دانلود کتاب نهادها و شیوه های دموکراتیک – بحثی درباره دولت ها، احزاب، نظریه ها و جنبش ها در دنیای امروز

This book brings together reflections on historical, philosophical, technical and insti-tutional aspects of contemporary democracies and the form they take in current debates. This includes the status of political parties, the separation of powers and the rule of law, bureaucracy and meritocracy, equality and inequality, the individual and his rights, propaganda, political commitment and consensus, and institutionalised and alternative forms of participation and governance in a world characterised by information flows on a global scale and the mediative role of technology.

What does democracy mean? “Government of the people, by the people, for the people”. The famous phrase, uttered by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, could easily be accepted by all democrats today. The reason is that Lincoln’s formula is not only magnificent, but also vague. Important words called to be filled with important content, but there are no specifics. It seems that democracy exists between ambigui-ties, affections and disaffections. It is evident, in any case, that its definition is more complex than a simple reference to the “power of the people” or their sovereignty, although it is also evident that, when the people do not have power, there is no democracy. The foregoing, of course, leads to the question of what the people is, in what terms is the holder of democracy made up of subjects who always maintain their status as such in political processes and are, at the same time, made up of these.

How does democracy happen in a world like the current one, determined by technology and information? How can democracy be extended and perfected in these conditions? Of course, this is not about being prescriptive. We have noticed, however, that our collaborators—practitioners of philosophy, science and political theory, the history of political thought, linguistics, and communication—coincide in expressing their concern about the evidence of deficits and limitations in contempo-rary democracies and the need to establish criteria to assess the democratic health of our societies. Specifically, many of the contributions agree that the current demo-cratic institutional forms do not fully fulfil their mission. From this follows not only reflections on the appropriate form and procedures, but also on how to consider the holders of democratic rights and the means by which they must participate in politics as active subjects.