---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Mon, May 2, 2011 at 8:50 PM Subject: "Post-Democracy" - book - Colin Crouch To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-democracy It is a polemic term because it calls attention to recognised democracies that are losing some of their foundations evolving toward an Aristocratic<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristocracy_%28government%29> regime. A *Post-democracy* may be characterised with: - non representative elections <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election> - citizen rights<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_and_political_rights> are not respected by the state, or its representatives - or, impossibility to get balanced debates<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate> Hereby, while thus contradicting pluralist<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_%28political_philosophy%29> assumptions, it seems to be an accepted presumption, that the common good were something to be determined objectively and that conflicts of interest were not to be handled within democratic processes but instead within administrative proceedings. ------------- http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=0745633153 *Post-Democracy* is a polemical work that goes beyond current complaints about the failings of our democracy and explores the deeper social and economic forces that account for the current malaise. Colin Crouch argues that the decline of those social classes which had made possible an active and critical mass politics has combined with the rise of global capitalism to produce a self-referential political class more concerned with forging links with wealthy business interests than with pursuing political programmes which meet the concerns of ordinary people. He shows how, in some respects, politics at the dawn of the twenty-first century returns us to a world familiar well before the start of the twentieth, when politics was a game played among elites. However, Crouch maintains that the experience of the twentieth century remains salient and it reminds us of possibilities for the revival of politics. -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens