John Markoff is Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published extensively in sociological, historical and political science journals. His recent work includes The Great Wave of Democracy in Historical Perspective, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords and Legislators in the French Revolution.
Instead of presenting democracy as an ideal political system that humans only imperfectly realize, John Markoff conceptualizes democracy as something continually being re invented. Instead of reducing democracy to well-defined and routine practices and institutions such as elections and parliaments, Markoff shows how political movements have repeatedly challenged and remade existing institutions. After reviewing two centuries of political conflict, he concludes with a thoughtful and exciting discussion on what democracy means today and what its future might be.
Markoff's central aim is to illustrate and examine the various forces that have shaped our meanings of democracy from the 18th century to the present. He does this, as his title suggests, by identifying what he calls antidemocratic and democratic waves that have alternatively risen to dominance at particular periods in the past. The urgency of his argument is made all the more pertinent, because he sees the present as being the crest of the greatest democratic wave to date, with the future being highly uncertain.
Rather than adopting a theoretical approach to understanding the meaning of contemporary democracy, his study is based very much in empirical reconstruction. He adopts two vantage points. First, he considers why democratic notions first really gained power at the end of the 19th century, and how they have then changed in response to the ways in which people have challenged governments. Second, he explores the ways in which democratic ideas have themselves moved across national boundaries, and particularly how all the countries that have recently partaken in the.....
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