“The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy,” A Breakfast Book Talk with Samuel Ely Bagg (Yale ‘09)
ISPS DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS SPECIAL EVENT
Please join us for breakfast and a book talk at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS). Samuel Bagg’s The Dispersion of Power (Oxford University Press) is an urgent call to rethink centuries of conventional wisdom about what democracy is, why it matters, and how to make it better. Drawing from history, social science, psychology, and critical theory, it explains why elections do not and cannot realize the classic ideal of popular rule, and why prevailing strategies of democratic reform often make things worse. Instead, Bagg argues, we should see democracy as a way of protecting public power from capture—an alternative vision that is at once more realistic and more inspiring. In this breakfast talk, Bagg will focus on the book’s distinctive approach to institutional reform and civic action, which is oriented first and foremost to contesting oligarchic and elite capture through the development of organized countervailing power.
Samuel Ely Bagg (Yale ‘09) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches political theory. He has also taught at the University of Oxford, McGill University, and Duke University, where he received his PhD in 2017. His research in democratic theory has appeared in the American Political Science Review; the American Journal of Political Science; the Journal of Politics; the Journal of Political Philosophy; and Dissent Magazine; among many other venues.
Sponsored by the Democratic Innovations Program at ISPS