What is PEGS?                             Who is in PEGS?                       
What does PEGS do?                    What are PEGS books?                  

What is PEGS?

PEGS is a nonpartisan, ideologically diverse, nonprofit organization whose goal is to promote serious and sustained inquiry into innovative institutional designs for a good society. PEGS responds to the growing awareness that current versions of socialism and democratic capitalism fail to offer workable visions of a good society and seem increasingly to contradict such basic values as liberty, democracy, equality, and environmental sustainability. By encouraging development of practical visions of the good society, PEGS hopes to create a theoretical basis for the eventual restructuring of real world political-economic systems.

 

Who is in PEGS?

PEGS brings together a diverse international network of thinkers engaged in good society analysis. To help bridge some of the gaps between academic inquiry and practical reality, PEGS seeks and encourages the active participation of interested thinkers from politics, journalism, and the activist community, as well as from academia. The PEGS Board Members and Institutional Sponsors include a growing number of prominent thinkers and organizations.

The Executive Board includes Karol Soltan (University of Maryland) and Gar Alperovitz (National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives) and is chaired by Stephen L. Elkin (University of Maryland).
 

What does PEGS do?

Besides publishing a journal, The Good Society, PEGS sponsors panels at academic conferences and holds independent conferences. The first PEGS conference on Good Society questions was held at Yale University. PEGS co-sponsored a conference in the fall of 1994 on A New Constitutionalism: Designing Political Institutions for a Good Society. And with the support of the Americans Talk Issues Foundation, PEGS held a conference on "Citizen Judgment and the Design of Democratic Institutions" in Washington D.C. in February, 1995.
 

What are PEGS' Books?

The University of Chicago Press published the first PEGS book, A New Constitutionalism: Designing Political Institutions for a Good Society. A second book, The Constitution of Good Societies, was published by Penn State Press in 1995. A third book, Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, was published in 1999 by Penn State Press.


PEGS

Department of Government and Politics
3140 Tydings Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
pegs@gvpt.umd.edu

PEGS logo designed by Smudgeface Graphics.


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