The Antiegalitarian Mutation: The Failure of Institutional Politics in Liberal Democracies

ISBN-13: 9780231169844 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 200 str.

Nadia Urbinati; Arturo Zampaglione; Martin Thom

Opis

The twin crises of immigration and mass migration brought new urgency to the balance of power between progressive, humanitarian groups and their populist opponents. In the United States and many European countries, the outcome of this struggle is uncertain, with a high chance that the public will elect more politicians who support an agenda of nativism and privatization.

The Antiegalitarian Mutation makes a forceful case that those seeking to limit citizenship and participation, political or otherwise, have co-opted democracy. Political and legal institutions are failing to temper the interests of people with economic power against the needs of the many, leading to an unsustainable rise in income inequality and a new oligarchy rapidly assuming broad social control. For Nadia Urbinati and Arturo Zampaglione, this insupportable state of affairs is not an inevitable outcome of robust capitalism but rather the result of an ideological war waged against social democracy by the neoliberal governments of Reagan, Thatcher, and others. These giants of free-market fundamentalism secured power through legitimate political means, and only by taking back our political institutions can we remedy the social ills that threaten to unmake our world. That, according to The Antiegalitarian Mutation, is democracy's challenge and its ongoing promise.

Recenzje

"Nadia Urbinati is one of the most original thinkers of representative democracy in our time. In this set of wide-ranging and stimulating conversations, she uses her theory and insights drawn from across the history of political thought to illuminate the profound challenges to political equality that we are witnessing in both Europe and the Americas today." - Jan-Werner Müller, author of What is Populism?, Princeton University

O autorze

Nadia Urbinati is Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University. Her books include Democracy Disfigured (2014) and A Cosmopolitanism of Nations (2009). Arturo Zampaglione is the New York correspondent for La Repubblica.