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    Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World
    Unavailable
    Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World
    Unavailable
    Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World
    Audiobook9 hours

    Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World

    Written by James Miller

    Narrated by Robert Petkoff

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    About this audiobook

    A new history of the world's most embattled idea.

    Today, democracy is the world's only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In Can Democracy Work? James Miller, the author of the classic history of 1960s protest Democracy Is in the Streets, offers a lively, surprising, and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present. As he shows, democracy has always been rife with inner tensions. The ancient Greeks preferred to choose leaders by lottery and regarded elections as inherently corrupt and undemocratic. The French revolutionaries sought to incarnate the popular will, but many of them came to see the people as the enemy. And in the United States, the franchise would be extended to some even as it was taken from others. Amid the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, communists, liberals, and nationalists all sought to claim the ideals of democracy for themselves—even as they manifestly failed to realize them.

    Ranging from the theaters of Athens to the tents of Occupy Wall Street, Can Democracy Work? is an entertaining and insightful guide to our most cherished—and vexed—ideal.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 18, 2018
    ISBN9781984841803
    Author

    James Miller

    James Miller is a professor of politics and the chair of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of The Passion of Michel Foucault and Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock & Roll, 1947–1977, among other books. He lives in New York City.

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