BOOK REVIEWS: POLITICAL THEORY | |
Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy
Shannon
Stimson
a1
a1 University of California at Berkeley
| |
Representative
Democracy:
Principles
and
Genealogy. By Nadia
Urbinati. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 326p. $45.00.
Nadia Urbinati begins her new book, Representative
Democracy:
Principles
and
Genealogy, with the observation that while we call
certain contemporary western governments “democratic,” any
historical glance at their political institutions will as readily show
that they were “designed to contain rather than encourage
democracy” (p. 1). She takes as one “main point of
reference” (p. 9) for her argument, Bernard Manin's claim in
The
Principles
of
Representative
Government (1997) that the
practice of contemporary democracy is still constrained by the fact that
“there has been no significant change in the institutions regulating
the selection of representatives and the influence of the popular will on
their decisions in office” (p. 229, n. 2). For many, this view of
unchanged institutions simply reflects either the more defensive
observation that modern governments continue to need Schumpeterian
neutralizing restrictions on participation or, conversely, the critical
claim that modern democracy continues to fall short of an ideal (or
perhaps idealized) Athenian standard of direct self-rule. On both of these
views, Urbinati notes, representative democracy is seen as an
oxymoron (p. 4). However, she quite forcefully disagrees, and
what is more, she believes both the times and contemporary democratic
theorizing are on her side.
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