Democratic Unity Research Articles

Poetic Politics: Renewing a Black Jeremiad on the Inaugural Stage

Abstract National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman stunned the United States with her captivating performance of “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” during the 2021 inaugural ceremony for President Biden and Vice President Harris. Analyzing this political poem, we contribute to the rhetorical scholarship of inaugural ceremonies and demonstrate how Gorman's performance renews a tradition of Black jeremiads. Specifically, we argue that Gorman's performance creates a “double play” on white expectations, thereby crafting a rival version of democratic unity as she poetically envisions a “we the people” that does not center on the U.S. system of white supremacy and is not sponsored by white aesthetic and rhetorical traditions. Ultimately, we demonstrate how Gorman's Black poetic jeremiad calls Americans into a democracy that rejects white supremacist assumptions of the good life.

Toward a Community of Democracies: Cold War Visions for Democratic Unity

On December 5–8, 1988, two former U.S. presidents, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, presided over a gathering of sixty-eight participants from forty-four democracies at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Arranged by a private organization called the Committee for a Community of Democracies (CCD), this All-Democracies Conference was made possible through financial support from the U.S. government and private foundations and backed by a strong endorsement from U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s administration. The culmination of years of work by the CCD, the conference’s stated purpose was to “consider the establishment of institutions to strengthen solidarity and cooperation among democratic governments.”1 As Ford observed in his opening remarks, never before had citizens of so many democratic nations assembled to promote democracy. Thirty-three years later, on December 9, 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden, convened another gathering of democracies at his Summit for Democracy. Several factors set this event apart from the All-Democracies Conference. Most notably, it was arranged by the U.S. government rather than a private organization, was considerably larger with over 275 participants from more than 100 countries, and it was conducted virtually due to the covid-19 pandemic. Moreover, the late Cold War context of the All-Democracies Conference had been replaced by an era of emerging great power rivalry between the United States and China. Yet, the purpose of the Summit for Democracy echoed that of its unacknowledged predecessor. In a press briefing announcing the summit on March 24, 2021, Biden declared, “I am going to invite an alliance of democracies to come here to discuss the future.”2 The official summit website proclaimed that it aimed to “set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.”3

Bootstrap Liberalism: Texas Political Culture in the Age of FDR by Sean P. Cunningham

Reviewed by: Bootstrap Liberalism: Texas Political Culture in the Age of FDR by Sean P. Cunningham Keith Volanto Bootstrap Liberalism: Texas Political Culture in the Age of FDR. By Sean P. Cunningham. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2022. Pp. 328. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) While researching the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) many years ago, I was intrigued by the extent to which so many traditionally conservative Texas politicians enthusiastically supported Franklin Roosevelt and his domestic agenda. One of these representatives, Marvin Jones of Amarillo, defended the plan to use a system of government subsidies to help the nation’s farmers from critics accusing the administration of promoting dangerous collectivism. While he supported individual liberty as much as the next American, Jones said, he believed the times dictated an interventionist approach by the federal government to facilitate what he termed an “ordered liberty.” I was so struck by the phrase that I used it as the title of the dissertation I was then researching. In this fine book on Texas political culture during the Roosevelt years, Sean P. Cunningham cites Jones’s use of the same phrase while describing the support that the New Deal received from Jones and similar fiscally conservative Democrats from the Lone Star State. [End Page 405] Cunningham also covers FDR’s backing from dedicated liberals such as Maury Maverick, Wright Patman, and Lyndon Johnson, as well as the rabid opposition of hard right-wingers such as the Jeffersonian Democrats and Texas Regulars who, while ineffective at the time, set the stage for future anti-liberal activism. The author’s main focus, however, is clearly on those Texas politicians (and voters) who were conservative at heart but threw their support solidly behind the president. Using a chronological approach, Cunningham analyzes the speeches, writings, and correspondence of such political leaders as Jones, James Buchanan, and George Mahon in order to answer the general question of why most of the state’s politicians and voters embraced the interventionist New Deal so strongly, concluding that a combination of strong messaging coupled with pragmatic economic policies ensured FDR’s loyal following in Texas. Pro-New Deal rhetoric frequently called for Democratic unity in the state, along with consistent portrayals of the rival Republican Party as the tool of Wall Street whose irresponsible policies led to the economic ruin of the country. With respect to the unprecedented interventions of the New Deal, such actions were depicted as necessary, commonsense corrections to the mess that the GOP had created to restore the foundations of the American economy and freedom for the “forgotten man” (for Whites primarily, as the New Deal did not challenge the racial status quo in Texas, yet another reason why FDR maintained the level of support that he enjoyed among most White Texas voters.) Cunningham’s title phrase, “bootstrap liberalism,” explains how most Depression-Era Texans reconciled their traditional beliefs with support for the New Deal. While still buying into the virtue of rugged individualism and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, most Texas Democrats nevertheless realized by the early 1930s that they needed government help to set things right from the Depression that had either broken their bootstraps or taken them away entirely. Rather than being revolutionary, the New Deal would restore life following the proper Jeffersonian American vision in which Texans were raised. Such rhetoric resonated strongly with the Texas public (who supported FDR with at least 71 percent of the vote in his four presidential runs) not to mention so many of the state’s politicians who rode Roosevelt’s coattails into office through their unabashed support for him. This book is recommended for anyone interested in Texas New Deal-era political history, serving as a good complement to Norman Brown’s recently published Biscuits, the Dole, and Nodding Donkeys (University of Texas Press, 2019), which covers state-level politics during these same crucial years. [End Page 406] Keith Volanto Collin College Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

The Hard-Edged Boundaries of Inclusive Democratic Unity

Abstract This article considers how democrats should work to protect and promote both political and social equality. Democrats should aspire to cultivate a sort of unity among citizens that is delineated by distinctly hard-edged boundaries. This unity should only encompass the democratic mainstream and should explicitly exclude autocratic citizens who reject political and social equality. Such political antagonism can serve as a resource to unite democrats, for the exclusion of some can help protect and promote the political and social equality of the rest. Moreover, such political antagonism can encourage citizens who straddle the divide between supporting democracy and condoning autocracy to definitively commit themselves to democracy. In short, political antagonism can help promote both forms of equality by expanding the reach of the democratic mainstream, and by diffusing any social antagonism which might exist within it.

The CIA in Ecuador

The CIA in Ecuador

Le socialisme est égal à la mort, le marché est égal à la vie: discours anti-socialiste et pro marché dans les politiques socio-économiques de l'opposition vénézuélienne contemporaine.

While there has been much coverage in the media and in academic work on the crisis in Venezuela, little has been written about the Venezuelan Opposition, grouped in the Democratic Unity Coalition (MUD) and even less about their economic and social policies. This paper seeks to address this latter lacuna by providing a critical examination of three key MUD policy documents. Situating this analysis within a wider discussion on the relationship between democracy and neoliberalism, and using a framework derived from Wendy Brown’s book “In the Ruins of Neoliberalism”, the article argues that the Venezuelan Opposition is fundamentally neoliberal in ideological orientation. This means that it seeks to, paraphrasing Brown, critique and dismantle society, using anti-socialism as its principle trope to do so; attack “democracy understood as popular sovereignty and shared political power”, even while it uses democracy as its main discursive banner; and extend the personal protected sphere at the expense of the public. This may result, the article concludes, in a form of neoliberal authoritarianism rather than ‘restored’ democracy as the Opposition claims.

Policy Series: Building Momentum for a New Future in Politics and Aging: Examining Economics, Values, Language, and Care

Coinciding with the 2020 presidential election, the 75th anniversary of the Gerontological Society of America arrives amid the contentious creation of a new future for politics and aging. Increasing inequality, spreading disinformation, and mounting despotism are escalating threats to constitutional democracy, but at the same time other social changes are promoting the development of a more thoroughly caring, intergenerationally just, and robustly democratic society. At the crux of this societal transformation, relentless political inertia on core aging issues, like the role of government in the care and support of older adults, continues to inhibit meaningful change in federal policy, dampening the potential for older Americans to achieve desired future states, like living well despite advanced age or disability. This session examines major contemporary trends at the intersection of politics and aging in the United States. Papers address the economics and demographics of aging, drawing attention to increasing federal spending on older adults, decreasing availability of caregivers, and geographic clustering of older people; changes in the age of the electorate, intergenerational political values, and the growing politically polarization of American society; the tendency for federal initiatives to fail to support caregivers, for reasons of policy history, policy traits, and mass public features, like the political isolation of informal caregivers; and the role of linguistic and metaphorical practices in shaping our experiences and views of aging. Discussion addresses opportunities for the country to become more age-friendly while also sustaining democratic institutions and national unity.

Ugly Attachments: Judith Shklar and the Unattractive Face of Solidarity

ABSTRACT Democratic politics constituted a challenging paradox for addressing international justice and injustice for Judith Shklar. It could be a primary source of redressing injustice in its capacity to mobilize international society against the worst kinds of cruelty suffered by international victims – refugees, exiles, immigrants, and victims of wars. Yet the link between democratic politics and nationalism also constituted a primary source of international injustice towards those, on either side of national borders, with whom democratic majorities did not identify and who became grist to the mill of democratic unity forged in entirely irrational hostility towards others. This was why Shklar strenuously criticised calls to highly participatory forms of democracy: the obverse of extreme democratic tightness was extreme hostility towards out-groups on either side of national borders. Shklar's aversion to nationalism had a status approaching her view of cruelty as the worst vice, for the irrational passions it unleashed were a great source precisely of that cruelty. A focus on international justice and injustice in Shklar's thought accordingly demands concertedexplorations of the part that domestic democratic politics, and especially democratic nationalism, plays in international politics.

Novelties of the Soviet Constitutionalism: The Principle of Unity of Powers

ABSTRACTThe paper’s purpose is to analyze the provisions of the first Soviet Constitution in terms of the relationship between the legislative and executive political institutions, and to examine whether and to what extent the principle of unity of powers had been prescribed. The analysis is based on the legal method, since the competences and the relationship of legislative and executive institutions had been explicitly prescribed by the Constitution. It also contains an analysis of the theoretical approach of the Marxist theoreticians to the system of government. The conclusion is that the Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic prescribed the principle of democratic unity of powers, and the system of assembly government, which had been based on the superiority of the representative body over the executive. However, it had not been a “clear” system of assembly government, since the executive (Sovnarkom [the Soviet of People’s Commissars]) had some important competences. Although the leading theoreticians of the new regime had not envisaged this possibility, it occurred as the result of the extraordinary circumstances caused by the civil war, as well as of the fact that the Marxist theory on the new system of government had not been developed in all its aspects.

“Gandhiji, I Have no Homeland”: Cosmopolitan Insights from BR Ambedkar, India’s Anti-Caste Campaigner and Constitutional Architect

While the domestic political and legal thought of BR Ambedkar—champion of India’s Dalits, shaper of its constitution and frequent critic of Mohandas Gandhi—has gained increasing notoriety, the international dimensions of his work have received relatively little attention. Ambedkar, in fact, staked out a distinctively universalistic approach to democratic citizenship and legitimacy which has important connections to and can inform current cosmopolitan dialogue. He rejected uncritical loyalty to the state, and he criticized presumptions of unity within states, arguing that foreigners’ support for the self-determination of an “Indian people” would merely perpetuate caste oppression within the country. The latter argument provides a significant challenge to some recent nationalist and moderate cosmopolitan accounts, which reject some comprehensive universal rights claims, or suprastate political structures to support them, in the name of respecting a state’s domestic culture. Furthermore, Ambedkar’s thought on promoting democratic unity across linguistically and culturally diverse political units, as well as on pursuing domestic rights protections through suprastate institutions, offer valuable insights for the development of participation and accountability practices beyond the state.

Defending Black Suffrage: Poll Taxes, Preachers, and Anti-Prohibition in Texas, 1887–1916

Defending Black Suffrage:Poll Taxes, Preachers, and Anti-Prohibition in Texas, 1887–1916 Brendan J. Payne (bio) On Tuesday, July 9, 1912, the African American Baptist preacher John B. Rayner penned an irate letter to a prominent agent of the Texas Brewers' Association (TBA). The TBA had bankrolled and coordinated anti-prohibition activities for brewers and distillers throughout Texas to the tune of over a million dollars for more than a decade, but this minister was not writing to condemn the brewers for their iniquitous enterprise. Instead, he admonished them for failing to adequately compensate him for his unstinting labors in their behalf. A self-described "protagonist in the cause of anti-prohibition," Rayner listed his sacrifices for the cause over the previous seven years. He had, he wrote, "wet a score of dry counties in Texas or kept them from drying"; exercised "Machiavellian diplomacy" against African American "religious, educational and business gatherings" to mute prohibition advocacy; worked "to make the colored pastors … political friends" of the brewers; "stood undaunted before the frowns of religious women"; and "endured the imprecations of mad prohibitionists." By herculean effort, Rayner had mobilized tens of thousands of voters over the previous several years, including "the colored farmers," who "saved the State from the blighting hand of the prohibitionists" in the narrowly decided 1911 election, which kept alcohol legal in parts of Texas for the better part of a decade. Rather than profiteering from his anti-prohibition activism, Rayner had "been forced to lose personal property and mortgage the best of my property." Despite his losses, he claimed he could forgive or ignore the brewers' slights "when the [End Page 815] liberty of man is in danger," because he fought out of "my fidelity to that liberty."1 Rayner's letter illumines how African Americans, who have been largely absent from scholarly accounts of prohibition, could and did vitally participate in the contest even after the imposition of poll taxes across the South. This finding raises challenges for studies contending that African Americans' disenfranchisement aided the rise of prohibition. Howard N. Rabinowitz and Richard F. Hamm contend that African Americans' tendency to vote against prohibition, especially in close elections, provided a major argument for their disenfranchisement, which in turn helped prohibition succeed in the South.2 Ann-Marie E. Szymanski sums up the scholarly consensus: "the disfranchisement of blacks principally enhanced the opportunities for dry success by eliminating one of the leading rationales for Democratic unity in the South." Yet Szymanski also claims that African Americans' impact on prohibition elections in the South is difficult to verify since drys lost statewide referenda in Alabama (1909), Florida (1910), Texas (1911), and Arkansas (1912) "despite the diminished voting power of southern blacks."3 The same evidence could also suggest that wets won precisely because African Americans continued to vote despite those states' restrictive voting laws. A look at one such state, Texas, provides definitive answers. This article uses Texas as a case study to gauge African Americans' impact on prohibition elections before and after the institution of poll taxes. It focuses on the three decades between Texas's first statewide prohibition election in 1887 and the state attorney general's crackdown on the brewers' political influence in 1916, which spelled the end of [End Page 816] significant black participation in the contest. African Americans, though divided, voted mostly against prohibition, and both sides engaged in the effort for a variety of reasons: the protection of black suffrage and upholding racial dignity; success as vote-getters; deep religious and political convictions; and material advancement. These motivations sometimes conflicted, and priorities shifted over time, especially in the face of poll taxes. Yet for a time, African Americans played a decisive role in Texas prohibition contests. This article complements a recent, nuanced account of black Texans on prohibition in Joseph L. Locke's Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion (2017). He observes that African Americans on both sides of the issue sought to advance their race, and the black majority of wet voters sometimes decided prohibition elections. Yet overall Locke focuses on white prohibitionists, who increasingly blamed black...

Challenges and Prospects of Electoral Campaigns through Social Media in Ethiopia: Lessons from the 2015 General Election.

Despite electoral campaigns are essential elements of election, opposition political parties in Ethiopia have been challenged due to limited media alternative. In the 2015 general election, some political parties were using social media to conduct campaigns. Hence, this case study aimed to explore the challenges and prospect of using social media. The research utilized a qualitative approach. Blue Party, Ethiopian Democratic Party, Ethiopian Federal Democratic Unity Forum, and Ethiopian People Revolutionary Democratic Front were selected as cases by using intensity case selection method since they were active in using social media. In-depth interview, focus group discussions, and documents were used to collect data. The study used thematic analysis. The study found that the low number of followers at the social media bases of parties, suppressive tendency of the regime, high internet cost and poor internet connectivity, political apathy of users, unwanted interactions of some of the users as well as awareness predicaments as factors that challenge parties’ use of social media as alternative channel of electoral campaign. However, emerging fertile conditions such as optimistic perception of users towards the role of social media, increasing political involvements of youths, and attempts of price revisions on the other hand were found to be impetus to promote parties’ use of these media. Generally, despite there are such challenges, the prospects show that social media are becoming as alternative channels of electoral campaigns in Ethiopia. Key Words : Challenges; Electoral campaign; Ethiopia; Prospects; Social media, Political Parties

Dividedness, Institutions and Economic Performance: A Cross-National Analysis of Democratic Stability

Why divided societies face particular obstacles in maintaining democracy is one of the most challenging questions posed in the literature. Several studies posit that ethnically, religiously, and linguistically divided societies are incapable of establishing and holding a democratic system because of their social divisions and institutional weaknesses. We challenge this argument and examine whether political institutional arrangements (constraints over the executive, geographic distribution of political power, and form of government) in addition to economic performance are the crucial factors of success to establish and sustain a democratic regime and social unity in divided states. We use the Quality of Governance time-series standard dataset to test this hypothesis. By analyzing data on 163 states (1960–2012) we find that institutional constraints imposed over the executive and economic performance are the two primary influential factors in sustaining democratic regimes in multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and multi-religious societies.

The Cooperation of Russia and China in Central Asia

The article analyses the process of Sino-Russian rapprochement which has significantly intensified since the worsening of Russia’s relations with the West in 2014. This process is studied as a part of the emerging of Greater Eurasia in place of Greater Europe which was envisioned in late 1980s. The states of Greater Eurasia, will not be tied by alliance relations, as are the United States and its European satellites. Some of them may turn to different centers of power; however, on the whole, they will form a unity, brought together by core interests. Precisely, this kind of democratic unity of Greater Europe could not be established by the United States and its allies. Attempting to subordinate every state to their dictates, they have united allies from most of Eastern Europe but lost Russia and Central Asia, and are increasingly antagonizing China and India, forcing them to draw closer to each other even in spite of significant contradictions. Only the future will tell who will succeed and who will not.

Perché è necessaria e com’è possibile la trasformazione dell’Unione europea in una democrazia sovranazionale

The European Union is at the crossroads between intelligent expansion of future horizons and frightened shrinking to a perspective of local areas. Fear of descent of the citizens on one side and a politics of crisis, that goes along with harsh injustice have made upset the national societies against each other, missing courage on the side of politicians, to bring European issues to the fore, endanger the European project. There is only one way to overcome this situation by establishing a democratic union, which conserves not only the social and civilian achievements of the national state, as well as the assets of a greater democratic political unity, that offers an unity of European citizens and European state demos.

Seery, John E., ed., A Political Companion to Walt Whitman

John E. Seery, ed. A Political Companion to Whitman. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. x + 373 pp.In 1937 article entitled Whitman-Nationalist or Proletarian?, Gay Wilson Allen argued that Whitman's real roots were not national but international and proletarian: Instead of seeking for an interpretation of Whitman in terms of American frontier, Jacksonianism, or ideology of American democracy, he should be studied as configuration of world-proletarian movement. Perhaps under influence of F. O. Matthiessen who, in his major study American Renaissance: Art and Expression in Age of Emerson and acknowledged common devotion to possibilities of democracy shared by Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville, at same time that he banished politics to margins in order to focus on formalist and aesthetic qualities of the writing itself, Whitman we inherited from Cold War came to us curiously clipped of his and working class roots, his homoeroticism, and his communal vision. At time began writing Whitman Political Poet in 1980s, Whitman was regarded as primarily mystical and spiritual poet, writing under influence of Emerson and Transcendentalism.Over past two decades, however, theorists and philosophers-including George Kateb, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, and Cornel West-have turned with renewed interest to Whitman as serious philosopher and theorist of democracy. This literary turn among theorists particularly evident in series of political companions to classic American writers published by University Press of Kentucky over past five years, including most recently A Political Companion to edited by John E. Seery. expressed goal of these editions to illuminate ways nation's greatest authors have shaped America's democratic experiment.Whereas in past, Whitman's politics would have been dismissed as irrelevant, hopelessly quaint, and even naive, all of theorists in Seery's Political Companion approach Whitman as poet actively engaged in constitution of democratic citizenry and community. Seery organizes his Political Companion into three convenient clusters-Individuality and Connectedness, City Life and Bodily Place, and Death and Citizenship-which aim finally for Whitmanian fluidity of interpretation. first cluster begins appropriately with George Kateb's foundational essay Walt Whitman and Culture of Democracy, which was originally published in Political Theory in 1990. Kateb's essay pioneered in introducing Whitman as theorist in its opening sentence: I think that Whitman great philosopher of democracy. Indeed, he may be greatest, Kateb asserts (19). Reading Whitman's Song of Myself as a work in theory, Kateb focuses on Individuality in tradition of Emerson and Thoreau as central meaning of democratic culture in Whitman's work. Connectedness... emanates from democratic individuality, as Whitman perceives and perfects it, Kateb argues; poet's concept of individual as multiple, composite, and strange becomes means through which individuals are connected to others in democratic rights-based polity (20). In Kateb's view, this ideal of connectedness as receptivity and responsiveness within individual is not well illustrated by Whitman's notion of adhesive love, or love of comrades (37). The comradely side of Whitman, he avers provocatively, is not his most attractive because it not genuinely democratic one (38).Kateb's exclusive focus on Individuality as Whitman's major contribution as theorist contested and revised not only in subsequent essays within opening cluster, but by other theorists throughout volume. Responding to Kateb in Strange Attractors: How Individuals Connect to Form Democratic Unity, an essay originally published in same issue of Political Theory in 1990, Nancy L. …

Polis and Revolution: Responding to Oligarchy in Classical Athens by Julia L. Shear (review)

Reviewed by: Polis and Revolution: Responding to Oligarchy in Classical Athens by Julia L. Shear Harvey Yunis Julia L. Shear . Polis and Revolution: Responding to Oligarchy in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xv, 368. $99.00. ISBN 978-0-521-76044-7. This book concerns the aftermath of the two brief, violent periods of oligarchical rule and democratic restoration in Athens towards the end of the fifth century B.C.E. Unlike most books and articles on the subject, it is not primarily concerned with the political processes and legal adjustments that restored and to some extent reformed Athens' democratic government. For example, Shear adds little to existing scholarship on the practical, judicial import of the injunction "not to recall past wrongs" (if that is what μὴ μνησικακεῖν indeed means) that was included in the reconciliation agreement of 403. Rather, when the Athenian demos returned to power, how did they attempt to restore civic unity in the face of deep, violent divisions? How did they restore public belief in the inviolability of democracy and the unacceptability of all forms of oligarchy? To answer these questions, Shear focuses mostly on two kinds of evidence. First, there are events—such as the oath of loyalty to the democracy included in Demophantus' decree of 410, and the assembly that immediately followed the sacrifice to Athena on 12 Boedromion 403 (marking the returning democrats' victory)—that would have fostered democratic unity and in addition created enduring public memories thereof. Shear emphasizes the solemnity of the mass oath-taking ceremony prescribed by Demophantus' decree, in which the entire citizen body, arrayed by tribe and deme, were to swear the oath in close proximity to sacrificial victims. She contends that the emotive effects on average citizens created by the original ceremony and its public memorialization in the erected decree, available to any citizen who saw and read the inscription, would have helped to stabilize the restored democratic regime. Second, Shear examines the democracy's newly erected public monuments and buildings for symbols and ideology that would defuse enmity and foster unity on the basis of loyalty to democracy. Shear marshals an impressive level of detail in her examination of the new monuments and buildings of the Agora, especially the design of the new Bouleuterion and the manner in which the revised law code was erected and displayed in the Stoa Basileios. These objects were notable not only for their content (in the case of the law code) or their function (in the case of the Bouleuterion) but also for the public presentation of their content or function, which engaged citizen viewers with a striking, if idealized, presentation of democratic purpose, unity, and history. By means of their display the "new" laws, incorporating those attributed to Solon and Drakon, tied the current democracy to the ideologically important ancestral constitution (patrios politeia). The Bouleuterion offered citizens a clear sense of the civic duty of democratic citizens. Shear thus further substantiates the process, already discussed by historians and archaeologists, by which the Agora became a [End Page 528] crucial location for democratic activity and ideology in fourth-century Athens. Shear displays unusually deep and extensive knowledge of the preserved physical material. Although the highly imperfect state of preservation also means that Shear's arguments on these and other objects entail considerable speculation, her arguments are nonetheless intelligent and clearly worthy of serious consideration. Yet ideology is often in the eye of the beholder. Occasionally Shear's argument suffers from the vagueness or special pleading that arises when one infers ideology from mute stones or building foundations, or from events whose original purpose is now obscure. It must be said that Shear attempts to demonstrate patterns of democratic response, especially between the two periods of democratic restoration, which mitigates the looseness of the ideological claims. Shear's prose is admirably clear, but it is also marred by excessive repetition of her main points, which is tedious for the reader. Towards the end of the book it emerges that Shear's work also contributes to a question that is peripheral to her main concerns, but important in itself and intriguing for students of virtually any aspect of fourth-century Athens...

A Peculiar Type of Democratic Unity: Carl J. Friedrich's Strange Schmittian Turn or How Friedrich Stopped Worrying and Learned to Decide on the Exception

Professor Joseph Bendersky claims that Harvard Political Scientist and German emigre Carl J. Freidrich's Weimar-era constitutional ideas were to their but that Friedrich's experience as a naturalized U.S. citizen led him to embrace American liberalism. This thesis argues to the contrary that Friedrich's Weimar-era thought lacked two essential axioms of Schmitt's philosophy: that democracy requires a people who are substantively homogeneous and that sovereignty even in a democracy can only genuinely be exercised by a single individual. Friedrich, however, played a crucial role in the New Deal reconfiguration of American liberalism by leading a movement among American social scientists during the 1930s and 40s toward playing a more direct role in policymaking. ironically, the liberal ideas of Friedrich's that emerged out of this reconfiguration and would persist for decades after World War II contained strong elements of both core Schmittian axioms.

The unity of the people, and immigration in liberal theory

What unites political associations? And what are fair criteria for conceding or denying access to citizenship to potential immigrants? This article argues that the socio-political conditions for the unity of political associations should be distinguished from the merely institutional functions of statehood. Focusing on conditions for the unity of political associations, the article critically examines traditional and contemporary ideas about the unity of the people in liberal political theory. Starting with a brief historical sketch of Hobbes' (states make peoples) and Rousseau's (the people is the state) accounts of the unity of the people, the major argument examines the conditions of democratic unity and especially conditions for the acceptance of majority rule. It will be claimed that democratic unity requires neither cultural nor moral homogeneity but first and foremost compatibility of political attitudes and continuous political dependency. Criteria for access to citizenship, accordingly, should focus on residence requirements and political attitudes, unless preferential treatment of particular groups of immigrants is recommended for other reasons such as history of colonialism or past injustice.

Jacques Maritain's Personalistic Society and Pluralism

Jacques Maritain's concept of ttte personalistic society describes a democratic unity of the body politc that mitigates the tension between the material and spiritual aspects of human existence. This unity, grounded in the principles of natural law, makes possible in our terrestrial existence a communion of good living and a rectitude of life--what Maritain calls the bonum honestum. The good he envisions both facilitates and reacts the ideals of an integral Christian humanism, but it necessarily requires for its realization the infusion of Christian ideals into the body politic. It is crucial to Maritain that the process by which this infusion occurs allow for a wide participation of diverse actors, bothh religions and non-religious. But it is also crucial that they are able to converge from their different perspectives into an agreement on "Christianly inspired" practical principles that will subsequently guide public policy. This essay argues that the collective character of the moral personally represented by Maritain in this unity describes a problematic corrtext tor public dialogue that risks undermining the social and political pluralism it presupposes.