Democracy is struggling in the us — by now this statement is nearly cliche. But imagine if the country is normally no more a democracy at all? In Democracy Included, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: offers America unwittingly morphed right into a new and strange kind of politics hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the country check its descent into what the writer conditions ‘inverted totalitarianism’?

Wolin portrays a country where residents are about Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy as well as the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism politically uninterested and submissive – and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a ‘handled democracy’ where the general public is sheperded, not sovereign. At worst it is a location where corporate power no more answers to state handles. Wolin makes very clear that today’s America is normally by no means morally or politically comparable to totalitarian areas like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked financial power risks verging on total power and provides its unnerving pathologies.

Wolin examines the common myths and mythmaking that justify today’s politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, as well as the perverse destinations of the endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy’s greatest hope lies in people themselves learning anew to workout power at the neighborhood level.

Democracy Incorporated is among the most being concerned diagnoses of America’s political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be always a lightening pole for political debate for a long time to come.

The book is published by Princeton University Press.