Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought
2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jax178
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoJames T. Kloppenberg's massive Toward Democracy is an exploration of American, British, and French thinking about democracy from the end of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. The book dazzles through its range and sweep, offering new interpretations of familiar texts and drawing attention to unfamiliar ones. Readers will find, in this single volume—in addition to a history of political developments in the United States, Great Britain, and France—penetrating interpretations of major thinkers from Michel de Montaigne to Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Hobbes to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke to James Madison. To navigate this vast expanse of material in a coherent way, Kloppenberg needs to limit what he will do. He is entirely forthright about what he considers “democracy” to be and how he will trace its history. This makes for the book's strengths and weaknesses. For Kloppenberg, democracy cannot be reduced to any particular set of institutions and practices. These must and will change over time. Democracy does, however, entail (a) a commitment to deliberation, (b) an openness to substantive change born out of deliberation (so long as popular sovereignty, autonomy, and equality are assured) and, perhaps most important, (c) an “ethic of reciprocity,” which entails “treating all persons with respect and weighing well their aspirations and their ways of looking at the world” (p. 10).
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