Democracy may be one of the most admired ideas ever concocted, but what if it’s also one of the most harebrained? After many years of writing about democracy for a living, David Harsanyi has concluded that it’s the most overrated, overused, and misunderstood idea in political life. The less we have of it the better. “Democracy” is not synonymous with “freedom.” It is not the opposite of tyranny. In fact, the Founding Fathers knew that democracy can lead to tyranny. That’s why they built so many safeguards against it into the Constitution. Democracy, Harsanyi argues, has made our government irrational, irresponsible, and invasive. It has left the American people with only two options—domination by the majority or a government that can’t possibly work. The modern age has imbued democracy with the mystique of infallibility. But Harsanyi reminds us that the vast majority of political philosophers, including the founders, have thought that responsible, limited government based on direct majority rule over a large, let alone continental scale was a practical impossibility. In The People Have Spoken, you’ll learn: Why the Framers of our Constitution were intent on establishing a republic, not a “democracy” How democracy undermines self-government How shockingly out of touch with reality most voters really are Why democracy is an economic wrecking ball—and an invitation to a politics of envy and corruption How the great political philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Burke and Tocqueville predicted with uncanny accuracy that democracy could lead to tyranny Harsanyi warns that if we don’t recover the Founders’ republican vision, “democracy” might very well spell the end of American liberty and prosperity.

The September 2014 elections in Fiji was one of the most anticipated in the history of the country, coming after eight years of military rule and under a radically new constitution that introduced a system of proportional representative (PR) and without any reserved communal seats. The election was won overwhelmingly by FijiFirst, a party formed by 2006 coup leader Frank Bainimarama. He subsequently embarked on a process of shifting the political configuration of Fijian politics from inter-ethnic to trans-ethnic mobilisation. The shift has not been easy in terms of changing people’s perceptions and may face some challenges in the longer term, despite Bainimarama’s clear victory in the polls. Ethnic consciousness has the capacity to become re?articulated in different forms and to seek new opportunities for expression. This book explores these and other issues surrounding the 2014 Fiji elections in a collection of articles written from varied political, intellectual and ideological positions.

Democracy may be one of the most admired ideas ever concocted, but what if it’s also one of the most harebrained? After many years of writing about democracy for a living, David Harsanyi has concluded that it’s the most overrated, overused, and misunderstood idea in political life. The less we have of it the better. “Democracy” is not synonymous with “freedom.” It is not the opposite of tyranny. In fact, the Founding Fathers knew that democracy can lead to tyranny. That’s why they built so many safeguards against it into the Constitution. Democracy, Harsanyi argues, has made our government irrational, irresponsible, and invasive. It has left the American people with only two options—domination by the majority or a government that can’t possibly work. The modern age has imbued democracy with the mystique of infallibility. But Harsanyi reminds us that the vast majority of political philosophers, including the founders, have thought that responsible, limited government based on direct majority rule over a large, let alone continental scale was a practical impossibility. In The People Have Spoken, you’ll learn: Why the Framers of our Constitution were intent on establishing a republic, not a “democracy” How democracy undermines self-government How shockingly out of touch with reality most voters really are Why democracy is an economic wrecking ball—and an invitation to a politics of envy and corruption How the great political philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Burke and Tocqueville predicted with uncanny accuracy that democracy could lead to tyranny Harsanyi warns that if we don’t recover the Founders’ republican vision, “democracy” might very well spell the end of American liberty and prosperity.

"The People Have Spoken" is an alternate history book written by Rebecca Stirling. What if the United States had underwent a socialist revolution, and what would this mean for the world? Complete with dozens of maps and four hundred pages of lore, dive deep into a new and fascinating world.

The September 2014 elections in Fiji was one of the most anticipated in the history of the country, coming after eight years of military rule and under a radically new constitution that introduced a system of proportional representative (PR) and without any reserved communal seats. The election was won overwhelmingly by FijiFirst, a party formed by 2006 coup leader Frank Bainimarama. He subsequently embarked on a process of shifting the political configuration of Fijian politics from inter-ethnic to trans-ethnic mobilisation. The shift has not been easy in terms of changing people's perceptions and may face some challenges in the longer term, despite Bainimarama's clear victory in the polls. Ethnic consciousness has the capacity to become re-articulated in different forms and to seek new opportunities for expression. This book explores these and other issues surrounding the 2014 Fiji elections in a collection of articles written from varied political, intellectual and ideological positions.

The Prophets have spoken. It is wise to know what they said. “It’s a fascinating story, a story you really must know for yourself.” History is strewn with wars and scrapping over religion. With the advent of the global village, people of different beliefs are being pressed up against each other, and the potential for major conflict is enormous. It behooves us to know what our neighbours believe and why they believe it. Though we may never agree with them, when we know what people believe, at the very least, we can intelligently disagree without being disagreeable. All that the Prophets have Spoken is about the most widely distributed and most vehemently disputed book in history—the Bible. If you are one of those who seriously wants to understand the message of the Prophets, then this book is for you.

Beyond the People develops a provocative, interdisciplinary, and meta-theoretical critique of the idea of popular sovereignty. It asks simple but far-reaching questions: Can 'imagined' communities, or 'invented' peoples, ever be theorized without, at the same time, being re-imagined and re-invented anew? Can polemical concepts, such as popular sovereignty or constituent power, be theorized objectively? If, as this book argues, the answer to these questions is no, theorists who approach the figure of a sovereign people must acknowledge that their activity is inseparable from the practice of constituent imagination. Though widely accepted as important, even vital, for the development of political concepts, the social practice of imagination is almost always presumed to operate either historically or impersonally, but seldom individually. Those who theorize the figures of popular sovereignty do not see that they are, in effect, 'conjurors' of peoplehood. This book invites constitutional, international, normative, and other political and legal theorists of sovereign peoplehood to embrace the conjuring-side of their professional identities, as a way of exploring the possibility of moving beyond eternally recurring, insolvable, and increasingly irrelevant questions. Instead of asking: Who is the people? What is the function of constituent power? Where may the people exercise its right to self-determination? Beyond the People asks the reader to consider the prospect of a riskier and more adventurous theoretical road, that opens with the question: What do I as a 'theorist-imaginer', or 'conjuror of peoplehood', assume, anticipate, and aspire to as I theorize the vehicles that mediate the assumptions, anticipations, and aspirations of others? This question is examined throughout the book as it interrogates the idea of peoplehood beyond disciplinary boundaries, showing how polemical, visual, affective, conceptual, and allegorical language critically shapes our idea of peoplehood. It offers a nuanced account of the contested relationship between the social imaginary of peoplehood on the ground, and the imaginative practices of the professional 'conjurors' of peoplehood in the academy.

This study explores one of the oldest and most central issues of the Hebrew Bible -- the compositional history of 1--2 Kings. Its approach does not proceed from the assumption prevalent since the time of de Wette, namely, that the origins of 1--2 Kings should be explained through a process of Deuteronomistic literary redaction rooted in the Josianic reform. Rather, this study reads 1--2 Kings through the lens of other texts with similar genres existing in its historical context. More precisely, the texts under question belong to the genre of "chronography": kinglists, chronicles, and royal inscriptions, possessing similar or, in some cases, identical structures and motifs to those found in 1--2 Kings. This study includes a literary-critical analysis of every main structural feature of the regnal framework: regnal year totals, synchronisms, geographic filiations, naming the queen mother, source citations, death and burial formulae, regnal evaluations, royal predecessor-formula, and cultic reports. It also seeks to determine the extent of the original framework by mapping its opening and conclusion. The results of the study indicate that the framework's opening was in Solomon's account and its original climax was in Hezekiah's account and represented the latter as a royal YHWHist par excellence excellence, the restorer of order who limited sacrificial space to Jerusalem. The genealogical structure of this Hezekian History emerges from the Davidic royal ideology rooted in Jerusalem. There is no decisive indication that calls for the original framework structure's classification as Deuteronomistic or Josianic. The author of the framework wrote during the early-to-mid seventh century B.C.E. and reported the major historical events surrounding Hezekiah's reign, including the survival of Jerusalem in 701 B.C.E. -- in the B1 narrative -- as well as his centralizing reform.