A Democratic Bearing

This book provides a model of active citizenship that counters the Tea Party's exclusivist, self-righteous portrait of democratic life.

In a blend of history, biography, political science, and political theory, he offers examples of the finest democratic leadership as well as cautionary tales of prominent leaders whose styles were essentially aristocratic."--BOOK JACKET.

International Democracy Documents is the first comprehensive compilation on democracy at the international level. It covers the most important international documents relating to democracy, while at the same time providing a focused approach.

The relationship of knowledge and liberties in modern societies presents a multitude of fascinating issues that deserve to be explored more systematically. The production of knowledge is dynamic, and the conditions and practice of freedom is undergoing transformation. These changes ensure that the linkages between liberty and knowledge are always subject to changes. In the past, the connection between scientific knowledge, democracy, and emancipation seemed self-evident. More recently, the close linkage between democracy and knowledge has been viewed with skepticism. This volume explores the relationship between knowledge and democracy, Do they support each other, do they mutually depend on each other, or are they perhaps even in conflict with each other? Does knowledge increase the freedom to act? If additional knowledge contributes to individual and social well being, does it also enhance freedoms? Knowledge and Democracy focuses on the interpenetration of knowledge, freedom and democracy, and does so from various perspectives, theoretical as well as practical. Modern societies are transforming themselves into knowledge societies. This has a fundamental impact on political systems and the relationship of citizens to large social institutions. The contributors to this book systemically explore whether, and in what ways, these modern-day changes and developments are connected to expansion of the capacities of individual citizens to act. They focus on the interrelation of democracy and knowledge, and the role of democratic institutions, as well as on the knowledge and social conduct of actors within democratic institutions. In the process of investigation, they arrive at a new platform for future research and theory, one that is sensitive to present-day societal conflicts, cleavages, and transformations generated by new knowledge. In this way, this volume will attract the interest of political scientists, sociologists, economists and students within various disciplines. Nico Stehr is Karl Mannheim Professor of Cultural Studies at the Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany and a fellow of the Center for the Advanced Study of the Humanities, Essen, Germany. During the academic year 2002/2003 he was Paul F. Lazarsfeld Professor at the University of Vienna. Stehr is also a professor emeritus of the University of Alberta. His research interests include sociology, economics and labor, globalization, and ecology.

'Basic Documents on Human Rights' provides a collection of key documents and covers all elements of the subject. It is an account of the most important instruments adopted by the UN, its agencies, regional organizations and other actors.

In this collection of sixteen literary and historical essays, Peter Green informs, entertains, and stimulates. He covers a wide range of subjects, from Greek attitudes toward death to the mysteries of the Delphic Oracle, from Tutankhamun and the gold of Egypt to sex in ancient literature, from the island of Lesbos (where he once lived) to the challenges of translating Ovid's wit and elegant eroticism into present-day English verse, from Victorian pederastic aesthetics to Marxism's losing battle with ancient history. This third volume of Green's essays (several previously unpublished) reveals throughout his serious concern that we are, in a very real sense, losing the legacy of antiquity through the corrosive methodologies of modern academic criticism.

This volume surveys the burst of political imagination that created multiple Enlightenment cultures in an era widely understood as an age of democratic revolutions. Enlightenment as precursor to liberal democratic modernity was once secular catechism for generations of readers. Yet democracy did not elicit much enthusiasm among contemporaries, while democracy as a political system remained virtually nonexistent through much of the period. If seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas did underwrite the democracies of succeeding centuries, they were often inheritances from monarchical governments that had encouraged plural structures of power competition. But in revolutions across France, Britain, and North America, the republican integration of constitutional principle and popular will established rational hope for public happiness. Nevertheless, the tragic clashes of principle and will in fraught revolutionary projects were also democratic legacies. Each chapter focuses on a distinct theme: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the “common good”; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and the transformations of sovereignty-a synoptic survey of the cultural entanglements of “enlightenment” and “democracy.”