I recently noticed that at least a few of the books listed in my Amazon Bookstore have been purchased. So I thought I’d plug three books & mention that I’ve been adding a number of books to the various categories.
None of these three are “new” (they were published in the last few years), but they’ve all been bestsellers. I don’t usually buy hard covers, and I tend to wait until publishers are willing to give me books for free (or at steep conference rate discounts). But this year I finally got to dive into these & found them thought provoking yet simple enough for a “general” audience.
The first is Jack Snyder’s From Voting to Violence (2000) deals primarily w/ the uncomfortable relationship between democracy & nationalism. My students regularly read an article by Snyder & Karen Ballentine (“Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas”) that trace how democratizing countries are especially prone to ethnic or nationalist violence. Ironically, it has the same cover art as Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom (2004), which tackles some of the thorny issues of modern liberal (and illiberal!) democracy—principally by emphasizing that liberal democracy means putting specific constraints on “popular passions” (an traditional “Madisonian” view of democracy). The book has some great historical anecdotal examples. Both books give a more somber assessment of democracy, particularly by looking at its “darker” underbelly.
Finally, I got this book about two years back, but have recently found a short version of it in my new edition of the reader I use for comparative politics. Avishai Margalit & Ian Buruma’s Occidentalism
