• The Origins of Collective Decision Making
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The Origins of Collective Decision Making

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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.
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  • 05 December 2017
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Building on his highly original and always insightful earlier works on collective activity, in Origins of Collective Decision Making Andy Blunden turns his attention to the question of how groups make decisions. Examining three paradigms—Counsel, Majority, and Consensus based methods—Blunden discovers that each has unique ethical foundations, deeply rooted in the historical experiences of specific struggles.
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Price: $30.00
Pages: 257
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Imprint: Haymarket Books
Series: Studies in Critical Social Sciences
Publication Date: 05 December 2017
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781608468041
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

PHILOSOPHY / Social, Social and political philosophy, HISTORY / Social History, PSYCHOLOGY / Social Psychology, Social and cultural history, Social, group or collective psychology
“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

“[In Origins of Collective Decision Making] Andy Blunden claims to be opening a new field, asking questions that have not been asked before…The dispute between supporters of Majority and Consensus is at bottom an ethical one, he argues, and the ethical problem has to be solved before practical solutions to the problem of decision making can be found, solutions in which both Majority and Consensus may have a place. This book, by illuminating the history, is intended as a resource for that purpose.”

—Jeremy Dixon, Social Movement Studies

"The result is a highly original, wide-ranging and continuously challenging dialogue between the sources and their implications."
—Stuart Macintyre (University of Melbourne), in Labour History, no. 112 (May 2017)

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).
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