Democracy tamed

• Verfasst von: Englert, Gianna [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: Democracy tamed
• Titelzusatz: French liberalism and the politics of suffrage
• Verf.angabe: Gianna Englert
• Verlagsort: New York, NY, United States of America
• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• E-Jahr: 2024
• Jahr: [2024]
• Umfang: viii, 213 Seiten
• Fussnoten: Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 191-204. - Index
• ISBN: 978-0-19-763531-5
• Schlagwörter: (g)Frankreich / (s)Liberalismus / (s)Demokratie / (s)Wahlrecht / (z)Geschichte 1800-1900
• Sprache: eng
• RVK-Notation: MS 4675
• RVK-Notation: ME 3100
• RVK-Notation: MC 6300
• Sach-SW: Suffrage - France - Histoire - 19e siècle
• Sach-SW: Libéralisme - France - Histoire - 19e siècle
• Sach-SW: Gouvernement représentatif - France - Histoire - 19e siècle
• K10plus-PPN: 188379482X

Abstract

"Liberal democracies are under constant threat in the twenty first century, and there is growing scepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. In Democracy Tamed, Gianna Englert argues that some of the crises of confidence facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment. Instead, they have existed ever since liberal political thought emerged in the nineteenth century. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Englert not only uncovers the source of liberals' original animus toward political democracy. She shows how self-proclaimed liberals devised two strategies to counter the rise of mass democracy. They created the concept of political capacity as their alternative to universal suffrage and mobilized that concept in the contentious debates over the franchise from the French Revolution to the Third Republic. Liberals also redefined democracy itself, transforming it from its ancient meaning as political rule by the people to designate a modern form of society-a new democracy that, counterintuitively, demanded the guidance of a capable few rather than the rule of all. Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their notion of the "new democracy" to resist universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would utilize their predecessors' antidemocratic concepts to merge liberal principles with political equality, first to imagine and then to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them"