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ქართული მემარცხენეობის ქრესტომათია
წიგნის ინგლისურენოვანი წარდგენა, ავტორი: პოლიტ.მეცნიერების პროფესორი ჩარლზ ფერბენქსი.
This book fills a huge need. In reaching out for democracy, the biggest obstacle Georgians face is lack of self-confidence. In politics Georgians are undermined by inner doubts about their capacity for democracy. Your taxi driver, struggling with a traffic jam, will remark “Georgians don’t know how to drive,” as though the problem was not as bad in Baku. Georgians bear a burden of masochism: they feel the problems that exist throughout the former Soviet space as though they were their very own personal responsibility, because they are Georgians.
Georgia’s crisis of confidence is worsened by the inevitably imitative or derivative character of democracy in 2015. It is easy to slip into thinking democracy’s success in Western Europe comes from something in European culture or history that must be hard to transplant—or that it could be transplanted here only by turning into foreigners.
Georgians need to know that democracy was discovered before in Georgia, and operated rather successfully in conditions of the utmost difficulty. This is why the experience of the First Republic is so crucial. It can show Georgians that they discovered democracy before, when they were even poorer, faced an even worse international environment, and were far less European. The First Republic, a depressing failure in power politics, is succeeding if it inspires you.
Most of the Georgians who led the first movement for democracy and the First Republic itself were leftists, socialists of various sorts. Here we meet a second big need for this book. The most active fighters for democracy in today’s Georgia are students and recent students who are almost all on the left. The First Republic still has the capacity to inspire them, as this book shows. Moreover, if leftism too is not to be merely imitative, young people of today who attracted to the left need to think through Georgia’s first experience in discovering and applying socialist principles.
Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr.
Professor of Political Science,
President, American-Georgian Initiative for Liberal Education
This book fills a huge need. In reaching out for democracy, the biggest obstacle Georgians face is lack of self-confidence. In politics Georgians are undermined by inner doubts about their capacity for democracy. Your taxi driver, struggling with a traffic jam, will remark “Georgians don’t know how to drive,” as though the problem was not as bad in Baku. Georgians bear a burden of masochism: they feel the problems that exist throughout the former Soviet space as though they were their very own personal responsibility, because they are Georgians.
Georgia’s crisis of confidence is worsened by the inevitably imitative or derivative character of democracy in 2015. It is easy to slip into thinking democracy’s success in Western Europe comes from something in European culture or history that must be hard to transplant—or that it could be transplanted here only by turning into foreigners.
Georgians need to know that democracy was discovered before in Georgia, and operated rather successfully in conditions of the utmost difficulty. This is why the experience of the First Republic is so crucial. It can show Georgians that they discovered democracy before, when they were even poorer, faced an even worse international environment, and were far less European. The First Republic, a depressing failure in power politics, is succeeding if it inspires you.
Most of the Georgians who led the first movement for democracy and the First Republic itself were leftists, socialists of various sorts. Here we meet a second big need for this book. The most active fighters for democracy in today’s Georgia are students and recent students who are almost all on the left. The First Republic still has the capacity to inspire them, as this book shows. Moreover, if leftism too is not to be merely imitative, young people of today who attracted to the left need to think through Georgia’s first experience in discovering and applying socialist principles.
Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr.
Professor of Political Science,
President, American-Georgian Initiative for Liberal Education
- GenresGeorgianNonfiction
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2015
35 people want to read
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