A review of Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, by Ernest Gellner.
About the Author
Marc F. Plattner, founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy. He also serves as cochair of the International Advisory Board of the Institute for Political Studies at the Portuguese Catholic University.
Any open society’s best weapon against Chinese influence operations is its openness—the ability to investigate and expose sharp-power manipulations, diminishing their strength.
Many countries have adopted the form of democracy with little of its substance. This makes the task of classifying regimes more difficult, but also more important.
What is the relationship between high-quality state administration and democracy? A look back at modern Greece and Italy, along with Germany and the United States, provides some insights.
