Search results for ""Author Eugenio Biagini""

This volume explores democracy in the 20th century, examining the triumph, crises, recovery, and resilience of democracy and its associated cultures in this period. From 1920 democracy became the hegemonic discourse in political cultures, to the extent that even its enemies claimed its legacy. The end of empires ushered in an unprecedented globalization of democratic aspirations. Barriers of gender and race were gradually removed, and greater equality gave new meaning to citizenship. Yet, already in 1922 democracy was on its back foot with the rise of fascism. Even after the latter’s defeat in 1945, liberal democracy died wherever communist democracy triumphed. The situation changed again from 1989, but democratic hubris was then checked by the rise of a new enemy—populism. The paradox is that the century of democracy’s triumph was also that of its near final defeat, while the peace and stability that everybody desired and many expected as the outcome of the extension of democracy were, at best, intermittent and geographically limited. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the “common good”; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and democratic politics beyond the polis. These ten different approaches to democracy since 1920 offer a global, synoptic, and probing exploration of the subject.

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Offering a broad exploration of the cultural history of democracy in the medieval age, this volume claims that, though not generally associated with the term, the Middle Ages deserve to be included in a general history of democracy. The term was never widely employed during this period, the dominant attitude towards democracy was outright hostility, and none of the medieval polities thought of itself as a democracy. Despite this, this study highlights a wide variety of ideas, practices, procedures, and institutions that, although different from their ancient predecessor (direct democracy) or modern successor (liberal representative democracy), played a significant role in the history of democracy. This volume covers almost 1,000 years and a wide range of territories. It deals with different political spheres (ecclesiastical and secular) and socio-political settings (courtly, urban, and rural) and examines the phenomenon from the local level up to the universal realm. This volume adopts a broad cultural approach and is structured thematically. Each chapter takes a theme as its focus: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the common good; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and the scalability of democracy beyond the limits of a single city. These ten themes add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

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The Lectures to Women given by Alfred Marshall at Cambridge in 1873, which focus on the effects of working conditions on man's character and prospects, are unique in their content and purpose. They offer insight into a radical period in Marshall's life of which relatively little is known.This new critical edition makes the Lectures, which have sometimes been referred to by Marshallian scholars, available to a wider body of historians of economic thought. Based on Mary Paley Marshall's original notes, corrected by Marshall himself, the Lectures are supplemented by Marshall's lecture outlines. Some contemporary and related texts are also published here including a paper on the future of the working classes from the same year and Marshall's exchange of articles with the trade unionist John Holmes in 1874 known as the Bee-Hive debate. A contextualised commentary on the lectures is provided by Rita McWilliams Tullberg, Ernesto Biagini and Tiziano Raffaelli who adopt three lines of enquiry respectively: the lectures as part of the movement for higher education for women in the Victorian era, the lectures as indicative of Marshall's stand vis-a-vis the political-ideological framework of the time and the lectures as an indicator of Marshall's methodological tendencies concerning the study of social phenomena.

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This volume surveys democracy broadly as a cultural phenomenon operating in different ways across a very wide range of societies in the nineteenth-century world. In the long nineteenth century, democracy evolved from a contested, maligned conception of government with little concrete expression at the level of the state, to a term widely associated with good governance throughout the diverse political cultures of the Atlantic world and beyond. The geographical scope and public range of discussions about the meaning of democracy in this era were unprecedented in comparison to previous centuries. These lively debates involved fundamental questions about human nature, and encompassed subjects ranging from the scope of the people who would participate in self-government to the importance of social and economic issues. For these reasons, the nineteenth century has proven the formative century in the modern history of democracy. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the “common good”; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and beyond the polis. These ten different approaches to democracy in the nineteenth century add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

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This volume offers a broad exploration of the cultural history of democracy in the Renaissance. The Renaissance has rarely been considered an important moment in the history of democracy. Nonetheless, as this volume shows, this period may be seen as a “democratic laboratory” in many, often unexpected, ways. The classicizing cultural movement known as humanism, which spread throughout Europe and beyond in this period, had the effect of vastly enhancing knowledge of the classical democratic and republican traditions. Greek history and philosophy, including the story of Athenian democracy, became fully known in the West for the first time in the postclassical world. Partly as a result of this, the period from 1400 to 1650 witnessed rich and historically important debates on some of the enduring political issues at the heart of democratic culture: issues of sovereignty, of liberty, of citizenship, of the common good, of the place of religion in government. At the same time, the introduction of printing, and the emergence of a flourishing, proto-journalistic news culture, laid the basis for something that recognizably anticipates the modern “public sphere.” The expansion of transnational and transcontinental exchange, in what has been called the “age of encounters,” gave a new urgency to discussions of religious and ethnic diversity. Gender, too, was a matter of intense debate in this period, as was, specifically, the question of women’s relation to political agency and power. This volume explores these developments in ten chapters devoted to the notions of sovereignty, liberty, and the “common good”; the relation of state and household; religion and political obligation; gender and citizenship; ethnicity, diversity, and nationalism; democratic crises and civil resistance; international relations; and the development of news culture. It makes a pressing case for a fresh understanding of modern democracy’s deep roots.

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This volume surveys the burst of political imagination that created multiple Enlightenment cultures in an era widely understood as an age of democratic revolutions. Enlightenment as precursor to liberal democratic modernity was once secular catechism for generations of readers. Yet democracy did not elicit much enthusiasm among contemporaries, while democracy as a political system remained virtually nonexistent through much of the period. If seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas did underwrite the democracies of succeeding centuries, they were often inheritances from monarchical governments that had encouraged plural structures of power competition. But in revolutions across France, Britain, and North America, the republican integration of constitutional principle and popular will established rational hope for public happiness. Nevertheless, the tragic clashes of principle and will in fraught revolutionary projects were also democratic legacies. Each chapter focuses on a distinct theme: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the “common good”; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and the transformations of sovereignty—a synoptic survey of the cultural entanglements of “enlightenment” and “democracy.”

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This volume surveys democracy broadly as a cultural phenomenon operating in different ways across a very wide range of ancient societies throughout Antiquity. It examines the experiences of those living in democratic communities and considers how ancient practices of democracy differ from our own. The origins of democracy can be traced in a general way to the earliest civilizations, beginning with the early urban societies of the Middle East, and can be seen in cities and communities across the Mediterranean world and Asia. In classical Athens, male citizens enjoyed full participation in the political life of the city and a flourishing democratic culture, as explored in detail in this volume. In other times and places democratic features were absent from the formal structures of regimes, but could still be found in the participatory structures of local social institutions. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the “common good”; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and beyond the polis. These ten different approaches to democracy in Antiquity add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

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