{"title":"Cristina Lafont","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"democracy-without-shortcuts-book-cristina-lafont-9780192868220","title":"Democracy without Shortcuts","description":"This book articulates a participatory conception of deliberative democracy that takes the democratic ideal of self-government seriously. It aims to improve citizens' democratic control and vindicate the value of citizens' participation against conceptions that threaten to undermine it. The book critically analyzes deep pluralist, epistocratic, and lottocratic conceptions of democracy. Their defenders propose various institutional ''shortcuts'' to help solve problems of democratic governance such as overcoming disagreements, citizens' political ignorance, or poor-quality deliberation. However, all these shortcut proposals require citizens to blindly defer to actors over whose decisions they cannot exercise control. Implementing such proposals would therefore undermine democracy. Moreover, it seems naive to assume that a community can reach better outcomes 'faster' if it bypasses the beliefs and attitudes of its citizens. Unfortunately, there are no 'shortcuts' to make a community better than its members. The only road to better outcomes is the long, participatory road that is taken when citizens forge a collective will by changing one another's hearts and minds. However difficult the process of justifying political decisions to one another may be, skipping it cannot get us any closer to the democratic ideal. Starting from this conviction, the book defends a conception of democracy ''without shortcuts''. This conception sheds new light on long-standing debates about the proper scope of public reason, the role of religion in politics, and the democratic legitimacy of judicial review. It also proposes new ways to unleash the democratic potential of institutional innovations such as deliberative minipublics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743376777489,"sku":"NGR9780192868220","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0192868225.jpg?v=1750908499"},{"product_id":"linguistic-turn-in-hermeneutic-philosophy-book-cristina-lafont-9780262621694","title":"The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe linguistic turn in German philosophy was initiated in the eighteenth century in the work of Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. It was further developed in this century by Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer extended its influence to contemporary philosophers such as Karl-Otto Apel and J rgen Habermas. This tradition focuses on the world-disclosing dimension of language, emphasizing its communicative over its cognitive function.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlthough this study is concerned primarily with the German tradition of linguistic philosophy, it is very much informed by the parallel linguistic turn in Anglo-American philosophy, especially the development of theories of direct reference. Cristina Lafont draws upon Hilary Putnam's work in particular to criticize the linguistic idealism and relativism of the German tradition, which she traces back to the assumption that meaning determines reference. Part I is a reconstruction of the linguistic turn in German philosophy from Hamann to Gadamer. Part I offers the deepest account to date of Habermas's approach to language. Part I shows how the shortcomings of German linguistic philosophy can be avoided by developing a consistent and more defensible version of Habermas' theory of communicative rationality.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50347514069265,"sku":"CIN026262169XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/026262169X.jpg?v=1751356794"},{"product_id":"lottocratic-mentality-book-cristina-lafont-9780192890627","title":"The Lottocratic Mentality","description":"In recent years there has been great interest in new forms of citizen participation, such as citizens' assemblies or deliberative polls that involve ordinary citizens in political decision-making. Many see these innovations as the best solution to the current crisis of democracy. The most radical among them propose replacing elections with the random selection of ordinary citizens, transforming electoral democracy into a lottocracy. These developments are driven by a lottocratic mentality that is deeply transforming our understanding of democracy, political equality, representation, and more.    In The Lottocratic Mentality, Lafont and Urbinati focus on this way of thinking, which is flourishing in public debates, inspiring the organization of citizens' assemblies worldwide, and bridging democratic and nondemocratic regimes in the vision of a unified global order based on problem-solving allotted assemblies, free from electoral competition.   The authors' analysis shows that it amounts to a worrisome form of technopopulism that justifies conferring legislative power on randomly selected assemblies based on a mixture of populist and technocratic grounds. This lottocratic mentality legitimizes the anti-democratic idea that the many should be \"ruled\" by \"the few\" chosen by chance. Against this view, they show how lottery-based institutions could be used with the democratic aim of empowering the citizenry, but only if the lottocratic mentality is rejected.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51150223638801,"sku":"NIN9780192890627","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51215758131473,"sku":"NGR9780192890627","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/019289062X.jpg?v=1751389174"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-cristina-lafont.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}