Description
Book SynopsisExposes the vested interests behind the US slide toward conflating corporate values with democratic values. Through an examination of professionalization in both the press and the law and free speech as property, this book demonstrates that present democracy is about trying to control and manage citizens than giving them freedom to participate.
Trade Review“From a master’s hand, wall-to-wall argument not limited to the cranium but invigorating our conscience as well. This erudite book is destined for the classics, in the legacy of de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America, John Dewey’s
The Public and Its Problems, and Hannah Arendt’s
The Human Condition. High-energy ideas on another order of magnitude, taking public life back from corporate ideology and re-creating it with discourse democracy instead."--Clifford G. Christians, author of
Media Ethics and Global Justice in the Digital Age"
Democracy, Inc. is an important and illuminating book. In an approach entirely consistent with his theory, Allen presents a clearly reasoned argument in place of table-pounding denunciations of the corporatization of the press and law. He attributes the problems of democracy neither to conspiracies nor to unbridled greed, but to the structure of a particular brand of capitalism whose modes of support he clearly identifies in law, making clear the route to real reforms in the process."--Thomas Streeter, author of
Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States
