Toward Democracy The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought

by Kloppenberg, James T.

• ISBN13: 9780195054613
• ISBN10: 019505461X
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780190457686
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-06-03
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details
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Summary

In this magnificent and encyclopedic overview, James T. Kloppenberg presents the history of democracy from the perspective of those who struggled to envision and achieve it. The story of democracy remains one without an ending, a dynamic of progress and regress that continues to our own day. In the classical age "democracy" was seen as the failure rather than the ideal of good governance. Democracies were deemed chaotic and bloody, indicative of rule by the rabble rather than by enlightened minds. Beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries, however, first in Europe and then in England's North American colonies, the reputation of democracy began to rise, resulting in changes that were sometimes revolutionary and dramatic, sometimes gradual and incremental.

Kloppenberg offers a fresh look at how concepts and institutions of representative government developed and how understandings of self-rule changed over time on both sides of the Atlantic. Notions about what constituted true democracy preoccupied many of the most influential thinkers of the Western world, from Montaigne and Roger Williams to Milton and John Locke; from Rousseau and Jefferson to Wollstonecraft and Madison; and from de Tocqueville and J. S. Mill to Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Over three centuries, explosive ideas and practices of democracy sparked revolutions--English, American, and French--that again and again culminated in civil wars, disastrous failures of democracy that impeded further progress.

Comprehensive, provocative, and authoritative, Toward Democracy traces self-government through three pivotal centuries. The product of twenty years of research and reflection, this momentous work reveals how nations have repeatedly fallen short in their attempts to construct democratic societies based on the principles of autonomy, equality, deliberation, and reciprocity that they have claimed to prize. Underlying this exploration lies Kloppenberg's compelling conviction that democracy was and remains an ethical ideal rather than merely a set of institutions, a goal toward which we continue to struggle.

Author Biography

James T. Kloppenberg is Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: The Paradoxes of Democracy in History

Part One: Roots and Branches
1. Born in Bloodshed: The Origins Democracy
2. Voices in the Wilderness: Democracies in North America
3. Democracy Deferred: The English Civil War
4. Coup d'Etat: 1688 in England and America

Part Two: Trial and Error
5. Sympathy, Will, and Democracy in the Enlightenments of Europe
6. Enlightenment, Faith, and Resistance in America
7. Democracy and American Independence
8. Constituting American Democracy
9. Ratification and Reciprocity

Part Three: Failure in Success
10. Delusions of Unity and Collisions with Tradition in France
11. Virtue and Violence in the French Revolution
12. Democracy in the Wake of Terror
13. Diagnosing Cultures of Democracy in America and Europe
14. The Tragic Irony of Democracy

Notes