Democracy - reading...
Democracy, Agency, and the State: Guillermo O'Donnell
Democracy, Agency, and the State aims to contribute to a comparatively informed theory of democracy. Professor O'Donnell begins by arguing that conceptions of 'the state' and 'democracy', and their respective defining features, significantly influence each other. Using an approach that is both historical and analytical, he traces this relationship through the idea of legally sanctioned and backed agency which grounds democratic citizenship. From this standpoint he explores several aspects of the democratic regime and of the state, distinguishing four constitutive dimensions (bureaucracy, legality, focus of collective identity, and filter). He goes on to examine the role played by the idea of 'the nation' or 'the people', and the ways in which the state represents itself to different sections of society, especially in countries marred by deep inequality and pervasive poverty.
Guillermo O'Donnell
Kellogg :: Faculty :: Fellows :: Guillermo O'Donnell Kellogg Institute Tribute Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Senior Fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies (LLB, National University of Buenos Aires, 1958; Ph.D.
It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices. Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market.
The Illusion of Free Markets - Bernard E. Harcourt
Bernard E. Harcourt | University of Chicago Law School
Website: http://bernardharcourt.com/ Professor Harcourt is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law, the Chair of the Political Science Department, and Professor of Political Science at The University of Chicago. Professor Harcourt's scholarship intersects social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, and penal law and procedure. He is the author of the book, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press 2011) and the co-editor with Fabienne Brion of Michel Foucault's Mal faire, dire vrai (in French 2012 here at PUL and in English forthcoming at the University of Chicago Press ). He is also the author of Against Prediction: Punishing and Policing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press 2007), Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press 2005), and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing (Harvard University Press 2001).
Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
This book develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy. Different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political power and resources. Thus democracy is preferred by the majority of citizens, but opposed by elites. Dictatorship nevertheless is not stable when citizens can threaten social disorder and revolution.
The Conditions of Democracy in Europe 1919-39
Between 1918 and 1945 there were many changes in European politics - old empires disappeared and new independent political systems emerged. Over the same period most countries faced similar problems - the world economic crisis and the rise of new ideologies and new political movements. But the political effects of these varied, and this study looks at the following key questions: why did democracy survive in some countries but not in others? How were some political institutions able to contain or manage the crises they faced but others collapsed or underwent radical transformation?Models of Democracy by David Held
Welcome to the website for Models of Democracy Welcome to the website for the third edition of Models of Democracy . It contains a number of useful resources, including information about the author, a detailed study guide, an interview and a postscript to the book. All of these resources can be accessed by clicking on the above links. About the book The first two editions of Models of Democracy have proven immensely popular among students and specialists worldwide.
Colin Crouch - Post-Democracy
Description Post-Democracy is a polemical work that goes beyond current complaints about the failings of our democracy and explores the deeper social and economic forces that account for the current malaise. Colin Crouch argues that the decline of those social classes which had made possible an active and critical mass politics has combined with the rise of global capitalism to produce a self-referential political class more concerned with forging links with wealthy business interests than with pursuing political programmes which meet the concerns of ordinary people. He shows how, in some respects, politics at the dawn of the twenty-first century returns us to a world familiar well before the start of the twentieth, when politics was a game played among elites. However, Crouch maintains that the experience of the twentieth century remains salient and it reminds us of possibilities for the revival of politics.
" In Search of Politics is an amazingly compact book. . . . [It] is often trenchantly and sometimes elegantly written and rich with observations or questions that invite both research and sober citizenly contemplation. I heartily recommend this book
In Search of Politics - Zygmunt Bauman
All societies must deal with the possibility of violence, and they do so in different ways. This book integrates the problem of violence into a larger social science and historical framework, showing how economic and political behavior are closely linked. Most societies, which we call natural states, limit violence by political manipulation of the economy to create privileged interests. These privileges limit the use of violence by powerful individuals, but doing so hinders both economic and political development.
Violence and Social Orders - Cambridge Books Online - Cambridge University Press
International Political Economy / IR - reading...
New Left Review 16, July-August 2002 John Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics disdains liberal-imperial rhetoric for a tough-minded theory of ‘offensive realism’. Peter Gowan argues that, whatever its merits, the behaviour of states in the international system cannot be dissociated from the internal dynamics of the political orders they protect.
Peter Gowan: A Calculus of Power
Author: Charles A. Kupchan , Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow September 2003 The Tragedy of Great Power Politics John J.
Review of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
Political theory
Timothy Mitchell
Charles Tilly