Cargando…
Open democracy : reinventing popular rule for the twenty-first century /
To the Ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in a public space and arguing based on an agenda set by a randomly selected assembly of 500 other citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings in Northern Europe a few centuries later, it meant gathering every summer in a large field, a place where they held th...
| Clasificación: | Libro Electrónico |
|---|---|
| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
Princeton, New Jersey :
Princeton University Press,
[2020]
|
| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
| Sumario: | To the Ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in a public space and arguing based on an agenda set by a randomly selected assembly of 500 other citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings in Northern Europe a few centuries later, it meant gathering every summer in a large field, a place where they held their own annual "parliament," and similarly talking things through until they got to relatively consensual decisions about their common fate. Our contemporary representative democracies are very different. Modern Parliaments are intimidating buildings that are much harder to access for ordinary citizens-quite literally. They are typically gated and guarded, and it often feels as if only certain types of people - people with the right suit, accent, bank account, connections, even last names - are welcome to enter them. In this book, the author revitalizes the model of success from ancient open democracies alongside the problems of twenty-first century representative democracies in order to get to the heart of the issues which contemporary democratic societies are dealing with. Something has been lost between the two, the author argues: accessibility; openness to the ordinary man and woman. The author believes the move to "representative" democracy, a mediated form of democracy seen as unavoidable in mass, commercial societies, also became a move towards democratic closure, and exclusivity. This book asks how can we recover the openness of ancient democracies, and would it help the crisis of democracy? In diagnosing what is wrong with representative democracy, the book offers a normative alternative and strategy - one that is more true to the democratic ideal of "government of the people, by the people, for the people." This alternative conception (open democracy) is one the author believes can be used to imagine and design more participatory, responsive, accountable, and smarter institutions, thereby strengthening our democracies along with on the whole, our societies. -- |
|---|---|
| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource (xix, 243 pages) |
| Bibliografía: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 0691208727 9780691208725 |