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With invaluable insight and poignant analysis, Blunden traces the hidden origins of three paradigms of decision-making: Counsel, Majority, and Consensus.
List of contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
Collective Decision Making
Realist Historical Investigation
PART 1. MAJORITY
The British Trade Unions in 1824
Anglo-Saxon England
The Guilds
The Methodist Church
London Corresponding Society
The Chartists
The Communist Secret Societies
The General Workers Unions
The End of Uncritical Majoritarianism
PART 2. CONSENSUS
English Revolution and the Quakers
The Quakers in Twentieth Century Pennsylvania
New England Town Meetings
The Peace and Civil Rights Movements
Myles Horton and the Highlander
The African and Slave Roots of the Black Baptist Churches
Eleanor Garst and Women Strike for Peace
The Quakers and Movement for a New Society
Anarchism and Decision Making
PART 3. THE POST WORLD WAR SETTLEMENT
The Negation of Social Movements
The Negation of Negation ? the rise of alliance politics
Alliance politics
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
INDEX
About the author
Andy Blunden is an editor of the journal Mind, Culture, and Activity and Secretary of the Marxists Internet Archive. His previous work includes, An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity (2010), Concepts: A Critical Approach (2012) and Collaborative Projects: An Interdisciplinary Study (2014).
Summary
With invaluable insight and poignant analysis, Blunden traces the hidden origins of three paradigms of decision-making: Counsel, Majority, and Consensus.
Foreword
Title will be prominently featured at all of the academic conferences we attend
Promotion to coincide with the annual Historical Materialism conference, which has a growing academic audience (400 graduate students and professors in 2010)
Reviews will be sought from left leaning academic journals
Additional text
“In this engaging and accessibly-written study, Andy Blunden seeks to uncover the history of how people have arrived at decisions on a shared course of action to achieve common goals. Along the way, he provides interesting and sometimes surprising case studies of collectivity in various social and institutional formations, drawn from three continents and a range of cultural practices… [I]n the wake of the Brexit vote and the Trump presidential victory, and in the context of allegedly ‘post-truth politics’, this is a valuable and serious look at what it means to reach genuinely collective decisions.”
—Steph Marston, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books
