David Held

I found this a hard, but worthwhile read. David Held writes well, but this is clearly designed as a text for an educational course and there were stages at which I would have welcomed a co-reader with whom to discuss what was being reported.

The book takes a look at democracy from its inception, at the hands of the Greek people, to the beginning of the 21st century. I expect that, if you are less mean than myself and bought a new edition from a book store, it would be even more up to date.

The first, perhaps unsurprising point, is that the perfect democratic system has yet to be created but, that democracy is the only system that even offers the prospect of a halcyon state. The book looks at both right leaning and leftward attempts at the perfect state. As one would expect of a serious tome, neither is favoured: both get a chance to show their strengths and both reveal their weaknesses.

In the final section of the book, Held offers an insight into the problems to come and, as I have already said, my edition was written in 2002, some 13 years before my ingesting thereof: this means that the predicted trials have started to appear. It is impressive to note how accurately Mr Held has been in spotting them. The final issue brought up, is the question of the need for some form of World Government. We see, at the moment, that the USA is taking the role of the world's policeman; it is time that a multinational alternative was considered.… (more)

I believe there's a 1990 edition where, presumably, Held takes account of the relations between poststructuralism (and its iterations) and critical theory. But I'd say that this edition (1980) may be stronger for not having this material in it, as it becomes all the more astonishing how much poststructuralism--including its feminist versions--owes to critical theory. There are differences, of course (see Held's (approving?) account of Marcuse on mastering 'nature'); but the differences are not of the nature of a radical break. Apart from being a reference, the book's value may lie in its preventing students of theory--me, for instance--from thinking that because Derrida et al. surprised us, that they emerged ex nihilo rather than from an already thriving intellectual tradition. In our arrogance, I think we too often mistake our own astonishment, and the astonishment of an uneducated press, for the astonishment of intellectuals who may not have been astonished at all.

The book's final third is on Habermas. After seeing that we were about the enter into a discussion of unrestricted rational discussions in the public sphere, I skipped it, since Habermas's unreconstructed humanism is of no value to my work on animals. So I can't rightly be said to have finished this book.

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