Direct democracy is alive and well in the United States. Citizens are increasingly using initiatives and referendums to take the law into their own hands, overr

Social scientists are concerned with élites of many kinds - bureaucracies, military oligarchies, political leaders and the like. The study of élites is freque

From the author of Aftershock and The Work of Nations, his most important book to date—a myth-shattering breakdown of how the economic system that helped make

This book analyzes the relationship between the many and the few in the formation of a republican polity. It studies the case of Buenos Aires in the 1860s and 1

In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite fe