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In a world where every person is exposed daily through the mass media to images of violence and suffering, as most dramatically exemplified in recent years by the ongoing tragedy in Darfur, the question naturally arises: What responsibilities do we, as bystanders to such social injustice, bear in holding accountable those who have created the conditions for this suffering? And what is our own complicity in the continuance of such violence&—indeed, how do we contribute to and benefit from it? How is our responsibility as individuals connected to our collective responsibility as members of a society? Such questions underlie Stephen Esquith&’s investigation in this book. For Esquith, being responsible means holding ourselves accountable as a people for the institutions we have built or tolerated and the choices we have made individually and collectively within these institutional constraints. It is thus more than just acknowledgment; it involves settling accounts as well as recognizing our own complicity even as bystanders.
The essays in Capabilities, Power, and Institutions extend, criticize, and reformulate the capabilities approach to development to better understand the importance of power, especially institutional power.
Focusing on the writings of John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, Esquith shows how modern liberal theory represents politics as the play of spectacular images and the reasonable interchange of domesticated voices - a representation that narrowly restricts the boundaries of public life, excluding those who are unable to enter this political domain of clients, consumers, and professional policymakers. By revealing this weakness, Esquith hopes to move political education in a more democratic direction. He uses Bakhtin's notion of speech genres to develop a critical interpretation of liberal theory's relationship to practice, then draws on Emerson's ideas of power and the public intellectual to reconsider the relationship between democratic theory and political education.
From the contents: Reason's reach: liberal tolerance and political discourse (Alfonso J. Damico).- Individualism and political dialogue (Tibor R. Machan).- Phronesis and political dialogue (Mark Kingwell).- Democracy and intellectual mediation: after liberalism and socialism (Richard T. Peterson).- Participation, power, and democracy (James H. Read).- Retribution in democracy (Aleksandar Fatic).
"A discussion of how everyday bystanders can learn to recognize and meet their shared and institutional political responsibilities for hunger, poverty, famine, civil war, wars of conquest and invasion, epidemics and pandemics, and genocide"--Provided by publisher.
Includes entries for maps and atlases.