Posts

Showing posts with the label come

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In Forty Questions

Image
Download Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In Forty Questions A searing, enlightening polemic about the tens of thousands of unaccompanied Mexican and Central American children arriving in the US without papers ‘It is not even the American dream they pursue, but rather a more modest aspiration: to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.’ Why did you come to the USA? When a child migrant arrives in the US all alone, this is the first question he or she will be asked. It’s the beginning of an official interview of forty questions used by the federal immigration court in New York City where Valeria Luiselli works as a volunteer interpreter for the tens of thousands of children from Mexico and Central America being detained at the US border. But nothing is ever that simple. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no be...

Democracy To Come: Politics As Relational Praxis

Image
Download Democracy To Come: Politics As Relational Praxis In this book Fred Dallmayr, one of the progenitors of comparative political theory, lays the groundwork for a new understanding of modern democracy. Dallmayr rejects the idea that democracy is a stable system that develops primarily through its horizontal spread; most expressly, he rejects the idea that democracy can be fostered through regime change and the unidirectional transfer of concepts of popular sovereignty and the public good from the West to autocracies. In fact, he argues that a major danger in modern history has been the tendency of Western leaders to appeal to the "will of the people". The "people" are not a fixed entity, and by invoking it, for example via militant populist movements, we go down the road to totalitarianism, messianism, or millenarianism. Rather than traveling horizontally from one society to others, democracy must be relational. Democracy to Com...