"Audacious . . . offers a fierce critique of democracy's most dangerous adversary: the abuse of democratic power by democratically elected chief executives." (Benjamin R. Barber, New York Times bestselling author of Jihad vs. McWorld )Bruce Ackerman shows how the institutional dynamics of the last half-century have transformed the American presidency into a potential platform for political extremism and lawlessness. Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the War on Te...

One of our most influential political theorists offers a boundary-breaking—and liberating—perspective on the meaning of life in the internet ageHuman beings have taken one thing for granted since our earliest days: we are bodily creatures dealing with one another on a face-to-face basis. The internet has shattered this fundamental feature of human existence. We are suddenly living our lives in two worlds at once—shifting endlessly from virtual to physical reality a...

Bruce Ackerman offers a sweeping reinterpretation of our nation’s constitutional experience and its promise for the future. Integrating themes from American history, political science, and philosophy, We the People confronts the past, present, and future of popular sovereignty in America. Only this distinguished scholar could present such an insightful view of the role of the Supreme Court. Rejecting arguments of judicial activists, proceduralists, and neoconservatives, Ackerman p...

A landmark work on how the Progressive Era redefined the playing field for conservatives and liberals alike.During the 1912 presidential campaign, Progressivism emerged as an alternative to what was then considered an outmoded system of government. A century later, a new generation of conservatives criticizes Progressivism as having abandoned America’s founding values and miring the government in institutional gridlock. In this paradigm-shifting book, renowned cont...

Based on seven years of archival research, the book describes previously unknown aspects of the electoral college crisis of 1800, presenting a revised understanding of the early days of two great institutions that continue to have a major impact on American history: the plebiscitarian presidency and a Supreme Court that struggles to put the presidency's claims of a popular mandate into constitutional perspective. Through close studies of two Supreme Court cases, Ackerman shows how the cour...

In this provocative book, two leading law professors challenge the existing campaign reform agenda and present a new initiative that avoids the mistakes of the past.Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres build on the example of the secret ballot and propose a system of secret donation booths” for campaign contributions. They unveil a plan in which the government provides each voter with a special credit card account containing fifty Patriot dollars” for presidential elections. To us...

Volume V in the acclaimed Real Utopias Project series, edited by Erik Olin Wright.Are there ways that contemporary capitalism can be rendered a dramatically more egalitarian economic system without destroying its productivity and capacity for growth?This book explores two proposals, unconditional basic income and stakeholder grants, that attempt just that. In a system of basic income, as elaborated by Philippe van Parijs, all citizens are given a monthly stipend sufficient ...

A robust defense of democratic populism by one of America’s most renowned and controversial constitutional scholars—the award-winning author of We the People.Populism is a threat to the democratic world, fuel for demagogues and reactionary crowds—or so its critics would have us believe. But in his award-winning trilogy We the People, Bruce Ackerman showed that Americans have repeatedly rejected this view. Now he draws on a quarter century of schol...

Constitutional thought is currently dominated by heroic tales of the Founding Fathers — who built an Enlightenment machine that can tick-tock its way into the twenty-first century, with a little fine-tuning by the Supreme Court. However, according to Bruce Ackerman, the modern presidency is far more dangerous today than it was when Arthur Schlesinger published the Imperial Presidency in 1973. In this book, he explores how the interaction of changes in the party system, mass communications,...

Over the past twenty years, the debate between neutrality and perfectionism has been at the center of political philosophy. Now Perfectionism and Neutrality: Essays in Liberal Theory brings together classic papers and new ideas on both sides of the discussion. Editors George Klosko and Steven Wall provide a substantive introduction to the history and theories of perfectionism and neutrality, expertly contextualizing the essays and making the collection accessible to everyone inter...