Explore the vast range of titles available.

Democracy, Charles Tilly, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. xi, 227. The ideal of democracy is rarely challenged openly in the contemporary world, yet it remains one of the social science's essentially contested concepts. Despite a large and growing literature on the topic, there is little consensus on how we are to decide when a particular regime qualifies as a democracy or not. In his ambitious and forceful new book, Charles Tilly argues that this lack of a clear and accurate definition of democracy is of considerable consequence. Lucid explanations of democratization, political standing of regimes, related foreign policy decisions and the quality of people's lives are all at stake. Tilly devotes his first chapter to building a working definition of democracy before putting forward a cogent explanatory framework for understanding how and why democracies emerge and why they sometimes disappear and to demonstrate what difference it makes.

Recensions / Reviews

Abstract Some two decades ago, Asen Balikci (1989) and David Riches (1990) questioned whether research on Inuit, despite production of a voluminous literature, had made any contribution to theoretical issues in anthropology. On their heels, Burch (1994) asked very much the same about Hunter-Gatherer Studies. The thesis of the present paper is that research on Inuit economy has, in fact, contributed importantly to a rethinking of the shape and content of subsistence. Once described as encompassing the most basic economic activities, it is now understood as a cultural adaptation. This has import because few hunter-gatherer societies can be portrayed as they were at the time of the Man the Hunter symposium (Lee and DeVore 1968). Rather, today, hunter-gatherers, from the Arctic to Australia, experience near-constant contact with market economies and a reality in which money plays a critical part in their livelihoods. It is in this regard that research on Inuit, as noted by Sahlins (1999), has conceptually contributed both to Hunter-Gatherer Studies and to anthropology.