It is a mistake to take democracy for granted. It was nearly destroyed by the onslaught of totalitarianism and human perversity in the twentieth century. And there are many who echo Plato’s critique that most people can’t really make rational judgments about how to order their own lives, much less how to order society. In Voices of Democracy Bernard Murchland probes the minds of some of the greatest political thinkers of our time in an effort to assess the condition of democracy in the world today.
In these conversations, Murchland finds a number of reasons for democracy’s continuing strength, including its embrace of the very ambiguity and contradiction decried by its critics, the constant rethinking of democracy and its practices, and the powerful alliance between democracy and capitalism. He also addresses the contemporary challenges to democracy, including the balancing of privacy and individual rights with equality and community needs and the necessity to strengthen democracy, which flourishes locally, on the national level.
Murchland’s conversations are with people who have read and thought deeply about democracy and other political systems, including Martin Matustik and Merab Mamardashvili, who lived behind the Iron Curtain; pollster Daniel Yankelovich; lawyer, mayor, and legislator Daniel Kemmis; and citizen-activist Elmer Johnson. Lively and thought-provoking, the book confronts the very basis of our society in a way that stimulates a new appreciation of democracy and a genuine awareness of the need to remodel it for the twenty-first century.
