Democracy's Value.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 January 1999
• Author: Parkinson, John
• Published date: 01 January 1999
• Author: Parkinson, John

Democracy's value. Cambridge University Press, Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon (eds). 1999.

We live in a time when liberal democracy dominates world wide, leading governments, supra-national institutions and political scientists to declare the end of history. Yet, at the same time as that declaration was made, doubts arose. As Nicolo Bobbio has noted, while democracy's forms have waxed across Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America, the democracy's substance seems to have waned in the very states which championed the cause.

One form this worry has taken is that liberal democracy has failed to produce goods such as distributive justice, peace, gender equality, community and ecological values, and it is these concerns which preoccupy the contributors to Shapiro and Hacker-Cordon's two volumes. In Democracy's Value, they collect a series of papers from political philosophers, economists and feminist theorists who advance both minimalist and rich theories of what democracy is for. The...