Democracy and Apartheid: Political Theory, Comparative by Anthony Butler

By Anthony Butler

Using South Africa's transition a spotlight, this e-book assesses and demanding situations traditional assumptions within the idea of democracy. Political philosophers deal with the electoral technique as a way of resolving clash into consensus inside a pre-existing political group. the writer exhibits how the South African case demonstrates the viability of the electoral approach within the absence of a group with universal languages of political appraisal. Elections can rework one form of clash into one other, and the assumption of democracy itself can facilitate conversation among sociologically separated teams with varied political languages. This publication turns those classes again on Western democracies and asks whether or not they aren't additionally characterised by means of systemic selection and sociological division.

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By Anthony Butler

Using South Africa's transition a spotlight, this e-book assesses and demanding situations traditional assumptions within the idea of democracy. Political philosophers deal with the electoral technique as a way of resolving clash into consensus inside a pre-existing political group. the writer exhibits how the South African case demonstrates the viability of the electoral approach within the absence of a group with universal languages of political appraisal. Elections can rework one form of clash into one other, and the assumption of democracy itself can facilitate conversation among sociologically separated teams with varied political languages. This publication turns those classes again on Western democracies and asks whether or not they aren't additionally characterised by means of systemic selection and sociological division.

Show description

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Extra resources for Democracy and Apartheid: Political Theory, Comparative Politics and the Modern South African State

Sample text

Afrikaners, however, secured access to power in a way that reinforced their sense of collective identity and rendered meaningful the historical stories that had traced their rise. Afrikaners could understand themselves to be acting as a collectivity. By contrast, even where other groups developed emerging senses of commonality of experience, culture and interests, they were always politically vulnerable and unable to apply what might seem to them a collective will to shape events. Buffeted by change, and engaged predominantly in defensive political strategies, Indian, Coloured and African histories could not be written as the tales of advances secured.

Just as Coloured youth culture turned to the symbols of a distant American Black culture, its political resistance gravitated towards the detached analyses of Trotskyism or the rarefied analysis of the meaning and significance of racial difference. The diverse experiences of Indian South Africans led to equally complex collective orientations towards history. Lacking religious, cultural and political unity (despite the presence of many commonalities) and composed of descendants of quite different groups of indentured labourers and descendants of low Hindu, high-caste Hindu, Muslim and Christian from the Indian subcontinent, South Africa's Indians have no unifying narrative by means of which to comprehend a collective past.

By the 1950s, the Bond was in control of the heartlands of executive power in the South African state, and the Native Affairs Department (NAD) had grown to be a state within a state. It was within NAD that the policies of the 1960s fomented. Statism was a defining theme of 1950s politics. Bonner et al. comment that the Nationalists were convinced that 'most of the problems [the state] confronted in 1948 could be solved effectively by simply expanding the scope and intensity of state intervention on the social, political, and economic fronts'.

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