Against Democracy

Regular price €31.99
Regular price €34.99 Sale Sale price €31.99
A01=Simon During
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Simon During
automatic-update
blanchot
capitalism
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSB
Category=JPHV
conservatism
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
democracy
e.m. forester
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Language_English
literary criticism
literary history
PA=Available
political theory
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
saul bellow
softlaunch
T.S. Eliot
Tocqueville

Product details

  • ISBN 9780823242559
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 14 Aug 2012
  • Publisher: Fordham University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

This book argues that we can no longer envision a political system that might practically displace democracy or, more accurately, global democratic state capitalism. Democracy has become fundamental: It extends deeper and deeper into everyday life; it grounds and limits our political thought and values. That is the sense in which we do indeed live at history’s end. But this end is not a happy one, because the system that we now have does not satisfy tests that we can legitimately put to it.
In this situation, it is important to come to new terms with the fact that literature, at least until about 1945, was predominantly hostile to political democracy. Literature’s deep-seated conservative, counterdemocratic tendencies, along with its capacity to make important distinctions among political, cultural, and experiential democracies and its capacity to uncover hidden, nonpolitical democracies in everyday life, is now a resource not just for cultural conservatives but for all those who take a critical attitude toward the current political, cultural, and economic structures. Literature, and certain novelists in particular, helps us not so much to imagine social possibilities beyond democracy as to understand how life might be lived both in and outside democratic state capitalism.
Drawing on political theory, intellectual history, and the techniques of close reading, Against Democracy offers new accounts of the ethos of refusing democracy, of literary criticism’s contribution to that ethos, and of the history of conservatism, as well as innovative interpretations of a range of writers, including Tocqueville, Disraeli, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Saul Bellow.

Simon During is an Australian Research Professor at the University of Queensland. His most recent books are Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic and Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory and Post-Secular Modernity.