This collection of short essays on texts in the history of democracy shows the diversity of ideas that contributed to the making of our present democratic moment.
The selection of texts goes beyond the standard, Western-centric canonical history of democracy, with its beginnings in ancient Athens and its climax in the French and American revolutions, recovering some of the significant body of democratic and anti-democratic thought in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. It includes discussions of well-known philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, but also of a variety of thinkers much less well known in English as writers on democracy: Al Farabi, Bol??var, Gandhi, Radishchev, Lenin, Sun Yat-sen, and many others. The essays thus de-center our understanding of the moments where the idea of democracy was articulated, rejected, and appropriated.
Spanning antiquity to the present and global in scope, with contributions by key scholars of democracy from around the world,Democratic Momentsis the ideal text for all students wishing to expand their understanding of the ways in which this contested concept has been understood.
Xavier M??rquezis Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Political Science at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of
A Stranger's Knowledge: Statesmanship, Philosophy and Law in Plato'sStatesman
(2012) and of
Non-democratic Politics: Authoritarianism, Dictatorship, and Democratization(2016).
Introduction,Xavier M??rquez, Victoria, (University of Wellington, New Zealand)
1. Herodotus's Political Ecologies,Joel Alden Schlosser, (Bryn Mawr College, USA)
2. Protagoras's Cooperative Know-how,James Kierstead, (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
3. Aristotle on Democracy and Democracies,Kevin M. Cherry, (University of Richmond, UK)
4. Cicero, On the Republic,W. Jeffrey Tatum, (Victoria University of Wellington, Newl32
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