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The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2006

Jason Frank
Affiliation:
Cornell University

Extract

The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era. By Ralph Ketcham. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 312p. $35.00.

Democracy today suffers from hermeneutic exhaustion in contemporary political contexts. It is regularly proclaimed as both a principle of war and a principle of peace, as a necessary component of free market capitalism and the name of resistance to economic globalization, as that which legitimates the power of the nation-state and that which perpetually threatens to undermine that power. As such, democracy risks becoming one of those worn-out coins that Friedrich Nietzsche invokes, “drained of sensuous force” (Philosophy and Truth, 1979, 84).

Type
BOOK REVIEWS: POLITICAL THEORY
Copyright
© 2006 American Political Science Association

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