Can democracy work?
a short history of a radical idea, from ancient Athens to our world
First edition.
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Word Count
76,500 words, Guess
Page Count
306 pages
Identifiers
- ISBN-100374137641
- ISBN-139780374137649
- Library of Congress Control Number2018002536
- OCLC Control Number1019944586
- Better World Books9780374137649
and 1 more
- Open LibraryOL26966434M
Classifications
- DDC321.8
- LCCJC423 .M617 2018
- LCCJC423.M617 2018
Description
Today, democracy is the world's only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In Can Democracy Work? James Miller, the author of the classic history of 1960s protest Democracy Is in the Streets, offers a lively, surprising, and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present. As he shows, democracy has always been rife with inner tensions. The ancient Greeks preferred to choose leaders by lottery and regarded elections as inherently corrupt and undemocratic. The French revolutionaries sought to incarnate the popular will, but many of them came to see the people as the enemy. And in the United States, the franchise would be extended to some even as it was taken from others. Amid the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, communists, liberals, and nationalists all sought to claim the ideals of democracy for themselves--even as they manifestly failed to realize them.
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