Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Life of American Democracy

✍ Scribed by Jedediah Purdy (editor); Anthony T. Kronman (editor); Cynthia Farrar (editor)

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 288
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In this thought-provoking collection, leading scholars explore democracy in the United States from a sweeping variety of perspectives. A dozen contributors consider the nature and prospects of democracy as it relates to the American experience—free markets, religion, family life, the Cold War, higher education, and more. These probing essays bring American democracy into fresh focus, complete with its idealism, its moral greatness, its disappointments, and its contradictions.

Based on DeVane lectures delivered at Yale University, these writings examine large themes and ask important questions: Why do democratic societies, and the United States in particular, tolerate profound economic inequality? Has the United States ever been truly democratic? How has democratic aspiration influenced the development of practices as diverse as education, religious worship, and family life? With deep insights and lively discussion, the authors expand our understanding of what democracy has meant in the past, how it functions now, and what its course may be in the future.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction
1. The Democratic Soul
2. Lincoln and Whitman as Representative Americans
3. Public Emblem, Private Realm: Family and Polity in the United States
4. Can Religion Tolerate Democracy? (And Vice Versa?)
5. Taking Democracy to School
6. The Misuse of Numbers: Audits, Quantification, and the Obfuscation of Politics
7. Neither Capitalist nor American: The Democracy as Social Movement
8. Democracy and the Market
9. Democracy and Distribution
10. Democracy and Foreign Policy
11. Dinner with Democracy
12. American Democracy and the Origins of the Biomedical Revolution
13. Computers and Democracy
Contributors
Index