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Author: David Runciman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-08
Total Pages: 286
ISBN-13: 0691148155
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA critical assessement of the problems of sincerity and truth in politics argues that we should accept hypocrisy as a fact of politics without resigning ourselves to it or embracing it, drawing on the lessons of such thinkers as Hobbes, Mandeville, Jefferson, Bentham, Sigwick, and Orwell.
Author: J. J. Joseph
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Published: 2014-06-06
Total Pages: 161
ISBN-13: 1499026005
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDemocracys Hypocrisies My gravitas to write Democracys Hypocrisies emanated in part from President Obamas utter adversities since procurement of the office of commander in chief, but largely due to desperate attempts by a small segment of society to displace the power of the peoples vote with that of their positions of enormous wealth. Numerous social issues are addressed, with the intent to uncover the hypocrisies, which have eroded traditional Democracy as we know it. Hopefully, the reader will, upon completion of this book, find the revelations both informative and enlightening. In my view, it would appear that for the entire duration of his tenure in the White House, this president has been faced with the daunting task of swimming upstream in his attempts to pass anything through congress. Additionally, he has endured more dishonor, disrespect, and caricature in his capacity as president of the United States than anyone else in the history of American presidents. No other president before Mr. Obama has sustained such ridicule while holding the most powerful and noble office in the entire universe. Nonetheless, he has demonstrated exemplary qualities in the manner in which he has maintained his dignity by remaining impervious to such acrimony clearly intended to detract him away from his agenda. There are manifestations of attempts by a small segment of society to shift the power from the peoples vote to the omnipotence of their millions. Last elections saw the most money infused into campaign funds of a few candidates on both sides of the aislebut more on the Republican end of the spectrum. More importantly, in the wake of the 2012 elections, a number of states have vamped up their efforts to disenfranchise minorities through voter suppression, allegations of voter fraud, as well as gerrymandering. This is in direct contradiction to traditional democracy, whose very fundamental principle is government of the people, by the people and for the people. Furthermore, with the recent passage of the legislation by the Supreme Court, allowing donors to endow as much as they deem necessary to their representativeswith no obligation to divulge their sources, one can only imagine how much money will be thrown into the bag in 2016. This is total hypocrisygiven that the vote should carry more weight than the dollar in a democratic society. Clearly, there have been significant erosions to traditional democracy as we know it. It is therefore my hope that power be restored back to the people through their fundamental right to vote, thus allowing them the ability to determine who is elected to public office, rather than a handful of wealthy individuals.
Author: Daniel J. Fiorino
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2018-06-22
Total Pages: 160
ISBN-13: 1509523995
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGlobal climate change poses an unprecedented challenge for governments across the world. Small wonder that many experts question whether democracies have the ability to cope with the causes and long-term consequences of a changing climate. Some even argue that authoritarian regimes are better equipped to make the tough choices required to tackle the climate crisis. In this incisive book, Daniel Fiorino challenges the assumptions and evidence offered by sceptics of democracy and its capacity to handle climate change. Democracies, he explains, typically enjoy higher levels of environmental performance and produce greater innovation in technology, policy, and climate governance than autocracies. Rather than less democracy, Fiorino calls for a more accountable and responsive politics that will provide democratically-elected governments with the enhanced capacity for collective action on climate and other environmental issues.
Author: David Runciman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-07-10
Total Pages: 301
ISBN-13: 1400889669
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat kind of hypocrite should voters choose as their next leader? The question seems utterly cynical. But, as David Runciman suggests, it is actually much more cynical to pretend that politics can ever be completely sincere. Political Hypocrisy is a timely, and timeless, book on the problems of sincerity and truth in politics, and how we can deal with them without slipping into hypocrisy ourselves. Runciman draws on the work of some of the great truth-tellers in modern political thought--Hobbes, Mandeville, Jefferson, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Orwell--and applies his ideas to different kinds of hypocritical politicians from Oliver Cromwell to Hillary Clinton. He argues that we should accept hypocrisy as a fact of politics--the most dangerous form of political hypocrisy is to claim to have a politics without hypocrisy. Featuring a new foreword that takes the story up to Donald Trump, this book examines why, instead of vainly searching for authentic politicians, we should try to distinguish between harmless and harmful hypocrisies and worry only about the most damaging varieties.
Author: Ivan Krastev
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2019-10-31
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 0241345715
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA landmark book that completely transforms our understanding of the crisis of liberalism, from two pre-eminent intellectuals Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only there but also back in the heartland of the West. In this brilliant work of political psychology, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of history turned out to be only the beginning of an Age of Imitation. Reckoning with the history of the last thirty years, they show that the most powerful force behind the wave of populist xenophobia that began in Eastern Europe stems from resentment at the post-1989 imperative to become Westernized. Through this prism, the Trump revolution represents an ironic fulfillment of the promise that the nations exiting from communist rule would come to resemble the United States. In a strange twist, Trump has elevated Putin's Russia and Orbán's Hungary into models for the United States. Written by two pre-eminent intellectuals bridging the East/West divide, The Light that Failed is a landmark book that sheds light on the extraordinary history of our Age of Imitation.
Author: David Runciman
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-06-05
Total Pages: 205
ISBN-13: 1541616790
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow will democracy end? And what will replace it? A preeminent political scientist examines the past, present, and future of an endangered political philosophy Since the end of World War II, democracy's sweep across the globe seemed inexorable. Yet today, it seems radically imperiled, even in some of the world's most stable democracies. How bad could things get? In How Democracy Ends, David Runciman argues that we are trapped in outdated twentieth-century ideas of democratic failure. By fixating on coups and violence, we are focusing on the wrong threats. Our societies are too affluent, too elderly, and too networked to fall apart as they did in the past. We need new ways of thinking the unthinkable -- a twenty-first-century vision of the end of democracy, and whether its collapse might allow us to move forward to something better. A provocative book by a major political philosopher, How Democracy Ends asks the most trenchant questions that underlie the disturbing patterns of our contemporary political life.
Author: James L. Leloudis
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2020-08-06
Total Pages: 191
ISBN-13: 1469660407
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerica is at war with itself over the right to vote, or, more precisely, over the question of who gets to exercise that right and under what circumstances. Conservatives speak in ominous tones of voter fraud so widespread that it threatens public trust in elected government. Progressives counter that fraud is rare and that calls for reforms such as voter ID are part of a campaign to shrink the electorate and exclude some citizens from the political life of the nation. North Carolina is a battleground for this debate, and its history can help us understand why--a century and a half after ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment--we remain a nation divided over the right to vote. In Fragile Democracy, James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad tell the story of race and voting rights, from the end of the Civil War until the present day. They show that battles over the franchise have played out through cycles of emancipatory politics and conservative retrenchment. When race has been used as an instrument of exclusion from political life, the result has been a society in which vast numbers of Americans are denied the elements of meaningful freedom: a good job, a good education, good health, and a good home. That history points to the need for a bold new vision of what democracy looks like.
Author: Leonard Mazzone
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2023
Total Pages: 194
ISBN-13: 3031338200
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Mazzone has focused our attention on an important and underappreciated topic; the way hypocrisy suppresses the complaints of the oppressed and poses a particular threat not just to our politics but to democracies as a whole. The topic could hardly be more urgent." -- Ekow N. Yankah, Thomas M. Cooley Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, USA Unconfessed by definition, hypocrisy is one of the most used and abused polemical categories, even today, to denounce the "masked cynicism" of certain social actors, especially when they hold public office. But has hypocrisy always been just that? Should we really always be wary of it and challenge its every manifestation? What forms of hypocrisy can we distinguish? What kind of relationship exists between hypocrisy and the lack of self-critical attitude of those who are used to challenge the conduct of others? And above all: what relationship exists between this common vice, democratic politics and the institutional reproduction of different forms of oppression and domination? These are just some of the questions that inspire this philosophical journey back into the history of one of the most chameleonic concepts of Western culture. In Mazzones conception, democratic hypocrisy includes argumentative strategies used by institutional actors to refuse any kind of responsibility when their decisions, actions or roles are called into question by the protests of citizens in a democratic context. He reveals the relationship that exists between such apologetic narratives and the institutional reproduction of different forms of oppression and domination. Ultimately, the book urges civic vigilance against underhand wannabe authoritarians, who as a group are evolving to find new ways to trick people into opposing democracy. Leonard Mazzone is Research Associate in Social and Political Philosophy at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Florence, Italy.
Author: John Dewey
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 1916
Total Pages: 456
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
Author: David Runciman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-10-31
Total Pages: 424
ISBN-13: 0691178135
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhy democracies believe they can survive any crisis—and why that belief is so dangerous Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008. A global history with a special focus on the United States, The Confidence Trap examines how democracy survived threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It also looks at the confusion and uncertainty created by unexpected victories, from the defeat of German autocracy in 1918 to the defeat of communism in 1989. Throughout, the book pays close attention to the politicians and thinkers who grappled with these crises: from Woodrow Wilson, Nehru, and Adenauer to Fukuyama and Obama. In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them—and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything—a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasn't already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap.
