A review of Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, by Ernest Gellner.
About the Author
Marc F. Plattner is a member of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Board of Directors. He was on the NED staff from 1984 until 2020, serving first as the director of the grants program. In 1989, he became founding coeditor (with Larry Diamond) of the Journal of Democracy. He later served as codirector of the International Forum for Democratic Studies and as NED’s vice-president for research and studies.
The story of this small former Yugoslav republic offers an example of how—if circumstances are right—it may be possible for a country to reform its way out of communism and…
How should we define the stages of democracy and their sequencing? Although some scholars argue that the rule of law should come first, today it should be viewed as the…
The recent "color revolutions" in the former Soviet Union should lead us to reassess the idea of revolution and also to consider the weaknesses of the concept of "democratic transition.