An astute diagnosis of democracy’s current ailments and an incisive argument for a novel cure.
Three professors of political science outline a new form of democratic participation as a tonic to civic disillusionment.
According to Esterling (The Political Economy of Expertise, 2004), Lazer (co-author: Connecting Democracy, 2011) and Neblo (Deliberative Democracy Between Theory and Practice, 2015), American politics suffers from a crisis of confidence. In response to the increasing complexity of governance, the “partisan blood sport” of ideological polarization, and the dominance of special-interest groups, citizens no longer trust that their participation in the political process bears any fruit: “Contemporary democracy asks little more of citizens than their votes and money, and so it is no wonder that many citizens share a sense of dissatisfaction and disconnection from public life.” The three main responses to these “democratic deficits”—more direct voter participation, more trust in technocratic bureaucracy, and a call for energetic populist leadership—misunderstand the core problem, which is that the relationship between citizens and their representatives have becomes so deformed that people no longer trust that their political expressions matter. The authors argue for a means to revivify that relationship through “directly representative democracy,” the centerpiece of which is the establishment of online, deliberative town halls that permit public officials and their constituents to openly communicate. The authors meticulously articulate the five criteria that any institution would have to satisfy to properly qualify as directly representative—in short, any such mechanism would have to be broadly inclusive, promote an informed and rational exchange of ideas, be scalable to encompass a sizable constituency, and restore the legitimacy of deliberative participation. This work is a brief but impressively thoughtful analysis, both philosophically searching and empirically rigorous—13 members of Congress participated in this study. The authors are inventive but not idealistic—the point is to make relatively modest and manageable improvements in existing structures to produce simple payoffs. The crux of the study is a rational faith in the “latent capacity” of citizens to educate themselves when that effort is properly recognized and rewarded, essentially a trust in the possibility of self-governance itself.
An astute diagnosis of democracy’s current ailments and an incisive argument for a novel cure.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-107-11726-6
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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