Mar/Apr 2001 Current Issues Features

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Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton Univ. Press, 1996).

James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity and Democracy, (MIT Press, 1996).

Robert Dahl, On Democracy (Yale Univ. Press, 1999).

Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Harvard Univ. Press, 1999).

Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, (Harvard Univ. Press, 1996).

Jeffrey C. Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Cornell Univ. Press, 1998).

Stephen Macedo, ed., Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999).

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This demon of partisanship has tormented the American political psyche from the time of our founding. It was Madison in Federalist Paper #10 who warned against the "mischiefs of faction," which he considered the disease natural to democratic republics. It is a peculiar cast of mind we Americans possess. As participants in what the framers considered the novo ordo seclorum ("a new order for the ages"), we Americans seem to believe that the ideal society would be one is which there were no politics, for politics is partisanship, and we seem to hold it as a self-evident truth that partisanship is problematic, something to be gotten beyond, overcome, silenced. For many Americans, the only good politics is no politics at all.

Such "end of politics" thinking continues in our day, and its possibilities or impossibilities constitute the thread of continuity in the works here considered. In the professional academy there is a spirited debate among those theorists who embrace a model of "deliberative democracy," which they believe can in one form or another help mature democratic societies navigate through the troubled ...