes and failures in office. These portraits show what characters are most effective in these offices. Could this be a blueprint for good and effective leadership in an age lacking good leaders?