First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this trenchant challenge to social engineering, Paul Gottfried analyzes a patricide: the slaying of nineteenth-century liberalism by the managerial state. Many people, of course, realize that liberalism no longer connotes distributed powers and bourgeois moral standards, the need to protect civil society from an encroaching state, or the virtues of vigorous self-government. Many also know that today's "liberals" have far different goals from those of their predecessors, aiming as they do largely to combat prejudice, to provide social services and welfare benefits, and to defend expressive and "lifestyle" freedoms. Paul Gottfried does more than analyze these historical facts, however. He builds on them to show why it matters that the managerial state has replaced traditional liberalism: the new regimes of social engineers, he maintains, are elitists, and their rule is consensual only in the sense that it is unopposed by any widespread organized opposition. Throughout the western world, increasingly uprooted populations unthinkingly accept centralized controls in exchange for a variety of entitlements. In their frightening passivity, Gottfried locates the quandary for traditionalist and populist adversaries of the welfare state. How can opponents of administrative elites show the public that those who provide, however ineptly, for their material needs are the enemies of democratic self-rule and of independent decision making in family life? If we do not wake up, Gottfried warns, the political debate may soon be over, despite sporadic and ideologically confused populist rumblings in both Europe and the United States.

Liberty After Liberalism frees the concept of the active citizen from both the territorial confines of the nation-state and the limits imposed by republican, city-state models. Lawrence Quill advances a theory of global republicanism, one that is able to respond directly to the changing realities of political life. By adopting a publicly ironic approach to politics, Quill revives the idea of public freedom within a global context thereby providing an important supplement to contemporary theories of cosmopolitan democracy.

Political theorists Jeremy Elkins and Andrew Norris observe that American political culture is deeply ambivalent about truth. On the one hand, voices on both the left and right make confident appeals to the truth of claims about the status of the market in public life and the role of scientific evidence and argument in public life, human rights, and even religion. On the other hand, there is considerable anxiety that such appeals threaten individualism and political plurality. This anxiety, Elkins and Norris contend, has perhaps been greatest in the humanities and in political theory, where many have responded by either rejecting or neglecting the whole topic of truth. The essays in this volume question whether democratic politics requires discussion of truth and, if so, how truth should matter to democratic politics. While individual essays approach the subject from different angles, the volume as a whole suggests that the character of our politics depends in part on what kinds of truthful inquiries it promotes and how it deals with various kinds of disputes about truth. The contributors to the volume, including prominent political and legal theorists, philosophers, and intellectual historians, argue that these are important political and not merely theoretical questions.

This volume focuses on democratic experimentalism, gathering a collection of original and previously unpublished essays focusing upon its major outlines, as well as specific aspects ¿ both promising and troublesome - of this theoretical approach. Together these essays offer conceptions of democracy and democratic governance that emphasize and highlight experimentalist aspects of pragmatic thought, particularly Deweyan pragmatism, and its relationship to instantiation in concrete social and political institutions. Issues of democratic governance, political organization and the relationship of law to democracy are analyzed.

What can motivate citizens in divided societies to engage in free, open, and reasoned dialogue? Attempts by philosophers to answer this question focus largely on elucidating what citizens owe to one another as free and equal citizens, as members of a shared social context, or as agents who are mutually dependent on one another for our well-being. In The Deliberative Impulse: Motivating Discourse in Divided Societies, Andrew F. Smith suggests that that a better answer can be offered in terms of what we owe to our convictions. Given the defining role they play in how we live our lives and regard ourselves, among the highest-order interests that we maintain is being in a position to do right by our convictions—to abide by conscience. By developing a clear understanding of how best to act on this interest, we see that we are well served by engaging in public deliberation. Particularly for citizens in societies that are fragmented along ethnic, cultural, ideological, and religious lines, our interest in abiding by conscience should give us clear moral, epistemic, and religious incentives to deliberatively engage with allies and adversaries alike. Scholars who focus on issues in political philosophy, ethics, and political theory will value this book for how it suggests we can overcome the motivational roadblocks to active political participation and robust deliberation.

The New American Social Compact examines the need to redefine the social compact in twenty-first-century America. Grant explores the two components of this compact_the rights and obligations of citizenship_as well as what she sees as the four substantive areas that are critical to realizing a new social compact in America. Grant proposes a new social compact that would honor the expansion of civil, political, and social rights in America and would integrate these rights within a new civic procedural ethos, clarifying our obligations to each other, future generations, other nations, and other species.

Public school systems are central to a flourishing democracy, where children learn how to solve problems together, build shared identities, and come to value justice and liberty for all. However, as citizen support for public schools steadily declines, our democratic way of life is increasingly at risk. Often, we hear about the poor performances of students and teachers in the public school system, but as author Sarah M. Stitzlein asserts in her compelling new volume, the current educational crisis is not about accountability, but rather citizen responsibility. Now, more than ever, citizens increasingly do not feel as though public schools are our schools, forgetting that we have influence over their outcomes and are responsible for their success. In effect, accountability becomes more and more about finding failure and casting blame on our school administrators and teachers, rather than taking responsibility as citizens for shaping our expectations of the classroom, determining the criteria we use to measure its success, and supporting our public schools as they nurture our children for the future. American Public Education and the Responsibility of its Citizens sheds an important light on recent shifts in the link between education and citizenship, helping readers to understand not only how schools now work, but also how citizens can take an active and influential role in shaping them. Moving from philosophical critique of these changes to practical suggestions for action, Stitzlein provides readers with the tools, habits, practices, and knowledge necessary to support public education. Further, by sharing examples of citizens and successful communities that are effectively working with their school systems, Stitzlein offers a torch of hope to sustain citizens through this difficult work in order to keep our democracy strong.

This is part two of a two-volume set. "Democracy is, in part, a debate about what democracy is. With The Theory of Democracy Revisted, Sartori offers an overview of classical and contemporary issues. All students of politics will find his arguments provocative, whether or not they agree with his conclusions." – Jean Bethke Eishtain, University of Massachusetts, Amherst