Author (or Editor): Mark E. Pietrzyk, Ph. D. (website; idea link) |
Title: International Order
and Individual |
Fiction? Anthology? |
Publisher: University Press of America |
Date: 2002 |
ISBN: 0-7618-2293-3 |
Series Name: |
Physical description: softbound 246 pages indexed |
Relevance to HPPUB: individual liberty and government |
Review: On a snowy day before John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration I (as a high
school senior) wrote an essay midterm exam in a Virginia and U.S. Government
class at Reviewing a social studies dissertation is a bit different from reviewing movies, but I always like to start with a value-adding personal context for the political theories that will follow. In the war on terror, conservative columnists have been drawn away
somewhat from the usual bickering over social mores and even resistance to
public funding of social programs to enunciation of what is missing from the
Arab world as well as much of the All of this pertains now to the current Bush administration’s “nation
building” in places like This book is based on a Ph. D. dissertation written by the author at The George Washington University and the Brookings Institution. I know the author, but I will defer here to his own presentation of himself at http://www.internationalorder.org/author.htm. The point of the book is the degree of nexus between democracy and peace.
The book is in two parts: “The Theoretical Controversy” and “Case Studies.”
On the political theory, the author disputes conventional wisdom that
democracies are always by nature inclined to make “a separate peace” (perhaps
a pun on the John Knowles novel and 1972 movie). Some of this has to do with
the way we characterize democracy itself. The author provides a key chapter “How Peace Facilitates
Democracy.” The case studies are
the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Transformation of Germany
(from the What is more controversial for me is the double-edge attitude that libertarianism takes towards democracy. Many libertarian commentators point out that the founding fathers really did not intend democracy as we know it today, but rather wanted to protect their property rights from the British (and the slaves). Democracy seems to invite “tyranny of the majority,” except that is why we have separation of powers and a strong judiciary. An associated concept is “market fundamentalism.” The underlying ideology is freedom to direct one’s life and choose how to deploy one’s property, assuming no aggression against others and a rather narrow view of personal accountability. But society has to deal with unfairness on a macro-scale, some of which comes from external events (interaction with other countries) or may be inherited from the past, so democracies give governments the prerogative to tax or regulate citizens to meet the needs of various groups. The objection to seeking social justice this way is that it invites corruption, and intellectual shallowness and constituents give money to politicians to get their way. A free society has to figure out how to get individuals to balance meeting their own ends with a collective need for productive socialization. Dr. Pietrzyk also provides online an essay “The Idea of a Democratic Zone of Peace: Origins in the Enlightenment” Particularly interesting is the pertinence of the ideas of German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace.”
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Related: George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism; Denish D’Souza: What’s So Great About America? In Shifting Sands (incl. Movies about Israel); Yossi & Jagger; Mary Ruwart’s Healing Our World |
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