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"The long-simmering crises challenging the European Union have worsened with the 2008 financial crisis, the influx of Middle East refugees in 2015, several bloody terrorist attacks, and England's departure from the E.U. in 2016. Yet these are all the wages of persistent flaws in the idea of the Union itself. Excessive regulations, welfare, and taxes impede economic growth. Centralization of power in Brussels has created a "democracy deficit" and lessened autonomy and freedom. Populations are shrinking, and unvetted and unassimilated migrants have increased crime and terrorist attacks. All these problems reflect the lack of any unifying set of beliefs and principles that could unite 27 diverse cultures and peoples. Europe is fractured and adrift, its peoples unsure for what they should fight or die for" --

By democracy we usually mean a government comprising popular rule, individual human rights and freedom, and a free-market economy. Yet the flaws in traditional Athenian democracy can instruct us on the weaknesses of that first element of modern democracies shared with Athens: rule by all citizens equally. In Democracy's Dangers & Discontents, Bruce Thornton discusses those criticisms first aired by ancient critics of Athenian democracy, then traces the historical process by which the Republic of the founders has evolved into something similar to ancient democracy, and finally argues for the relevance of those critiques to contemporary American policy

A stirring and sobering diagnosis of the challenges that confront anyone laboring to renew America's tradition of ordered liberty. Classicist Bruce Thornton's Plagues of the Mind is a forceful vindication of the West's tradition of rational, critical inquiry-a legacy now largely jettisoned in favor of a host of new deities, environmentalism, feminism, primitivism, New Age, and the cult of the therapeutic among them.

By democracy we usually mean a government comprising popular rule, individual human rights and freedom, and a free-market economy. Yet the flaws in traditional Athenian democracy can instruct us on the weaknesses of that first element of modern democracies shared with Athens: rule by all citizens equally. In Democracy's Dangers & Discontents, Bruce Thornton discusses those criticisms first aired by ancient critics of Athenian democracy, then traces the historical process by which the Republic of the founders has evolved into something sim.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Translation -- Introduction: "Custom the King of All" -- Part One The "Controlless Core" -- 1 The "Tyrant of Gods and Men" -- Madness and the Irrational -- Death, Violence, War -- "Thermos Eros," -- Erotic Disease -- Wind, Sea, and Storm -- The Beasts of Love -- The "Very God of Evil," -- 2 The Golden Child of the Bloody Foam -- Aphrodite and Helen -- The Seduction of Zeus -- Fear and Desire on Mt. Ida -- Sappho's Aphrodite -- "Something Greater Than a God," -- Her Cruel Smile -- Aphrodite Domesticated—Somewhat -- The Goddess of Gold and Blood -- 3 Pandora's "Foul Tribe of Women" -- The Charybdis of Appetite -- The Daughters of Earth and Blood -- The Mother of Them All -- "The Memorial of Disasters," -- The Lion in the House -- The Child-Killer -- Phaedra -- "Man-Slaughterer," -- The Power of Pandora's Tribe -- 4 Monsters of Appetite -- Culture or Nature? -- The Heterosexual Paradigm -- Outrage and Shame -- The Itch of Appetite -- The Controlless Core -- Part One The "Fancied Sway" -- 5 Taming the Beasts -- Cosmic Love -- The "Steersman of the Soul," -- The Order of the Soul -- 6 Erotic Technology -- Flowers, Fruit, Furrows -- The Technology of Ritual -- Putting Aphrodite in Her Place -- Cultivating the Cyclopses' Island -- 7 Wives and the Order of the House -- Sowing Heirs and Citizens -- The Most Important Possession: A Chaste Wife -- Preserving the Household -- Home Economics -- Andromache -- Alcestis -- Circumspect Penelope -- The Rehabilitation of Helen -- The Technology of Marriage -- 8 Eros the Pedagogue -- The Heterosexual Paradigm Revisited -- The Drinking Party -- Outrage, Shame, and "Just Eros," -- Taming the Horses of the Soul