Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Revisited

by Larry Diamond (Editor), Marc F. Plattner

"Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Revisited is must reading for anyone who considers him- or herself a political economist, and it should also appeal to those probing the uncertainties of contemporary democratization." -- Philippe C. Schmitter, Stanford University.

Paperback

First published August 1, 1993

About the author

Larry Jay Diamond (born October 2, 1951) is a political sociologist and leading contemporary scholar in the field of democracy studies. He is a professor of Sociology and Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative policy think tank. At Stanford he teaches courses on democratic development and supervises the democracy program at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. He has published extensively in the fields of foreign policy, foreign aid, and democracy.

Diamond is also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, which is Stanford University’s main center for research on international issues. At the Institute Diamond serves as the director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. The CDDRL’s most recent accomplishment came in the spring of 2011 by building a technological community between Tahrir Square (Cairo, Egypt) and Silicon Valley (California Bay Area). This community was fully focused on helping mobilize protesters in Egypt who eventually helped in the downfall of autocratic president Hosni Mubarak.

Diamond has served as an advisor to numerous governmental and international organizations at various points in his life, including the United States Department of State, United Nations, World Bank, and U.S. Agency for International Development. He is a founding co-editor of the National Endowment for Democracy's Journal of Democracy. He is also a coordinator of the Hoover Institution's Iran Democracy Project, along with Abbas Milani and Michael McFaul.

Reviews

[Michael]

Nice look at how a broad spectrum of economists and political scientists saw the relations between capitalism, socialism and democracy just after the fall of the USSR. Disappointingly little discussion of Schumpter, but the essays by Fukuyama, Przeworski and Tamas in particular are quite good. The afterword by Lipset does an admirable job of connecting the dots between the essays and Schumpter.

[Tidar Rachmadi]

I tell you people that this book is very very very good. It's really useful in understanding democracy in some perspectives. Read this and you'll feel somehow that it is a complicated era we are living in.