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C. Douglas Lummis writes as if he were talking with intelligent friends rather than articulating political theory. He reminds us that democracy literally means a political state in which the people (demos) have the power (kratia). The people referred to are not people of a certain class or gender or color. They are, in fact, the poorest and largest body of citizens. Democracy is and always has been the most radical proposal, and constitutes a critique of every sort of centralized power. Lummis distinguishes true democracy from the inequitable incarnations referred to in contemporary liberal usage. He weaves commentary on classic texts with personal anecdotes and reflections on current events. Writing from Japan and drawing on his own experience in the Philippines at the height of People's Power, Lummis brings a cross-cultural perspective to issues such as economic development and popular mobilization. He warns against the fallacy of associating free markets or the current world economic order with democracy and argues for transborder democratic action. Rejecting the ways in which technology imposes its own needs, Lummis asks what work would look like in a truly democratic society. He urges us to remember that democracy should mean a fundamental stance toward the world and toward one's fellow human beings. So understood, it offers an effective cure for what he terms \"the social disease called political cynicism.\" Feisty and provocative,Radical Democracyis sure to inspire debate.

No detailed description available for \"Radical Democracy\".

This article explores why it is so difficult to imagine a state without an army. It considers Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, conventional accounts of the sovereign state and the right to legitimate violence, Gandhi's concept of satyagraha, Gandhi's Constitution for a Free India, and Gandhi's understanding of the art of the possible. It concludes with a reading of Gandhi and the sacrificial politics of founding in India.

At the beginning of this book I wrote that I would not propose institutional solutions, a promise I hope has been mainly kept. Perhaps by now the reason for this eccentricity has become somewhat more clear. I have sought to argue that democracy is better described not as a “system” or a set of institutions but as a state of being and that the transition to it is not an institutional founding but a “change of state.” Does this argument mean that democracy cannot be institutionalized? If one reasons strictly from the above distinction, the answer is that it cannot.

Democratic order finds a congenial ally in the natural order of nonoppressive work, but in itself it is a political order, not an economic one. It is distinguished from other forms of order by the nature of the bond which holds it together. It is not founded on such “guarantees” as state violence, indoctrination, fear of God, or bureaucratic management. It is also not founded on a set of “essential” fírst principies from which its necessity can be infallibly deduced. In a democratic situation, people are bound together into a state of order not by necessity but by trust. The

Among political words, surely “democracy” is the most cruelly overworked. It has been used to justify revolution, counterrevolution, terror, compromise, and mediocrity. It has been applied to representative institutions, free-enterprise economies, state-run economies, Leninist party rule, and dictatorship by plebiscite. Wars have been fought to make the world safe for it, and atomic bombs have been dropped to establish it on foreign soil. Counterinsurgency operations are carried out to protect it against guerrillas who say they are fighting for it. Democracy has been treated as a whore among political words. And as Orwell points out, most of its regular employers

Let us coin the expression “state of democracy.” As a metaphor calling up the image of a change of state in physics, the term may help us to distinguish the phenomenon of democracy itself from the institutions that people build hoping to establish and maintain it. This distinction in turn may help us to clarify what category of thing democracy is. As I argued in Chapter 1, it is an error to refer to institutions as if they were synonymous with the conditions they are intended to promote. We tend to think about institutions of learning or the Department of

To use the criterion of democracy to evaluate machines may seem a confusion of levels, for in Marxian terms, machines are part of the substructure, politics of the superstructure. Machines should be judged by the criteria appropriate to them—their ability to do the work they were designed to do, well and efficiently without too many undesirable side effects like noise or pollution. We don’t require of a lathe that it produce sounds like a concert violin; why should we require that it be democratic? What would such a demand mean? Even if such a critique were made, wouldn’t it

Though written in large letters on the face of history, the fact that economic development is antidemocratic is hard to see. We have been taught just the opposite, that democracy and development go together. It is no coincidence, most historians argue, that the democratic movement and the industrial revolution appeared at the same moment in European history. The two support one another. On the one hand, they say, economic development is the necessary condition for democracy. Industrialization produces wealth, wealth produces leisure, leisure gives people the freedom to learn about and participa te in politics, and this freedom makes democracy