The Failure Of The Centralized State: Institutions And Self-governance In Africa

Ostrom, Vincent

Harbeson, John W

Olowu, Dele

Wunsch, James

Reference

Routledge

The Failure Of The Centralized State: Institutions And Selfgovernance In Africa

We struggle in the modern age to preserve individual freedoms and social self-government in the face of large and powerful governments that lay claim to the symbols and language of democracy, according to Vincent Ostrom. Arguing that democratic systems are characterized by self-governing--not state- governed--societies, Ostrom contends that the nature and strength of individual relationships and self-organizing behavior are critical to the creation and survival of a democratic political system. Ostrom begins with a basic contradiction identified by Alexis de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville suggested that if citizens acted on the basis of their natural inclinations they would expect government to provide for them and take care of their needs. Yet these conditions contradict what it means to be self-governing. Ostrom explores the social and cultural context necessary for a democratic system to flourish emphasizing the important role of ideas and the use of language in defining and understanding political life. Discussing differences in the ideas about social organization among various cultural and intellectual traditions, he considers the difficulties encountered over time in building democratic societies in America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. He outlines lessons from these experiences for the efforts to build democracy in the developing world and the countries emerging from communism. Based on a lifetime of thinking about the social conditions necessary to support a democracy, this book makes a significant contribution to the recent discussion about civil society and the fragility of our formal and informal social institutions and will be of interest to social scientists, historians and all readers concerned with the state of democracy in the modern world. Vincent Ostrom is Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science Emeritus and Co-Director of the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University. He is the author of many works on political theory and public administration.

The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerabilities of Democracies: A Response to Tocqueville's Challenge

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

University of Michigan Press

The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies: A Response to Tocqueville's Challenge

Univ of Michigan Pr

The Political Theory of a Compound Republic: Designing the American Experiment

The Political Theory of a Compound Republic examines the foundation of American constitutional design expressed in theFederalist. Through meticulous textual analysis, the logical principles of federalism―the extended and compound republic envisioned by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton―are revealed as thirteen propositions broadly applicable to any effort to design the institutions of a self-governing polity. The final chapters, expanded and revised by Vincent Ostrom and Barbara Allen, turn to the American experiment in constitutional choice at the threshold of the twenty-first century. In this revised edition, Ostrom and Allen consider the continuing story of federal institutional development by focusing on two current concerns: the "imperial presidency" and the ideal of universal human rights.This third, revised and expanded edition of The Political Theory of a Compound Republic continues to be of interest to scholars of federalism, institutional analysis and development, political economy and public choice, and students of the American founding. It is also useful in undergraduate and graduate courses on American government and political thought.

Allen, Barbara

Legal Theory & Systems

Lexington Books

The Political Theory of a Compound Republic presents the essential logic of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton's design of limited, distributed, constitutional authority proposed inThe Federalist. Two revised and expanded ensuing chapters show how the idea of constitutional choice has been employed since the adoption of the 1789 Constitution of the United States. A new concluding chapter questions commonly accepted beliefs about sovereign nation-states and considers governance from the perspective of twenty-first century 'citizen-sovereigns.'

The Quest to Understand Human Affairs: Natural Resources Policy and Essays on Community and Collective Choice (Volume 1)

The Quest to Understand Human Affairs presents fifty previously unpublished essays by Vincent Ostrom on the U.S. Government's environmental problems and resource governance and span the six decades of Ostrom's career in political science and public administration. Including everything from a 1947 essay on Western (U.S) issues in national politics to ending with a 2004 manuscript on Constitutional foundations and federal institutional forms, these essays examine significant developments in administration, constitutional design, and the evolution of theory and practice in the field of institutional analysis and development during the second half of the twentieth century and first decade of the new millennium. Political theorist, Barbara Allen, has edited the work and provided extensive notes that provide context and identify key events and persons cited in the works. These remarkable works not only offer specialists insight into developments in the fields of institutional analysis, resource governance, policy and administration, but also speak to general readers about worldwide transformations in democracies and human and environmental relations as well as the enduring challenge of sustaining just, productive political orders.

Philosophy

The Quest to Understand Human Affairs: Essays on Collective, Constitutional, and Epistemic Choice (Volume 2)

The second volume of The Quest to Understand Human Affairs presents thirty-six previously unpublished manuscripts written by Vincent Ostrom, cofounder of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. The essays are divided among three parts: Constitutional Choice, Epistemic Choice, and The Quest for Understanding and the Future of Democratic Self-Governance. Part I, Constitutional Choice, includes studies on public sector performance and the constitutional dilemmas facing the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the North American “New World” of US constitutionalism, and the United States of Mexico. In the essays of Part II, Ostrom turns to the foundational ideas on which the institutions of a particular culture rest. He raises questions about the methodologies of the social sciences and insists that we return to “basic questions” in our search for institutional forms that will liberate human communities. Part III offers the reader a colloquy on self-governance in which Ostrom’s speeches and presentations on a variety of twenty-first-century issues are supplemented with letters and memos between Ostrom and visiting scholars and students.  These remarkable works not only offer specialists insight into developments in the fields of institutional analysis, resource governance, policy and administration—during the second half of the twentieth century and first decade of the new millennium—but also speak to general readers about worldwide transformations in democracies and human and environment relations as well as the enduring challenge of sustaining just, productive political orders. The Quest to Understand Human Affairs is introduced with a foreword by Nobel Laureate and co-founder of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Elinor Ostrom, with a preface by the editor of the volume, political theorist Barbara Allen.

The Quest to Understand Human Affairs: Essays on Collective, Constitutional, and Epistemic Choice (Volume 2) (Essays on Collective, Constitutional, and Epistemic Choice, 2)

History

Americas

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