America, Aristotle, and the Politics of a Middle Class PDF Download

Author: Leslie G. Rubin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481300551
Category : Middle class
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Leslie G. Rubin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481300568
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Aristotle's political imagination capitalizes on the virtues of a middle-class republic. America's experiment in republican liberty bears striking similarities to Aristotle's best political regime--especially at the point of the middling class and its public role. Author Leslie Rubin, by holding America up to the mirror of Aristotle, explores these correspondences and their many implications for contemporary political life. Rubin begins with the Politics, in which Aristotle asserts the best political regime maintains stability by balancing oligarchic and democratic tendencies, and by treating free and relatively equal people as capable of a good life within a law-governed community that practices modest virtues. The second part of the book focuses upon America, showing how its founding opinion leaders prioritized the virtues of the middle in myriad ways. Rubin uncovers a surprising range of evidence, from moderate property holding by a large majority of the populace to citizen experience of both ruling and being ruled. She singles out the importance of the respect for the middle-class virtues of industriousness, sobriety, frugality, honesty, public spirit, and reasonable compromise. Rubin also highlights the educational institutions that foster the middle class--public education affords literacy, numeracy, and job skills, while civic education provides the history and principles of the nation as well as the rights and duties of all its citizens. Wise voices from the past, both of ancient Greece and postcolonial America, commend the middle class. The erosion of a middle class and the descent of political debate into polarized hysteria threaten a democratic republic. If the rule of the people is not to fall into demagoguery, then the body politic must remind itself of the requirements--both political and personal--of free, stable, and fair political life.

Author: Glassman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004618066
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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This volume presents an in-depth study of the commercial middle class and its link with legal-democratic processes. The material presented is critical for understanding both the future of democracy, and its past.

Author: Ganesh Sitaraman
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101973455
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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In this original, provocative contribution to the debate over economic inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that a strong and sizable middle class is a prerequisite for America’s constitutional system. For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable—and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America’s republic. Over the next two centuries, generations of Americans fought to sustain the economic preconditions for our constitutional system. But today, with economic and political inequality on the rise, Sitaraman says Americans face a choice: Will we accept rising economic inequality and risk oligarchy or will we rebuild the middle class and reclaim our republic? The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution is a tour de force of history, philosophy, law, and politics. It makes a compelling case that inequality is more than just a moral or economic problem; it threatens the very core of our constitutional system.

Author: Michael Meckler
Publisher: Baylor University Press
ISBN: 1932792325
Category : Civilization, Classical
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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history and illustrates how the ancient Greeks and Romans continue to influence political theory and determine policy in the United States, from the education of the Founders to the War in Iraq.

Author: Aristotle
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141913266
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Twenty-three centuries after its compilation, 'The Politics' still has much to contribute to this central question of political science. Aristotle's thorough and carefully argued analysis is based on a study of over 150 city constitutions, covering a huge range of political issues in order to establish which types of constitution are best - both ideally and in particular circumstances - and how they may be maintained. Aristotle's opinions form an essential background to the thinking of philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli and Jean Bodin and both his premises and arguments raise questions that are as relevant to modern society as they were to the ancient world.

Author: Jill Frank
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226260194
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Author: George R. Tyler
Publisher: BenBella Books
ISBN: 1937856712
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Something has gone seriously wrong with the American economy. The American economy has experienced considerable growth in the last 30 years. But virtually none of this growth has trickled down to the average American. Incomes have been flat since 1985. Inequality has grown, and social mobility has dropped dramatically. Equally troubling, these policies have been devastating to both American productivity and our long-term competitiveness. Many reasons for these failures have been proposed. Globalization. Union greed. Outsourcing. But none of these explanations can address the harsh truth that many countries around the world are dramatically outperforming the U.S. in delivering broad middle-class prosperity. And this is despite the fact that these countries are more exposed than America to outsourcing and globalization and have much higher levels of union membership. In What Went Wrong, George R. Tyler, a veteran of the World Bank and the Treasury Department, takes the reader through an objective and data-rich examination of the American experience over the last 30 years. He provides a fascinating comparison between the America and the experience of the “family capitalism" countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Over the last 30 years, they have outperformed the U.S. economy by the only metric that really matters—delivering better lives for their citizens. The policies adopted by the family capitalist countries aren't socialist or foreign. They are the same policies that made the U.S. economy of the 1950s and 1960s the strongest in the world. What Went Wrong describes exactly what went wrong with the American economy, how countries around the world have avoided these problems, and what we need to do to get back on the right track.

Author: Isaac Kramnick
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501745980
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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With this book Isaac Kramnick adds a strong voice to the lively debate about the nature of political ideology in eighteenth-century England and America. Whereas the now-dominant "republican thesis" sees liberal ideology as virtually irrelevant in an age of civic commitment to a moral public order, Kramnick makes a strong case for a thriving liberalism in the Anglo-American world at the time of the American and French revolutions. In his view, both ideologies flourished during this period, and it is unwise to see one as the exclusive paradigm in which eighteenth-century political discourse took place. In short, he proposes to the republican school a scholarly truce.

Author: Bryn Rosenfeld
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691192197
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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"The conventional wisdom is that a growing middle class will give rise to democracy. Yet the middle classes of the developing world have grown at a remarkable pace over the past two decades, and much of this growth has taken place in countries that remain nondemocratic. Rosenfeld explains this phenomenon by showing how modern autocracies secure support from key middle-class constituencies. Drawing on original surveys, interviews, archival documents, and secondary sources collected from nine months in the field, she compares the experiences of recent post-communist countries, including Russia, the Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, to show that under autocracy, state efforts weaken support for democracy, especially among the middle class. When autocratic states engage extensively in their economies - by offering state employment, offering perks to those to those who are loyal, and threatening dismissal to those who are disloyal - the middle classes become dependent on the state for economic opportunities and career advancement, and, ultimately, do not support a shift toward democratization. Her argument explains why popular support for Ukraine's Orange Revolution unraveled or why Russians did not protest evidence of massive electoral fraud. The author's research questions the assumption that a rising share of educated, white-collar workers always makes the conditions for democracy more favorable, and why dependence on the state has such pernicious consequences for democratization"--