Search results for ""author paul w. kahn""
Yale University Press Democracy in Our America: Can We Still Govern Ourselves?
One of America’s most distinguished political theorists examines what happens when national politics enters a small New England town After the election of 2016 and, even more urgently, after the election of 2020, many citizens looked at the economic and cultural divisions that were causing deep disruptions in American politics and asked, “What is happening to us?” Paul W. Kahn explores these fundamental changes as they show themselves in a small New England town—his home of twenty-five years, Killingworth, Connecticut. His inquiry grounds a democratic theory that puts volunteering, not voting, at its center. Absent active participation, citizens lose the capacity for judgment that comes from working with others to solve real problems. Volunteering, however, is under existential threat today. Changes in civil society, commerce, employment, and public opinion formation have isolated families from each other and from their communities. Even middle-class families live under financial stress, uncertain of their children’s future, and without the support of civil society. Local media has disappeared. Residents do not have the time, information, or interest to volunteer. Under these conditions, national polarization enters local politics, which becomes yet another site for national conflict. To save our democracy, Kahn concludes, we need to find ways of matching opportunities for participation to the ways we live our lives today.
£20.92
Yale University Press Origins of Order: Project and System in the American Legal Imagination
An examination of how two fundamental concepts of order influence our ideas about sovereignty, citizenship, law, and history Western accounts of natural and political order have deployed two basic ideas: project and system. In a project, order is produced by the intentional act of a subject; in a system, order is immanent in the world. In the former, order is made; in the latter, discovered. Paul W. Kahn shows how project and system have long been at work in our theological and philosophical tradition. Against this background, Kahn explains the development of the modern legal imagination in the nineteenth century as a movement from project to system. Americans began the century imagining the constitutional order as their common project: a deliberate construction of We the People. They ended the century imagining that order is continuous with the common law: an immanent development of the principles of civilization. This imaginative shift affected ideas of legal text, sovereignty, citizenship, interpretation, history, and science.
£37.50