Trust in the Capacities of the People, Distrust in Elites - by Kenneth Good (Hardcover)

About the Book

Democratization is conceived as an unending struggle by the poor majority against the small elite of wealth, status, and power. This book is a critical, comparative, and global approach to the study of democratization and the participants who bring the processes and actual struggles alive.

Book Synopsis

Democratization is conceived as an unending struggle by the poor majority against the small elite of wealth, status, and power. This book is a critical, comparative, and global approach to the study of democratization and the participants who bring the processes and actual struggles alive.

Review Quotes

Good, author or coauthor of six books on democracy, social inequalities, and southern African politics, offers a study that favorably compares participative democracy to liberal political systems. His key argument is that the liberal capitalist democracy has failed and that participatory forms are rising in many places. The liberal form, epitomized by Great Britain and the US, is now under threat from its dysfunction and the alienation of its citizens from its institutions and elitist values. The participatory model upholds the capacity of uneducated and poor citizens to govern themselves actively and directly. Good provides illustrations for his arguments from ancient Athens through 17th-century England to developments in post-apartheid South Africa, Iceland, and Arab countries since 2011. Despite his optimism, he admits that the process of participatory democratization will be long term and inherently contentious. While questioning practices of liberal democracy, the author does not forget to criticize the political theory of elitism that underpins modern liberal democracies, a theory developed a century ago by Robert Michels, Max Weber, and Gaetano Mosca. Summing Up: Recommended. Undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.

Ken Good's Trust in the Capacities of the People, Distrust in Elites tells the story of the struggle for real democracy from ancient Athens and the Levellers, through the struggle against apartheid, Portugal's 1975 Carnation Revolution and the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe and brings the story up to date with events in Iceland and the Arab world. Challenging lazy accounts of democratization as the result of natural processes or heroic figures, it powerfully restates the burning ideals of radical democracy against both the bland, plastic realities of liberal institutionalism and the conservative celebrations of elite power as good in itself.

The book's dramatic and at times heart-wrenching examples give power to its sense of historical change and the open-endedness of the struggle for popular self-government. It shows that mass self-organization, radical education and the struggle for democracy are not idle words but ever-present possibilities which keep reappearing despite the best efforts of the powerful and wealthy and the co-optations and blind alleys which often mark the process. The collapse of popular trust in politics in the UK and US, or the disappointments of revolutionary processes in South Africa and Egypt, are countered by the new ways in which people struggle for equal and direct participation in the decisions which govern their lives. Far from being rendered impossible by the inequalities of neoliberalism, real democracy is shaped by class and poverty, colonialism and race, and gender and grows out of self-organization in struggle. This book should be read by activists and students alike.

This book, which will be read as heretical by all forms of elitism, across the political spectrum, offers a scintillating challenge to the political common sense of our times. Good offers a sustained attack on the 'insistence that ordinary people are incompetent and irrational, and that only elites are able to think for them and fit to rule'.

Trust in the People, Distrust in Elites provides a biting critique of liberal democracy as it is found in the world today, and issues a clarion call in favour of participatory democracy. Taking the Athenian model of democracy as his inspirational model, Ken Good argues that historical and contemporary attempts to realize democracy on a popular basis offer the prospect of a better future for all. Failures will be encountered along the way, yet even they will further the capacities of ordinary people to build equitable democracies, and ultimately to exert control over privileged elites. This is a highly accessible and provocative text, and strongly recommended as an antidote to democratic pessimism.

About the Author

Kenneth Good is adjunct professor in global studies at RMIT University and visiting professor in political and international studies at Rhodes University.