Sözler ve Alıntılar
Eski düzende bir şarkıcının şöhreti onu kimin dinlediğine bağlıydı. Şimdi ise şöhretin anahtarı kaç kişinin onu beğendiğine bağlıdır.
Nicelik, nitelik haline dönmüştür.
Birleşik Devletler’in yurt dışında sıkça sınırsız demokrasiyi savunması biraz tuhaftır. Amerikan sisteminin ayırt edici özelliği ne kadar demokratik olduğu değil, seçmen kitlelerinin üzerine koyduğu birçok kısıtlamalar nedeniyle, ne kadar demokratik olmadığıdır.
Ethnic conflict is as old as recorded history, and dictatorships are hardly innocent in fomenting it. But newly democratizing societies display a disturbingly common tendency toward it. The reason is simple: as society opens up and politicians scramble for power, they appeal to the public for votes using what ends up being the most direct, effective language, that of group solidarity in opposition to some other group. Often this stokes the fires of ethnic or religious conflict. Sometimes the conflict turns into a full-scale war.
Sayfa 113
Most Third World countries that proclaimed themselves democracies immediately after their independence, while they were poor and unstable, became dictatorships within a decade. As Giovanni Sartori, Columbia University's great scholar of democracy, noted about the path from constitutional liberalism to democracy, "the itinerary is not reversible." Even European deviations from the Anglo-American pattern constitutionalism and capitalism first, only then democracy- were far less successful in producing liberal democracy. To see the complications produced by premature democratization, we could return to the heart of Europe-back in time to the early twentieth century.
Sayfa 58
More to the point, Greece was not the birthplace of liberty as we understand it today. Liberty in the modern world is first and fore- most the freedom of the individual from arbitrary authority, which has meant, for most of history, from the brute power of the state. It implies certain basic human rights: freedom of expression, of associ ation, and of worship, and rights of due process. But ancient liberty, as the enlightenment philosopher Benjamin Constant explained, meant something different: that everyone (actually, every male citizen) had the right to participate in the governance of the community. Usually all citizens served in the legislature or, if this was impractical, legislators were chosen by lottery, as with American juries today. The people's assemblies of ancient Greece had unlimited powers. An individual's rights were neither sacred in theory nor protected in fact. Greek democracy often meant, in Constant's phrase, "the subjection of the individual to the authority of the community." Recall that in the fourth century B.C. in Athens, where Greek democracy is said to have found its truest expression, the popular assembly-by democratic vote-put to death the greatest philosopher of the age because of his teachings. The execution of Socrates was democratic but not liberal.
Sayfa 32
Dünyanın her yerinde genelde referandumlarla yeniden seçilen veya yeniden onaylanan, demokratik seçimlerle göreve gelmiş yönetimler, iktidarları üzerindeki anayasal kısıtlamaları görmezden gelip vatandaşlarını en temel haklarından mahrum bırakıyorlar.
Ancak geçmişini anlayarak özgürlüğün geleceğini güven altına alabiliriz.