The Good State : On the Principles of Democracy

Resumen del libro

The foundations upon which our democracies stand are inherently flawed, vulnerable to corrosion from within. What is the remedy?

A. C. Grayling makes the case for a clear, consistent, principled and written constitution, and sets out the reforms necessary - among them addressing the imbalance of power between government and Parliament, imposing fixed terms for MPs, introducing proportional representation and lowering the voting age to 16 (the age at which you can marry, gamble, join the army and must pay taxes if you work) - to ensure the intentions of such a constitution could not be subverted or ignored. As democracies around the world show signs of decay, the issue of what makes a good state, one that is democratic in the fullest sense of the word, could not be more important.


To take just one example: by the simplest of measures, neither Britain nor the United States can claim to be truly democratic. The most basic tenet of democracy is that no voice be louder than any other. Yet in our 'first past the post' electoral systems a voter supporting a losing candidate is unrepresented, his or her voice unequal to one supporting a winning candidate, who frequently does not gain a majority of the votes cast. This is just one of a number of problems, all of them showing that democratic reform is a necessity in our contemporary world.

Biografía del autor

A. C. Grayling es escritor y filósofo. Profesor del Birkbeck College hasta 2011, imparte clases en el New College of the Humanities, la universidad que fundó en 2010, y es miembro del St Annex{0026} x02019;s College. Antiguo columnista en The Guardian y The Times, colabora actualmente en medios como New Statesman, Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review e Index on Censorship. Galardonado con el Forkosch Literary Prize y el Premio Bertrand Russell, es autor de numerosos libros sobre filosofía, historia de las ideas, derechos humanos y ética. Entre sus obras destacan Contra todos los dioses, El buen libro, El poder de las ideas y La era del ingenio, todas publicadas por Ariel.