The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad | Fareed Zakaria

The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad | Fareed Zakaria | Democracy without liberty

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The Future of Free...

	The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad Fareed Zakaria, 2003 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 133 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Democracy has reshaped politics, economics, and culture around the world. This provocative book asks, can you have too much of a good thing?

Today we judge the value of every idea, institution, and individual by one test: is it popular? Or, more practically, do the majority of those polled like it? This transformation has affected not just politics but also business, law, culture, and even religion. Every institution and profession in society must democratize or die. Democracy has gone from being a form of government to a way of life.

Like any broad transformation, however, the trends that democracy unleashes are not uniformly benign. Democracy has its dark sides, yet to question it has been to provoke instant criticism that you are "out of sync" with the times. No more. With an easy command of history, philosophy, and current affairs, Zakaria reinterprets our past and outlines our future. Woodrow Wilson said the challenge of the twentieth century was to make the world safe for democracy. This penetrating book challenges us to make democracy safe for the world.

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Democracy on the Autopsy Table

America's most brilliant columnist has struck again, this time with his sharp intellect used as a scalpel at the autopsy table dissecting American, and Western democracy. This book is his tutorial on freedom. It is refreshing and honest in a way we Americans are not use to. And had he plunged his knife in even an inch deeper, he easily could have been accused of "informal treason" (as everyone who criticizes American eventually is accused of).

It is impossible to miss his larger message: that democracy is more than just elections. It is really "elections plus." That is to say, it is elections plus an important package of assorted and related measures he refers to as "constitutional liberalism" -- such as freedom from tyranny, the rule of law, free speech, civil society, freedom of religion, etc. These "illiberal measures" that lay above and beyond democratic process itself, are the actual glue that makes democracies work. They depend completely on the moral strength of the people that devise them and carry them out.

And therein lies the rub, the fly in the ointment of all governments whether they be full fledged oligarchs or the best of Western democracies: Ideals do not automatically come into force by themselves; and governments are not inherently insulated against moral and political corruption, they require morally strong people to see them through. In short, ideals and governments, no matter how well designed, cannot be better than the people designated to carry them out.

The examples that Professor Zakaria chose in a rather backhanded way to make this point, could not have been better chosen: Hitler's democratic election in Germany and America's majority rule racial Apartheid which has lasted for over a century. Both came into being as a result of fair democratic elections by the majority of the respective nation's peoples. So too did Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Mugabe of Zimbabwe, for that matter.

Thus in the first part of the book, Zakaria makes a telling case that neither elections nor even democracies, are panaceas: It is moral legitimacy that is needed no matter what is the government's type. Yet, his prescriptions for fixing our problems seem to have gone off the rails. They ignored this important point at the subtext of his analysis, one of the most important forensic results of the autopsy. In his conclusions he falls back on the "mechanics of process" rather than rest his case on the strength of character of the people involved. The good professor thinks we need a better balance between capitalist regulations (which we now have too much of) and the regulations on our democracy (which he thinks has become entirely too free, as in free-wheeling). Sounding like one who has been recruited by the cult of neo-cons: he thinks the problem with American democracy is that we have gone too far in both cases, and that we now need to pull in our reins. Go figure?

But this solution does not fix the problem mentioned at the subtext of his analysis: the illegitimacy of creeping moral corruption, which sneaks in through the backdoor, and attacks all democracies whether large or small, East or West, like the locusts that descended on Egypt after the Jews fled to Israel.

It is corruption, not process that is the problem. No wonder people from the U.S. to Europe are losing faith in their democracies. Five stars.

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Democracy without liberty

This is a fascinating book! Illiberal democracy (democracy without liberty) is spreading worldwide, and imperiling the future of freedom. The democratization process is multi-faceted: political, economic, cultural, what have you. The broad drivers behind it are technological progress, the growth of a wealthy middle class, the fall of alternative economic systems, and the Americanization of popular culture. Gunnar Myrdal predicted the convergence of political attitudes, while von Hayek foretold the fall of socialism and rise of the welfare state. What both philosophical thinkers missed is that the rise in democracy was to be without liberty. The rest of this book explains how and why that happened.

The explanation starts with a short history of liberty. This chapter is pure educational pleasure - for any reader. The road to democracy itself has undulated, yet infrastructural change is unstoppable, and along with it super-structural change. The exception is the Islamic world where the "monarchs are more liberal than societies over which they reign" (p. 120). However, too much of anything is dangerous, and paradoxically too much democracy has killed authority, resulting in illiberal democracy. It is under this new stage that dangers, like international terrorism, now lurk.

The book ends with a forward-looking chapter of the "way out". While the information the last chapter presents is valuable, the conclusions do not appear to follow easily from previous chapters. However, even with that flaw, this is a great book.

Amavilah, Author
Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies
ISBN: 1600210465

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Freedom - Economic First? Or Democracy First?

This book is an excellent look at the promotion of democratic and economic reforms abroad. The main question in the book which Zakaria seeks to provide an answer to is whether economic reforms (and market reforms) should come first or democratic and governance reforms should come first over the other.

It is about the sequencing between economic and governance reforms. Which should be liberlized first? Which type of liberlization should the U.S. and international financial institutions promote? Should the U.S. promote economic market reforms in other nations or require nations to first liberalize their governance and institute democracy first. Zakaria argues in favor of economic and market liberalization has usually come first and then liberalization and institution of democratic institutions usually follow. He argues this by showing examples.

One of the main thesis is that once a nations GDP rises above a certain level, the political institutions usually develop and liberilize into democratic ones with more wide-spread participation by a middle class.

This is an excellent book at the intersection of economics and international trade and the promotion of democratic political institutions. Having said that, I do not like the subtitle of the book - but that is a question of marketing for the publisher. We'll watch nations like Singapore and China to see whether liberalization of their governance follows their economic liberalization and thus confirm or deny his hypothesis.

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great analysis but should have been deeper

Good analysis. But just touched (it was democracy that produced Hitler) and dropped extremely serious issue of social, ethnic, religious, intellectual, knowledge, etc. diversity and its role in democracy functioning. This analysis and ways to make democracy more efficient and more "dictator resistent" must be continued without any political correctness.

In the name of Freedom

Fareed Zakaria proves himself a brilliant thinker with his From Wealth to Power, The Future of Freedom, and The Post-American World. The Future of Freedom has the real foundation of his thinking: there is something wrong with Liberal Democracy and there is something right with Illiberal Democracy from the perspectives of social development and international politics.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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