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The Democracy Project
- A History, a Crisis, a Movement
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
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Publisher's summary
A bold rethinking of the most powerful political idea in the world - democracy - as seen through the lens of the most transformative political movements of our time and the story of how radical democracy can yet transform America.
Democracy has been the American religion since before the Revolution - from New England town halls to the multicultural democracy of Atlantic pirate ships. But can our current political system, one that seems responsive only to the wealthiest among us and leaves most Americans feeling disengaged, voiceless, and disenfranchised, really be called democratic? And if the tools of our democracy are not working to solve the rising crises we face, how can we - average citizens - make change happen?
David Graeber, one of the most influential scholars and activists of his generation, takes listeners on a journey through the idea of democracy, provocatively reorienting our understanding of pivotal historical moments, and extracts their lessons for today - from the birth of Athenian democracy and the founding of the United States of America to the global revolutions of the 20th century and the rise of a new generation of activists. Underlying it all is a bracing argument that in the face of increasingly concentrated wealth and power in this country, a reenergized, reconceived democracy - one based on consensus, equality, and broad participation - can yet provide us with the just, free, and fair society we want.
The Democracy Project tells the story of the resilience of the democratic spirit and the adaptability of the democratic idea. It offers a fresh take on vital history and an impassioned argument that radical democracy is, more than ever, our best hope.
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Is America a source of pride, as Americans have long held, or shame, as Progressives allege? Beneath an innocent exterior, are our lives complicit in a national project of theft, expropriation, oppression, and murder? Or is America still the hope of the world? New York Times best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza says these questions are no mere academic exercise.
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We can think for ourselves
- By score bags on 06-21-14
By: Dinesh D'Souza
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Decline and Fall
- The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America
- By: John Michael Greer
- Narrated by: Kristoffer Tabori
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The decline and fall of America's global empire is the central feature of today's geopolitical landscape, and the nature of our response to it will determine much of our future trajectory, with implications that reach far beyond the limits of one nation's borders. Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America challenges the conventional wisdom of empire, using a wealth of historical examples combined with groundbreaking original analysis.
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Will insist friends & family read this book
- By Paul on 05-14-16
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Winter Is Coming
- Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped
- By: Garry Kasparov
- Narrated by: George Backman
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The ascension of Vladimir Putin - a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB - to the presidency of Russia in 1999 should have been a signal that the country was headed away from democracy. Yet in the intervening years - as America and the world's other leading powers have continued to appease him - Putin has grown into not only a dictator but a global threat. With his vast resources and nuclear weapons, Putin is at the center of a worldwide assault on political liberty.
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A polemic against Putin
- By David on 05-27-16
By: Garry Kasparov
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The Paranoid Style in American Politics
- By: Richard Hofstadter, Sean Wilentz - foreward
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs. In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence - and derail - the larger agendas of a political party.
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Written in the 50s and 60s...
- By Kindle Customer on 11-06-19
By: Richard Hofstadter, and others
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Our Divided Political Heart
- The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent
- By: E. J. Dionne
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Our Divided Political Heart will be the must-listen book of the 2012 election campaign. Offering an incisive analysis of how hyper-individualism is poisoning the nation's political atmosphere, E. J. Dionne Jr., argues that Americans can't agree on who we are because we can't agree on who we've been, or what it is, philosophically and spiritually, that makes us Americans.
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Good points and lots of good information
- By Jamie B on 08-15-12
By: E. J. Dionne
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When the Facts Change
- Essays, 1995-2010
- By: Tony Judt
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 14 hrs
- Unabridged
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In When the Facts Change, Tony Judt's widow and fellow historian Jennifer Homans has assembled an essential collection of the most important and influential pieces written in the last 15 years of Judt's life, the years in which he found his voice in the public sphere. Included are seminal essays on the full range of Judt's concerns, including Europe as an idea and in reality, before 1989 and thereafter; Israel, the Holocaust and the Jews; American hyperpower and the world after 9/11.
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Essential
- By Herman Utik on 09-19-16
By: Tony Judt
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Blood Oil
- Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules That Run the World
- By: Leif Wenar
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 20 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Natural resources empower the world's most coercive men. Autocrats like Putin and the Saudis spend oil money on weapons and repression. ISIS and Congo's militias spend resource money on atrocities and ammunition. For decades resource-fueled authoritarians and extremists have forced endless crises on the West - and the ultimate source of their resource money is us, paying at the gas station and the mall.
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Caveat: Human beings -- Totally untrustworthy
- By lost the power cord could you send me another cord address 13 east wilmont ave somers point nj 08244 on 05-17-16
By: Leif Wenar
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Cowards
- What Politicians, Radicals, and the Media Refuse to Say
- By: Glenn Beck
- Narrated by: Ron McLarty
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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As we approach the most important presidential election in America’s history, something has been lost among all of the debates, attack ads, and super- PACs - something that Americans used to hold in very high regard: THE TRUTH. The truth can no longer be something we hope for; it must be something we live. When courage prevails, cowards do not - and this book was written to ensure that’s exactly what happens.
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Guess what... Its by Glenn Beck!!
- By Joseph on 07-17-12
By: Glenn Beck
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Death of the Liberal Class
- By: Chris Hedges
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Chris Hedges examines the failure of the liberal class to confront the rise of the corporate state and the consequences of a liberalism that has become profoundly bankrupted. Hedges argues that there are five pillars of the liberal establishment and that each of these institutions has sold out the constituents it represented. In doing so, the liberal class has become irrelevant to society at large and ultimately the corporate power elite they once served.
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Integrity-Can You Tell Me Where It's Gone?
- By Mel on 06-14-12
By: Chris Hedges
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Liberal Fascism
- The Secret History of the American Left
- By: Jonah Goldberg
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 15 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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"Fascists", "Brownshirts", "jackbooted stormtroopers" - such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?
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Great book
- By Mark on 05-10-08
By: Jonah Goldberg
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Not his most serious book, but still really great
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"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes.
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Transformative to the point of being revolutionary
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Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”. It went viral. After a million online views in 17 different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.
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Incredibly disappointing...
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A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state", political violence, and social inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
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exactly what I've been looking for
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The Utopia of Rules
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Anthropologist David Graeber - one of our most important and provocative thinkers - traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice...though he also suggests there may be something perversely appealing - even romantic - about bureaucracy.
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Not his most serious book, but still really great
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Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies—vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.
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A fun historical analysis of Pirate political systems
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"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes.
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Transformative to the point of being revolutionary
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Incredibly disappointing...
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A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state", political violence, and social inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
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exactly what I've been looking for
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On Anarchism
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On Anarchism provides the reasoning behind Noam Chomsky's fearless lifelong questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched power. In these essays, Chomsky redeems one of the most maligned ideologies, anarchism, and places it at the foundation of his political thinking. Chomsky's anarchism is distinctly optimistic and egalitarian. Moreover, it is a living, evolving tradition that is situated in a historical lineage; Chomsky's anarchism emphasizes the power of collective, rather than individualist, action.
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It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system–a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework.
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Mind-blowing
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Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative.
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A major new collection from "arguably the most important intellectual alive" ( The New York Times). Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the modern era. Over the past thirty years, broadly diverse audiences have gathered to attend his sold-out lectures. Now, in Understanding Power, Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel have assembled the best of Chomsky's recent talks on the past, present, and future of the politics of power.
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Current times demand you get this into your head.
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Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? Author James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not - and cannot - be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge.
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Eric R. Kandel, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is one of the pioneers of modern brain science. His work continues to shape our understanding of how learning and memory work and to break down age-old barriers between the sciences and the arts. In his seminal new audiobook, The Disordered Mind, Kandel draws on a lifetime of pathbreaking research and the work of many other leading neuroscientists to take us on an unusual tour of the brain. He confronts one of the most difficult questions we face: How does our mind, our individual sense of self, emerge from the physical matter of the brain?
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Thoroughly enjoyed
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Wanting
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Gravity affects every aspect of our physical being, but there’s a psychological force just as powerful - yet almost nobody has heard of it. It’s responsible for bringing groups of people together and pulling them apart, making certain goals attractive to some and not to others, and fueling cycles of anxiety and conflict. In Wanting, Luke Burgis draws on the work of French polymath René Girard to bring this hidden force to light and reveals how it shapes our lives and societies.
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One of the most important books you'll ever read
- By chris boutte on 06-14-21
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How Democracies Die
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Democracies can die with a coup d'état - or they can die slowly. This happens most deceptively when in piecemeal fashion, with the election of an authoritarian leader, the abuse of governmental power and the complete repression of opposition. All three steps are being taken around the world - not least with the election of Donald Trump - and we must all understand how we can stop them.
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Connecting the Dots
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By: Steven Levitsky, and others
What listeners say about The Democracy Project
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Phoebe
- 04-15-21
This should be more famous
I loved the story of Occupy, which I really had known next to nothing about when it happened, and also the story of democracy, which follows. He is a terrific explainer of things; I never had to rewind because something was too convoluted or dense. Well, I had to rewind once, because I couldn't tell if the reader was saying really or rarely. Also, it's official, I'm an anarchist now. Small a.
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- Ricardo
- 07-17-17
imperdible
imperdible para los que estén buscando entender cómo renovar la política y qué significan los últimos aContecimientos y movimientos que promueven la libertad y democracia en todos los niveles
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- Nicholas
- 09-10-18
a must read for anyone interested in politics
I loved this book. it was very thought but not too dense or academic. this book largely focuses on occupy wall street which was a pleasant surprise but adds both a global and historical perspective.
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- M.H.
- 02-24-23
Incredible book
Graeber has an incredible talent of identifying and exploring the hidden assumptions and myths that run our world. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It is an excellent book.
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- Alan Smithee
- 08-08-19
the graeb does it again
real Shaq and Kobe vibes here. peak performance, dude is killing the game right now
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- Ember
- 08-21-19
Excellent
In depth but approachable and extremely interesting book. Must read. Covers the broad concepts and big questions you find yourself asking in the currently political climate.
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- Marcus
- 12-31-15
there's a something magic about this book.
I loved the book, but if I had to recap it, it would be hard. The book moves between history and the events of OWS and sums up some thoughts of possible future. I would love an entire book just going through the future of an anarchy world.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Scott
- 12-28-22
Inspiring, reflective look at the road up which we must travel
This is a remarkable historical, analytical and reflective look at ways of organizing ourselves as communities and as a political society (and ways states and various actors have worked to block various idealistic and practical attempts to create more effective ways) at a time where the current structures are clearly falling apart due to their being antithetical to our survival - as individuals, communities, and as a species. A great source for conceiving alternatives that have never been more essential.
And the narration is fabulous - clear, conversational, and with just the right emphasis to promote great comprehension and thought.
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- Kevin
- 10-15-14
Must-read: such insight, an awakening!
What did you love best about The Democracy Project?
This is one of the handful of gems that make you think in profoundly-different ways.
I heard excellent reviews of Mr. Graeber's book "Debt: the First 5000 Years", but I thought I'd like a more general book to start with and this was perfect.
Explores our assumptions of "democracy", and how Corporate and Government bureaucracy are top-down hierarchies which are quite simply contrary to real democracy.
I've often assumed "anarchism" was somehow extreme or unrealistic, but this book made a very compelling case for how horizontal decision-making is desirable and even practical, featuring numerous real-life examples along with common sense analogies.
This book also tackles the morality of debt and the morality of work head-on, most relevant and fascinating!
What did you like best about this story?
Only special books manage to shake one from one's stupor, or present clear explanations for those nagging ideas that were never understood. This is a lot to ask for, but this book delivers!
Also recommended is Matt Taibbi's book "Griftopia"
Which scene was your favorite?
On top of everything, this book is surprisingly uplifting. Revolutions and revolutionary ideas do indeed cascade into society and our collective consciousness, often seemingly against all odds.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
These book connected so many dots and opened up a new world of ideas and possibilities. For a non-fiction, that is the highest accolade.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Bruce Dwayne
- 11-18-20
Democracy Distilled
Graeber smashes vast society-spanning topics into relatable snippets that make you think about... well, everything! Amazing, 10/10
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