The principles of representative government (Themes in social sciences)

Bernard Manin

Cambridge University Press

1997

243 páginas

8h 6m

ISBN-10: 0521452589

Bernard Martin's challenging book defines the key features of modern democratic institutions. For us representative government has come to seem inseparable from democracy. But its modern history begins, as Professor Manin shows, as a consciously chosen alternative to popular self-rule. In the debates which led up to the new constitution of the United States, for the first time, a new form of republic was imagined and elaborated, in deliberate contrast to the experiences of ancient republics from Athens to Renaissance Italy. The balance between aristocratic and democratic components within this novel state form was not, as has been widely supposed, a consequence of a deliberate mystification of its real workings; it was a rationally planned aspect of its basic structure. With its blend of historical and theoretical analysis, Professor Manin's book captures with quite new clarity and precision both the distinctiveness and the fundamental.