Search results for ""author wilson carey mcwilliams""
Rowman & Littlefield Democracy and the Claims of Nature: Critical Perspectives for a New Century
Can democrats be environmentalists? Democracy and the Claims of Nature tackles the core questions raised by the intersection of our democratic and environmental commitments, including the conceptual and practical connections between democratic theory and environmental ethics, the potential for an environmentally defined democratic citizenship, the concerns of equity and justice in environmental discourse and policy making, and the shape and future of democratic environmental movements. The prominent contributors-philosophers, political theorists, and social scientists-engage both the complexities and the possibilities of a robustly democratic environmentalism, and each offers their own unique insights into the particular challenges that flow from the intermingling of environmental ethics and politics. Taken together, the essays provide an indispensable multidisciplinary analysis of the ways in which our loyalties to democracy and the environment confront and mutually reinforce one another in theory and practice. Democracy and the Claims of Nature will be of great interest not only to students and educators in environmental studies, American political thought, and democratic theory, but to environmental professionals and citizens concerned about the health of both our democratic ideas and institutions and the environment in the 21st Century.
£129.60
University Press of Kansas Redeeming Democracy in America
Wherever we turn in America today, we see angry citizens disparaging government, distrusting each other, avoiding civic life, and professing a hatred of politics and politicians of all stripes. Is our situation hopeless? Wilson Carey McWilliams wouldn’t think so. McWilliams, one of the preeminent political theorists of the twentieth century, was closely identified with an ambitious intellectual enterprise to reclaim and restore democracy as a source of national veneration, inspiration, and salvation. Better than most of his contemporaries, he understood and illuminated the major sources of the political malaise that afflicts our nation’s citizens. For him, the key to reinvigorating our republic depends on our ability to reclaim the “second voice” of American politics—the one that emanates from our literature, churches, families, and schools and speaks out on behalf of community and civic responsibility. The writings gathered here cohere into McWilliams’s most mature and most developed philosophical statement—the distillation of a distinguished career of thinking about the American experiment. From insights into “The Framers and the Constitution” to reflections on “America as Technological Republic,” he shares a love for an older tradition of democracy, one based upon the active self-rule of self-governing citizens. “Protestant Prudence and Natural Rights” and “On Equality as the Moral Foundation for Community” may force readers to adjust their understandings of American politics, while “Democracy and the Citizen” and “Political Parties as Civic Associations” will resound for observers of the current political scene, regardless of party. Carey McWilliams not only offers a prescient analysis of the current crisis in American citizenship and governance but also shows us what sources within the American tradition might exist to save us from our worst selves. His broad and iconoclastic approach to American politics should appeal to both conservatives and liberals—to anyone, in fact, who cares about the state of democracy in America.
£62.23