Abstract
“Hyperdemocracy” is a term already in use by students of politics. It was used, for example, by José Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses to describe a condition in which “the mass [of people] acts directly, outside the law, imposing its aspirations and its desires by means of material pressure.”1 More recently, “hyper-democracy” has been seen, by communications scholar Brian McNair, as a form of political unpredictability that is an outcome of “cultural chaos” in the media, typified by “ideological competition rather than hegemony [and] increased volatility of news agendas.”2 Neither writer makes the concept central to his analysis or defines it very clearly, and each places it within an ideological framework, respectively conservative and liberal.
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Notes
José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W W. Norton, 1993), 17.
Brian McNair, Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 3.
Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976).
Bruce Ackerman, We the People 1: Foundations (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1991).
See David Brian Robertson, The Constitution and America’s Destiny (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) for detailed analysis of the Constitution-making process and the ratification.
(see Herbert A. Simon, “Rational Decision-Making in Business Organizations,” American Economic Review 69 (1979)).
John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 33–6.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), §§ 143–241.
Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 35–75.
Richard A. Hilbert, The Classical Roots of Ethnomethodology: Durkheim, Weber, and Garfinkel (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 158–60.
A useful survey and assessment is David Held, Models of Democracy, 3rd ed. (Cambridge and Maiden, MA: Polity Press, 2006).
See Emily Hauptmann, “Political Science/Political Theory: Defining ‘Theory’ in Postwar Political Science,” in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others, ed. George Steinmetz (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005).
Robert A. Dahl, “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest,” American Political Science Review 55 (1961).
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” American Political Science Review 63 (1969): 1063.
Leo Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” Journal of Politics 19 (1957): 347.
Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), 92.
Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 56.
Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 40, n. 7.
Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited. Part One: The Contemporary Debate (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1987), 64–7.
Alexander Wendt, “On Constitution and Causation in International Affairs,” Review of International Studies 24 (1998).
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© 2013 Stephen Welch
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Welch, S. (2013). Introduction: Hyperdemocracy, the Cognitive Dimension of Democracy, and Democratic Theory. In: Hyperdemocracy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137099174_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137099174_1
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