A review of The Idea of Civil Society, by Adam B. Seligman, and Civil Society and Political Theory, by Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato.
About the Author
Susan Shell, professor of political science at Boston College, is the author of The Rights of Reason: A Study of Kant’s Philosophy and Politics (1980).
Robert Michels’s classic work on the “iron law of oligarchy” can help us to understand why there is so much dissatisfaction with representative democracy.
Where indigenous peoples constitute a smaller share of the electorate, their recent inclusion denotes a more generalized opening of the political system to excluded and vulnerable sectors of society.
