Includes bibliographical references (p. 293-337) and index.

1. Myth in the making -- 2. Totalitarianism's inversion : beginnings of the imaginary of a permanent global war -- 3. Totalitarianism's inversion, democracy's perversion -- 4. The new world of terror -- 5. The utopian theory of superpower : the official version -- 6. The dynamics of transformation -- 7. The dynamics of the archaic -- 8. The politics of superpower : managed democracy -- 9. Intellectual elites against democracy -- 10. Domestic politics in the era of superpower and empire -- 11. Inverted totalitarianism : antecedents and precedents -- 12. Demotic moments -- 13. Democracy's prospects : looking backwards.

"In "Democracy Incorporated", Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive - and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level." -- Book jacket.