Reviews for Democracy in a world of tensions

The average rating for Democracy in a world of tensions based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-04-21 00:00:00 Sandra Fenton-goss This book is conceptually divided into two parts. Both parts serve the author's purpose of rejecting the Riker-inspired social choice critique that posits that democratic outcomes are either chaotic (and thus do not adequately "map" the will of the people and/or reflect that such a collective "will" does not exist), and/or involve voting procedures that are subject to manipulation. The author's arguments are powerful and convincing. The first have of the book is actually all he needs - it's devoted to attacking the theoretical bases of the social choice critiques mentioned in my previous paragraph. In a nutshell, Mackie shows that (1)it only takes a very small amount of preference homogeneity for all voting procedures to yield the same outcomes, and that (2)while in some cases the voting procedures will not satisfy Arrow's conditions (don't worry, it's explained in the book), in a pragmatic sense it almost never matters. There is much more going on in this part, but the upshot is that concerns about the futility of all electoral systems are greatly overwrought, and that contrary to what Riker and his supporters would argue, the "bad cases" require theoretically implausible conditions in order to occur. The second part is a systematic examination and rejection of all the empirical evidence that his opponents have used in order to argue their point. In doing so, Mackie doubles what could have been a 250 page book. The exposition gets tedious at times here, as the argument is not as self-contained as in the first half. Basically, if you haven't read the articles and books that Mackie trashes, it's easy to feel as though you did not get everything you could out of the discussion. Not light reading, but worthwhile for people who got terrified after having been shown Condorcet's Paradox. :)

Review # 2 was written on 2013-05-14 00:00:00 Jimmy Bob It is always remarkable when a thinker, well entrenched within a particular intellectual mileu, is nevertheless able to reorient the discipline with a new question. Well, I do not know the impact this book has had on identity theorists and cosmopolitanists, but it really should. At any rate, Honig explores the centrality of otherness to the constitutional/foundational moment in politics and also to a polity's constant articulations about its own nature. In this sense, this book is also a risky venture because Honig willing to turn the proverbial gaze onto herself and other theorists living and working in the west.