Democracy or Bonapartism: Two Centuries of War on Democracy

(Hardback)

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The history of the advent of universal suffrage is a fraught one. As late as the mid-twentieth century, it was still impeded by forms of censitary, racial and sexual discrimination, which proved especially stubborn in countries with the most rooted liberal tradition. Moreover, no sooner had it been achieved than universal suffrage was subject to internal depletion that reduced the exercise of political rights to the acclamation of a leader vested with very wide powers. In and through a complex historical process, Bonapartism has assumed its current soft form, involving orderly competition and succession and resorting to the iron fist only in emergency situations. The electoral system most conducive to this regime seems to be one involving single-member constituencies. Cutting out organized parties with programmes and, courtesy also of the gigantic concentration of the mass media, depriving the subaltern classes of any political expression, it reduces democracy to a contest between competing leaders, who are the interpreters exclusively oflocal realities or interests, over and above which towers the figure of thenations charismatic leader. The United States represents the primary country-laboratory of the soft Bonapartism that has also emerged in Italy, and which seems set to become the political regime of our time.

Reviews

Praise for Liberalism: A Counter-History -- :
A brilliant exercise in unmasking liberal pretensions,surveying over three centuries with magisterial command of the sources. * Financial Times *
Stimulatingly uncovers the contradictions of an ideology that is much too self-righteously invoked. -- Pankaj Mishra * Guardian *
A book of wide reference and real erudition. * Times Literary Supplement *
The book is a historically grounded, very accessible critique of liberalism, complementing a growing literature critical of liberalism. * Choice *

Author Bio

Domenico Losurdowas Professor of Philosophy at the University of Urbino, Italy. He is the author of many books in Italian, German, French and Spanish. In English he has publishedHegel and the Freedom of Moderns, Heidegger and the Ideology of War, andLiberalism: A Counterhistory.