A comprehensive analysis that lays the foundation for a discussion of necessary reforms and how they can be achieved.
Why the theories used to rationalize our beliefs in democracy are broken beyond repair and must be replaced.
“Conventional thinking about democracy,” write Achen (Social Sciences and Politics/Princeton Univ.; co-author: The Statistical Analysis of Quasi-Experiments, 1987, etc.) and Bartels (Chair, Public Policy and Social Science/Vanderbilt Univ.; Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, 2008, etc.), “has collapsed in the face of modern social-scientific research.” The authors argue that rising inequality is a byproduct of this breakdown in the way democracy functions, and we desperately need reforms. Unfortunately, the demanded improvements are often unattainable, functioning merely as empty sloganeering. Inequality and insider power have increased over the years, and the politicians who benefit continue to expand their gains. Reformers often substitute increased emotional intensity of their demands for effective political strategies. Neither politicians nor citizens fully understand why this is so or how it can be addressed. As the authors note, campaign finance reform, reductions in income inequality, and the strengthening of equal protections would all be beneficial. Unfortunately, politicians are often not influenced by the people's will. Achen and Bartels combine a long-standing tradition of political criticism with intensive research into population behavior and beliefs. They show that results are not based on individual choices and deliberations but on notions of group identities. Citizens lack the time, inclination, and means to seriously consider issues that should be important but are usually ignored, and partisan loyalties shape—and are shaped by—racial, ethnic, religious, and familial identities. “We believe,” write the authors, “that abandoning the folk theory of democracy is a prerequisite to both greater intellectual clarity and real political change. Too many democratic reformers have squandered their energy on misguided or quixotic ideas.”
A comprehensive analysis that lays the foundation for a discussion of necessary reforms and how they can be achieved.Pub Date: May 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-691-16944-6
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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