Ian Shapiro Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

A principled commitment to democracy offers a way out of this bind which protagonists on both sides of the debate appear not to have noticed.

Ian Shapiro
Wealthy people used to find democracy frightening. The reason was simple: the poor, once enfranchised, should be expected to soak the rich. This fear bred elite resistance to expanding the franchise, particularly beyond the propertied classes. Nor did this fear, and the reasoning behind it, go unnoticed on the political left.

Ian Shapiro
Political theorists often fail to appreciate that arguments about how politics ought to be organized typically depend on relational claims involving agents, actions, legitimacy, and ends.

Ian Shapiro
So Sen is right that democracy can be pressed into the service of reducing injustice. Indeed this can happen against expectations. Had there been neoclassical economists around in the late eighteenth century, they would have scoffed at the possibility of abolishing the slave trade. In the absence of a system of multilateral enforcement, Britain had to bear the enormous expense unilaterally—over several decades—without any obvious prospect of a return. whether democracy fosters or hinders economic growth.

Ian Shapiro
An enduring embarrassment of democratic theory is that it seems impotent when faced with questions about its own scope.

Ian Shapiro
The principles and practices of democracy continue to spread ever more widely, and it is hard to imagine that there is a corner of the globe into which they will not eventually penetrate. But the euphoria of democratic revolutions is typically short-lived, and its attainment seems typically to be followed by disgruntlement and even cynicism about the actual operation of democratic institutions. It might be widely accepted that democracy is a good thing, yet it is equally apparent that democrats have much work to do in improving the performance of democratic institutions. Of course, it is far easier to perceive the need for reform than to prescribe specific proposals.

Ian Shapiro
The further institutional designers try to move along the continuum toward explicit proactive systems that force integration in exclusionary and racist societies, the more they will learn about how much redesign of ethnic antipathy is feasible in them.

Ian Shapiro
Although this is less often commented on in the academic literature, democracy is as much about opposition to the arbitrary exercise of power as it is about collective self-government....

Ian Shapiro
No conception of democracy as geared toward reducing domination can ignore the relations between the political system and the distribution of income and wealth.

Ian Shapiro