American Dionysia: Violence, tragedy and democratic politics

American Dionysia

Pluralism’s renaissance, thanks to William Connolly, Chantal Mouffe and others, has established its position as the distinctive voice of late modern democracy. It thus calls for an explicit theory of tragedy to address the antagonisms and enmities it reflects and fosters. Treating Machiavelli, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Weber and Camus as members of a minor (tragic) tradition of thought, I articulate...

Preventive War and Democratic Politics

I define the concept of preventive war, distinguish it from preemption and other sources of better-now-than-later logic, and examine numerous conceptual issues that confound theoretical and empirical analyses of prevention. I then consider the argument that democracies rarely if ever adopt preventive war strategies because such strategies are contrary to the preferences of democratic publics an...

Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India

Fast thinking: Implications for democratic politics

Amajor programmeof research on cognition has been built around the idea that human beings are frequently intuitive thinkers and that human intuition is imperfect.Themodernmarketing of politics and the time-poor position ofmany citizens suggests that ‘fast’, intuitive, thinking inmany contemporary democracies is ubiquitous. This article explores the consequences that such fast thinking might hav...

Death in pregnancy--an American tragedy.

n engl j med 370;10 nejm.org march 6, 2014 889 as apneic but alive, she was brought to the county hospital where her family was soon told that she was brain dead. Ms. Muñoz and her husband, both emergency medical technicians (EMTs), had discussed their feelings about such situations. So Erik Muñoz felt confident in asserting that his wife would not want continued support. Her other family membe...