Home
Democracy as Fetish by Ralph Cintron, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters
Loading Inventory...
Democracy as Fetish by Ralph Cintron, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters
From Ralph Cintron
Current price: $151.95
From Ralph Cintron
Democracy as Fetish by Ralph Cintron, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters
Current price: $151.95
Loading Inventory...
Size: 0.92 x 9 x 453
*Product information may vary - to confirm product availability, pricing, shipping and return information please contact Coles
Democracy has long been fetishized. Consequently, how we speak about democracy and what we expect from democratic governance are at odds with practice. With unflinching resolve, this book probes the theory of democracy and how the left and right are fascinated by it. In this innovative multidisciplinary study, Ralph Cintron provides sustained analysis of our political discourse. He shows not only how the rhetoric of democracy produces strong desires for social order, global wealth, and justice but also how these desires cannot be satisfied. Throughout his discussion, Cintron includes ethnographic research from fieldwork conducted over the course of twenty years in the Latino neighborhoods of Chicago, where he observes both citizens and the undocumented looking to democracy to fulfill their highest aspirations. Politicians hand out favors to the elite, developers strong-arm aldermen, and the disenfranchised have little redress. The problem, Cintron argues, is that the conditions required to put democracy into practice—territory, a bordered nation-state, citizens, property—are constituted by inequality and violence, because there is no inclusivity that does not also exclude. Drawing on ethnography, economics, political theory, and rhetorical analysis, Cintron makes his case with tremendous analytic rigor. This challenge to reassess the discourses on democracy and to consider democratic politics as always compromised by oligarchy will be of particular interest to political and rhetorical theorists. | Democracy as Fetish by Ralph Cintron, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters