The Two Faces Of Democracy

Political myths surround the figure of the people and help to explain its influence; should the people itself be regarded as fictional? This original and accessible study sheds a fresh light on debates about popular sovereignty, and will be an important resource for students and scholars of political theory.

"The democratic imagination is facing significant challenges. These challenges involve not only deep philosophical questions about the core values of democracy, but also pressing practical issues related to how we should understand and confront the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism. What should our stance be as defenders of democratic life? The two most prominent efforts to orient us here are the deliberative and agonistic models of democracy. The former emphasizes reasoned discussion, but some worry that this exclusive focus overlooks structures of injustice that distort civil deliberation. The latter prioritizes contestation and conflict, but its proponents struggle to explain why this prime orientation to defeating political opponents will not also corrode our commitment to normative democratic restraints, like fairness. This book develops an understanding of the moral core of democracy. In doing so, it illuminates how these two faces of democratic life, the deliberative and agonistic, each has a significant, but constrained, role to play in a more capacious comprehension of what our democratic commitments require of us. The "communicative model" of democracy we propose provides better grounds for facing the challenges of contemporary anti-democratic movements than either the deliberative or agonistic models alone"--

The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American political tradition from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidentialism in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Aziz Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule—one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women. These practices of liberty and exclusion were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin. However, at crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.

This inclusive study examines the extraordinarily high rates of political nonparticipation in the United States and the political, historical, institutional, and philosophical roots of such widespread apathy. To explain why individuals become committed to political apathy as a political role, Tom DeLuca begins by defining "the two faces of political apathy." The first, rooted in free will, properly places responsibility for nonparticipation in the political process on individuals. Political scientists and journalists, however, too often overlook a second, more insidious face of apathy--a condition created by institutional practices and social and cultural structures that limit participation and political awareness. The public blames our most disenfranchised citizens for their own disenfranchisement. Apathetic citizens blame themselves. DeLuca examines classic and representative explanations of non-participation by political analysts across a range of methodologies and schools of thought. Focusing on their views on the concepts of political power and political participation, he assesses current proposals for reform. He argues that overcoming the second face of apathy requires a strategy of "real political equality," which includes greater equality in the availability of political resources, in setting the political agenda, in clarifying political issues, and in developing a public sphere for more genuine democratic politics. Author note: Tom DeLuca is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. He has been a long-time activist on local and national issues, especially nuclear arms control, and his op-ed pieces on politics have appeared in The New York Times, New York Newsday, The Nation, and The Progressive.

Justice is a human virtue that is at once unconditional and conditional. Under favorable circumstances, we can be motivated to act justly by the belief that we must live up to what justice requires, irrespective of whether we benefit from doing so. But our will to act justly is subject to conditions. We find it difficult to exercise the virtue of justice when others regularly fail to. Even if we appear to have overcome the difficulty, our reluctance often betrays itself in certain moral emotions. In this book, Jiwei Ci explores the dual nature of justice, in an attempt to make unitary sense of key features of justice reflected in its close relation to resentment, punishment, and forgiveness. Rather than pursue a search for normative principles, he probes the human psychology of justice to understand what motivates moral agents who seek to behave justly, and why their desire to be just is as precarious as it is uplifting. A wide-ranging treatment of enduring questions, The Two Faces of Justice can also be read as a remarkably discerning contribution to the Western discourse on justice re-launched in our time by John Rawls.

This book evaluates democratic innovations to allow a full analysis of the different practices that have emerged recently in Latin America. These innovations, often viewed in a positive light by a large section of democratic theorists, engendered the idea that all innovations are democratic and all democratic innovations are able to foster citizenship – a view challenged by this work. The book also evaluates the expansion of innovation to the field of judicial institutions. It will benefit democratic theorists by presenting a realistic analysis of the positive and negative aspects of democratic innovation.