Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.87 (579 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 019505461X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 912 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-07-26 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Our democracies would work better if, as Kloppenberg suggests, we followed St. After a look back at the origins of democratic ideas in classical, biblical, and medieval times, Kloppenberg's story gets underway with the Protestant Reformation and the Puritans of New and Old England. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities, Stanford Humanities Center "This impressive work, a monument to the author's lifetime of historical scholarship, provides a lucid, richly informed narrative about the struggle for democracy across the centuries. In a time when democracy again seems tragically fragile, James Kloppenberg has given us a sweeping, searching and enormously timely account of its development in European and American thought. Elsewhere,
Kloppenberg is Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard, where he teaches European and American intellectual history. James T. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians, has served as Pitt Professor at the University of Cambridge and as a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and has held fe
"Rigorous and Rich - A Full-Bodied History of Democracy" according to GDP. John Adams famously wrote that the American Revolution took place "in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington" (p. 289). As Adams knew well, the American Revolution's antecedents reached much further back. The ideas hatched by Americans in the Revolutionary era were the inheritance of a long intellectual. "How long will democracy continue?" according to PM. This is an exhaustive study of the evolution of representative democracy in the United States, England and France. The author is thoroughly familiar with his material and it will be judged as a standard of academic excellence. That said, it it not an easy read and at times is mind numbing, for instance in his seemingly endless accounts of John Adam's correspondence. I will not re-read this book, but have . Five Stars Claire Huntley very nice book, enjoying it
The product of twenty years of research and reflection, this momentous work reveals how nations have repeatedly fallen short in their attempts to construct democratic societies based on the principles of autonomy, equality, deliberation, and reciprocity that they have claimed to prize. Democracies were deemed chaotic and bloody, indicative of rule by the rabble rather than by enlightened minds. Underlying this exploration lies Kloppenberg's compelling conviction that democracy was and remains an ethical ideal rather than merely a set of institutions, a goal toward which we continue to struggle.. The story of democracy remains one without an ending, a dynamic of progress and regress that continues to our own day. Over three centuries, explosive ideas and practices of democracy sparked revolutions--English, American, and French--that again and again culminated in civil wars, disastrous failures of democracy that impeded further progress.Comprehensive, provocative, and authoritative, Toward Democracy traces self-government through three pivotal centuries. In the classical age "democracy" was seen as the failure rather than the ideal of good governance. Notions about what constituted