1st Edition
Democracy’s Achilles Heel The Rocky Marriage of Relative and Absolute
Acknowledgments
1. Democracy as Oddball
2. Philadelphia 1776 and Beyond
3. Democracy Is a Game with Rules, and Some People Play It Better Than Others
4. Absolute and Relative Are Yoked Together
5.
Th The Arc of History Does Not Bend toward Democracy
6. Rights and Freedom in Democracy
7. Freedom Is Linked to Goals
8. The Dangers of Overselling Democracy
9. Democracy’s Two Elements at War
10. Democracy Isn’t Supposed to Be Sexy
11. Absolutist Actions vs. Relativistic Actors
12. Democracy Is Constructed, Like a Building
13. Do People Even Want to Be Free?
14. Laws, Freedom, and Democracy
15. Belief within Democracy
16. Democracy Doesn’t Demand the Provable
17. Reason vs. Passion in Everyday Life
18. Works Cited
Biography
Bruce Fleming is Professor of English at the US Naval Academy and is the author most recently of The End of the Modernist Era in Arts and Academia, What Does ‘Art’ Mean Now?, The Civilizing Process and the Past We Now Abhor, Masculinity from the Inside, and Saving Our Service Academies: My Battle with, and for, the US Naval Academy to Make Thinking Officers.
