Over at JOTWELL,
Roman Hoyos (Southwestern Law School) has posted an admiring
review of James T. Kloppenberg,
Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (2016). Here's a taste:
These are interesting times to be an historian of democracy.
Historians are beginning to explore the myriad ways that people outside
of and even within political officialdom have pressed their claims for
recognition, respect, and inclusion in politics, governance, and
society. This work is steadily reshaping our understanding of the
historical relationships between law, democracy, and the state. At the
same time, we have witnessed recently the emergence of a politics that
appears to many to have up-ended many of our ideas and practices of
democracy. Political ethics of virulent self-aggrandizement, relentless short-term thinking, and total retaliation, in particular, are increasingly prominent. In this moment of heightened attention the question persists: what is democracy?
Too often we reduce democracy to principles like majoritarianism,
egalitarianism, or to institutions like voting and elections. In Toward Democracy,
James Kloppenberg refuses to be cabined by reductionist or essentialist
conceptions of democracy. Instead, his focus is on how Western thinkers
developed an ethical (as opposed to an institutional) framework for
democracy, a set of “principles” and “premises” which, he claims, grew
out of Christianity. These ethics form a dissonant political harmony
that makes democracy a fragile political experiment, containing both the
highest aspirations of humanity and the seeds for their betrayal.
Read on
here.
