San Antonio College Library

First published in 1987, this book combines a succinct but far-reaching introduction to democracy from classical Greece to the present with a critical discussion of what democracy means today. The new edition has been extensively revised and updated to take account of the transformation in world politics during the past ten years, and includes four new chapters: on the impact on democracy of the fall of the Soviet empire, the prospects of the democratic...

Democracy is today universally considered to be a good thing, yet in history has been frequently criticised. Ross Harrison argues the merits of democracy by tracing its history from the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, The American Federalists and Hume, Bentham, the Mills, Hegel and Marx. This historical perspective provides a repertory of specific problems where democracy converges upon the values of liberty, equality, knowledge...

Reviews over two dozen coercion-based practices, including human sacrifice, genocide, war, terrorism, revolution, political murder, riots, homicide, imprisonment, capital punishment, torture, religious persecution, slavery, debt bondage, and taxation. Examples and data are drawn from all over the world, including ancient Rome, medieval Japan, early modern England, revolutionary Russia, and four centuries of American history. Payne concludes that the...

"In The Democratic Century, Seymour Martin Lipset and Jason Lakin combine social, cultural, economic, and institutional analyses to explain why democracy has succeeded in some countries and failed in others." "Defining democracy as a political system in which all adults may vote in contested elections to choose their representatives, Lipset and Lakin argue that the mainstays of a successful system are institutions that encourage the diffusion of power...

"Struggles over women's suffrage and the ERA have publicized how much women have related their struggle for equality to rights. That the history of citizens' obligations is also linked to gender has been less understood." "In this landmark book, the historian Linda K. Kerber opens up this important and neglected subject for the first time. She begins during the Revolution, when married women did not have the same obligation as their husbands to be...

This book bears witness to remarkable width of reading and to unusual insight. It is a most skilful and, on the whole, complete sketch of democratic ideas, as developed not only in England, but in Scotland and the American colonies during the seventeenth century. By way of introduction, the author also gives some ac-count of the movement of political thought on the continent, particularly in France and Spain, in the preceding century. -- From http://www.jstor.org...

"The late twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of an unexpected and extraordinary phenomenon: Islamist political movements. Beginning in the early 1970s, militants revolted against the regimes in power throughout the Muslim world and exacerbated political conflicts everywhere. Their jihad, or "Holy Struggle," aimed to establish a global Islamic state based solely on a strict interpretation of the Koran. Religious ideology proved a cohesive...