Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Orphan Paradox: Destinies, Autocracies and Democracies in India and the United States

The Orphan Paradox: Destinies, Autocracies and Democracies in India and the United States

Sharma, Dinesh

Hardcover

General Psychology

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 29, 2026

ISBN10: 1666976792
ISBN13: 9781666976793
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Oct 29 2026
Pages: 312
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Why do democracies continue to elect 'orphaned' outsiders versus 'patrician' elites?

In The Orphan Paradox, Sharma offers an original meditation on the hidden wounds that shape political leadership. Building on his earlier works, including Barack Obama in Hawai'i and Indonesia (2012), Sharma fuses psychology, history, and political science to illuminate how leaders transform vulnerability into vision. Through vivid portraits that traverse continents and centuries, he traces how the United States and India - twin experiments in democracy born of colonial rupture - produced leaders who embodied both loss and renewal: Washington, Jefferson, and Madison in America; Gandhi, Nehru, and Ambedkar in India. From these founders emerged patrician families -the Adamses, Kennedys, Bushes, and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty - whose inheritance of power eventually met the populist insurgencies of figures like Trump and Modi. For psychologists, historians and political scientists alike, The Orphan Paradox provides a new framework on the foundations of democracy, showing how personal loss shapes institutional design and how nations, like individuals, oscillate between trauma and transcendence. The result is a work of scholarship with a moral urgency - a study of how the orphaned souls continue to haunt, and perhaps redeem the democratic experiment.

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