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  • Democracy Incorporated

  • Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
  • By: Sheldon S. Wolin
  • Narrated by: Joe Barrett
  • Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (17 ratings)

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Democracy Incorporated

By: Sheldon S. Wolin
Narrated by: Joe Barrett
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Summary

Democracy is struggling in America - by now this statement is almost cliche. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"?

Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive - and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" in which the public is sheperded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies.

Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level.

Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightening rod for political debate for years to come.

The book is published by Princeton University Press.

©2008 Princeton University Press (P)2010 Redwood Audiobooks
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Critic reviews

"Sheldon Wolin has produced an ambitious and broad-ranging book that examines the current state of democracy in America.... Wolin argues that the unquestioned faith in the virtues of free market capitalism has dramatically narrowed the range of policy options that are on the table when debate turns to resolving the US's ills... [T]his is a trenchant and powerful volume." (Alex Waddan, International Affairs)
"As we've come to expect from Sheldon Wolin, a tightly argued and deeply revealing book about the dangers of unconstrained capitalism for our democracy." (Robert B. Reich, Professor of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley; former U.S. Secretary of Labor)

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Overrated beyond words

I heard Chris Hedges talk about this book so much, it was an essential to read, and I almost felt like an obligation. When I listened to this book, good lord. The person reading it sounds like a sarcastic grandfather exasperated with every single sentence, or a monotone zombie counting down the hours until the contract expires.

And as for the book, it's such deadening repetition, and so obvious, any point is lost because it is so excruciatingly, and painfully boring. I would sooner have several root canals back to back than listen to even a paragraph of Wolin's whiney, self-referential, pseudo-intellectual guff again.

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