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Can Democracy Work?

A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World

James Miller

Picador

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ISBN10: 1250234670
ISBN13: 9781250234674

Trade Paperback

320 Pages

$22.00

CA$30.00

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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.

Ranging from the theaters of Athens to the tents of Occupy Wall Street, Can Democracy Work? is an entertaining and insightful guide to our most cherished—and vexed—ideal.

Reviews

Praise for Can Democracy Work?

"The strength of this book lies . . . in the exquisite portraits it paints of characters who stand behind the immortalized Pericles, Robespierre, and Thomas Jefferson . . . [Miller] forces the reader to sit up and realize that history isn’t a definitive grayed parchment beyond reproach, but actually a living force constantly capable of new interpretation and meaning in our current world. . . Like the ekklesia in Athens, the constituent assembly in Versailles, and the soviet in Petrograd – Can Democracy Work? offers insightful context on how our own body politic will survive these turbulent times." —John Colin Marston, The Christian Science Monitor

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BOOK EXCERPTS

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ONE

A CLOSED COMMUNITY OF SELF-GOVERNING CITIZENS


WHEN AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENTISTS speak of democracy today, they generally have in mind a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free...

About the author

James Miller

James Miller is a professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche; Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947–1977; and Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago.

© Emma Dodge Hanson Photography