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Suppose an island appears in the Pacific Ocean. An island that has never existed before. Many people of the world decide to settle it, until it has a similar population and settlement pattern to New Zealand. We can guess that the islanders would want their own government. They would want it to be democratic. And…
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What a fitting cover! The title Against Elections: The Case for Democracy (2013) may sound like a contradiction to most people. It shouldn’t be. In the Western world, we have an ingrained view that “democracy = elections”. But David Van Reybrouck, a Belgian historian and author, makes a provocative but strong case in this book…
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Conservatism is a philosophy of sex and death That’s an actual quote from Danny Kruger’s book Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation (2023) and it makes sense in context. I read this book because I think it’s healthy to sometimes read from different perspectives to your own. Kruger wrote it to argue…
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When confronted with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, John F. Kennedy had on his mind a book that he had recently read. It was The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s newly-published and now-classic account of how the European powers blundered into the First World War. Kennedy was impressed by the book and encouraged many…
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Frome, a mid-sized town in the English county of Somerset A few of us have predicted that radical assembly-based parties could be The Next Big Thing in politics. But how would one actually work? Assemblies What do we mean by assembly-based? This would partly mean that the party would use the incredible potential of randomly-selected…
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Roger Hallam is not known for optimism. The co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil is quite the fire-and-brimstone preacher when it comes to climate change. But when I heard him a few weeks ago on a call with Assemble and like-minded activists, he sounded genuinely hopeful about the assemblies that they were about…
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Many have wondered, as I have, why we study history. For a long time, I only really did it for fun, only in the last few years beginning to realise that it can do more. Seeing the past puts present-day problems in perspective. It can give clues as to what may happen next, but one…
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In the Western world and especially the United States, the political left has a problem. It is increasingly seen as a champion of the identity politics of discriminated groups to the exclusion of others, sometimes rightly and often wrongly. Yascha Mounk had previously written books such as The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is…
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There are two types of people – those who haven’t read John Rawls and those who are politics graduates. The Harvard professor revolutionised political philosophy with his book A Theory of Justice (1971), yet is rarely discussed in the world of politics. In his book Free and Equal (2023), Daniel Chandler, a political advisor turned…
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