FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Through research, advocacy, and public education, the FAS Project on Government Secrecy works to challenge excessive government secrecy and to promote public oversight.
Democracy
Address to the Western World
The Address to the Western World is a powerful message given by the Hau de no sau nee (or traditional Six Nations Council at Onondaga) also called the Iroquois Confederacy, to the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland in September, 1977.
Films for Action
Films For Action is a community-powered, digital library for people who want to change the world. Their mission is to provide citizens with the knowledge and perspectives essential to creating a more beautiful, just, sustainable, and democratic society. Films For Action was founded in 2006 by a few friends in Lawrence, Kansas, after realizing how essential a healthy media is to a healthy democracy. Although they started out hosting community film screenings in the beginning and did so for many years, their digital library eventually became their primary focus.
The League of Women Voters Refuses to Help Perpetuate a Fraud
“It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations [Democrat and Republican] aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and honest answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.” League of Women Voters League Refuses to “Help Perpetrate a Fraud” NEWS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 3, 1988 LEAGUE REFUSES TO “HELP PERPETRATE A FRAUD”
“Educational enterprises do not for any length of time remain immune from the struggle of interests for power which is the dominant feature of social life under a class system.”
Recommended Reading
The Press and the Decline of Democracy
– Robert G. Picard
Democracy and Development
– Adam Przeworski
Democratic Realism
– Charles Krauthammer
Democracy and the Police
– David Sklansky, David A. Sklansky
The Open Space of Democracy
– Terry Tempest Williams
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Dark Times
– Ken Coates
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Democracy and Education
– John Dewey
Published: 1916
First published in 1916, John Dewey’s Democracy and Education is regarded as the seminal work on public education by one of the most important scholars of the century. In this classic work Dewey addresses the serious challenge of providing quality public education in a democratic society. He calls for the complete renewal of public education, arguing for the fusion of vocational and contemplative studies and for the necessity of universal education for the advancement of self and society.
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Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy
– Diana C. Mutz
Freedom and Time
– Jed Rubenfeld
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The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad
– Fareed Zakaria
People Before Profit
– Charles Derber
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African Studies in Social Movements and Democracy
– Mahmood Mamdani
The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century
– Mark Mazower
The Friendly Dictatorship
– Jeffrey Simpson
Public Choice and Public Law
– Daniel A. Farber
The Mainspring of Human Progress
– Henry Grady Weaver
Religion in the Public Square
– Robert Audi
Empire
– Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt
Never Again
– Rudolph Rummel
Homegrown Democrat
– Garrison Keillor
Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich
– Kevin Phillips
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On Liberty
– John Stuart Mill
An American Dilemma
– Gunnar Myrdal
The Revolt of the Elites
– Christopher Lasch
In Defense of Anarchism
– Robert Paul Wolff
Political Man
– Seymour Martin Lipset
The Global Third Way Debate
– Anthony Giddens
A Basic Call to Consciousness: The Hau De No Saw Nee Address to the Western World
– Mohawk Nation
Published: Geneva, Switzerland, Autumn 1977
What is presented here is nothing less audacious than a cosmogony of the Industrialized World presented by the most politically powerful and independent non-Western political body surviving in North America. It is, in a way, the modern world through Pleistocene eyes.
Democracy in America
– Alexis De Tocqueville
Waves of Democracy
– John Markoff
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Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm
– Kazu Haga
Published: January 14, 2020
In Kingian Nonviolence, a philosophy developed out of the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., there is a distinction made between nonviolence spelled with a hyphen, and nonviolence spelled without a hyphen. “Non-violence” is essentially two words: “without” “violence.” When spelled this way, it only describes the absence of violence. As long as I am “not being violent,” I am practicing non-violence. And that is the biggest misunderstanding of nonviolence that exists.
Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy
– Diana C. Mutz
The End of Kings
– William Everdell
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War and Peace
– Leo Tolstoy
Rights vs. Public Safety After 9/11
– Amitai Etzioni
The Age of Reform
– Richard Hofstadter
V D Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government, 1917
– V D Nabokov
Secret Trials and Executions
– Barbara Olshansky
America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy
– Francis Fukuyama
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The European Dream
– Jeremy Rifkin
The Government We Deserve: Responsive Democracy and Changing Expectations
– Hugh Heclo, C. Eugene Steuerle, Demetra Nightingale
The Master Switch
– Tim Wu
The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust
– John Judis
Parchment, Guns, and Constitutional Order
– Richard E. Wagner
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August 1914
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Escape From the Ivory Tower
– David Lempert
Terrorism for Humanity
– Ted Honderich
Cruel and Unusual
– Mark Crispin Miller
The Russian Tradition
– Tibor Szamuely
Take Back Your Government
– Robert A. Heinlein
Diminished Democracy
– Theda Skocpol
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Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship
– J.M. Coetzee
The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls
– David W. Moore
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Necessary Illusions
– Noam Chomsky
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
– Sean Wilentz
Dilemmas of Democracy and Dictatorship
– Michael Radu
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Democracy in America
– Alexis De Tocqueville
Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich
– Kevin Phillips
Never at War
– Spencer R. Weart
Making Democracy Work
– Robert Putnam
The Powers and Aims of Western Democracy
– William Milligan Sloane
The Promise of American Life
– Herbert Croly
Citizen and Subject
– Mahmood Mamdani
The New Golden Rule
– Amitai Etzioni
We the People
– Thom Hartmann
Hidden Power
– Charles Derber
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The Theory of the Leisure Class
– Thorstein Veblen
Democracia Y Mercado
– Adam Przeworski
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Public Opinion
– Walter Lippmann
Democracy and Populism
– John Lukacs
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The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
– William Appleman Williams
New Federalist Papers
– Alan Brinkley
Democracy and Economic Power: Extending the ESOP Revolution Through Binary Economics
– Patricia Hetter Kelso, Louis O. Kelso
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We the People
– Thom Hartmann
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The New Industrial State
– John Kenneth Galbraith
The American Statehouse
– Charles Goodsell
Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America
– Charles H. Ferguson
The Challenge of Democracy
– Kenneth Janda
Diminished Democracy
– Theda Skocpol
Corporation Nation
– Charles Derber
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Defending My Enemy: American Nazis, the Skokie Case, and the Risks of Freedom
– Aryeh Neier
Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800-1851
– Donald B. Cole
History and Illusion in Politics
– Raymond Geuss
The War State: The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945-1963
– Michael Swanson
Globalizing Civil Society
– David Korten
The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defenders
– Reinhold Niebuhr
The Third Way and Its Critics
– Anthony Giddens
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The Story of American Freedom
– Eric Foner
The Wheels of Commerce
– Fernand Braudel
The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America
– Gary B. Nash
Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy
– Stephen L. Carter
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The Port Huron Statement
– Tom Hayden
A broad critique of the political and social system of the United States for failing to achieve international peace and economic justice. The writers took issue with the US government’s handling of the Cold War,both the existential threat of nuclear war, and the actual arms race. It also critiqued endemic racial discrimination, economic inequality, big business domination, trade union quiescence, and the cooption of political parties. It suggested a series of reforms: including the need to create genuine political parties, to attain greater democracy, to achieve more substantial involvement by workers in business management, and to enlarge the public sector with increased government welfare, including a “program against poverty.” The document advocated nonviolent civil disobedience to bring forth greater “participatory democracy.”
Attention Deficit Democracy
– James Bovard
Power Kills
– Rudolph Rummel
Young America
– Edward L. Widmer
A Stream of Windows: Unsettling Reflections on Trade, Immigration, and Democracy
– Jagdish Bhagwati
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Blood in the Sand
– Stephen Bronner
It Can Happen Here
– Joe Conason
John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority-Rule
– Willmoore Kendall
The Public and Its Problems
– John Dewey
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Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
– Noam Chomsky
Parliaments and Citizens in Western Europe
– Philip Norton, Baron Norton of Louth
On Democracy
– Robert A. Dahl
Politics Lost: From RFK to W: How Politicians Have Become Less Courageous and More Interested in Keeping Power Than in Doing What’s Right for America
– Joe Klein
Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy
– Donald Kagan
The Dissent of the Governed
– Stephen L. Carter
New Federalist Papers
– Alan Brinkley
The Road to Illegitimacy
– Mark Danner
La Seconde Revolution Tranquille
– Gil Courtemanche
New Communitarian Thinking
– Amitai Etzioni
How to Cure a Fanatic
– Amos Oz
America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal
– Larry Ward
Immediate, illuminating, and hopeful: this is the key set of talks given by leading Zen Buddhist teacher Larry Ward on breaking America’s cycle of racial trauma.
The Public and Its Problems
– John Dewey
Ten Days That Shook the World
– John Reed