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The Origins of Collective Decision Making
by Andy Blunden

Paperback, 257 pages

ISBN: 9781608468041

December 2017

$30.00 $18.00 40% off

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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Reviews
  • “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)

  • “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

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