The Woodrow Wilson Center Press
Paradoxes of Democracy
This work is about the inherent weaknesses and surprising strenghts of democratic government by one of the most productive and learned schoalrs in the social sciences.
Shmel Eisenstadt opens with observations on divergent theories of democracy and closes with a discussion of mechanisms by which democratic regimes incorporate into their own structures the movements of protest that seem to challenge their existence. In between he courses through the roots of democratic theory in modern culture, the contradictions and tensions prompted by those roots, and some fo the historical manifestations of contradiction.
What People are Saying
Chapter List
Introduction: The Problem
1. Constitutional and Participatory Conceptions of Democracy
2. The Historical Roots of Constitutional Democratic Regimes
3. The Cultural and Political Programs of Modernity: Basic Premises
4. The Cultural Program of Modernity: Antinomies, Tensions, Contradictions, and Criticisms
5. The Political Program of Modernity: Tensions Between Pluralistic and Jacobin Tendencies
6. The Political Process in Modern Societies: Protest Movements and the Redefinition of the Political
7. Social Movements in Modern Constitutional REgimes
8. The Challenge of Incorporating Protest: The Non-Zero-Sum Game Conception of Politics and the Structuring of Trust in Modern Societies
9. Tendencies to Deconsolidaiton of Democracy in Contemporary Societies