John Keane - Research - History of Democracy Project Outline

History is often said to be a catalogue of human crimes, a slaughterhouse of follies and misfortunes, but that is not always so. The rule is sometimes shattered, as happened two thousand six hundred years ago, when Greeks living on the south-eastern fringes of Europe laid claim to an invention that now ranks in historical importance with the wheel, the printing press, the steam engine and the cloning of stem cells. Born of resistance to tyranny, the invention at first caused no great stir. Few spotted its novelty. Some condemned it for bringing chaos into the world. Nobody predicted its universal appeal. It seemed simply to be part of the great cycle of human affairs – yet one more example of power struggles among rivals. The invention was later to be seen differently. It was to arouse passions on a world scale, understandably so, since it required human beings to picture themselves afresh, to live as they had never before lived. The invention was a potent form of wishful thinking that is still with us today : the Greeks called it dēmokratia.

Wishful thinking, the passion to mould the present world into a different and better future, is often lampooned, yet the plain fact is that such thinking is a regular feature of the human condition. Whenever we refer to the world around us using language, we habitually refer to things that are absent. We continually say things about the world that miss the mark. We live by our illusions and indeed our entire language, it has been said, points to what is in fact not there. Language can be described as an endless series of short little dreams, during which sometimes we fashion new ways of saying things using words that are remarkably apposite and strangely inspiring. The feminine noun dēmokratia was one of those tiny words that emerged out of a little dream, with grand effect. It was to rouse billions of people in all four corners of the world – and to help them change it in ways that we still do not fully understand. Nobody knows who invented the language of democracy or exactly where and when the word was first used. Through the thick fogs of the past only random clues appear – in the guise of wild-looking figures bearing suggestive names like Demonax of Mantinea, the bearded, robed lawmaker who was summoned (around 550 BCE) by the women of the Oracle of Delphi to grant the people of Cyrene, a Greek-speaking farming town on the Libyan coast, the right to resist the tyranny of the limping, stuttering King Battus III, and the right to govern themselves, under their own laws.

Demonax may have been among the first public figures to describe himself as a friend of democracy, but we cannot be sure. [1] None of his writings or speeches or laws have survived, which makes the figure of Demonax a fitting symbol of the way in democracy carefully guards her own secrets and wards off those who think they know her every way. The subject of democracy is full of enigmas, and harbours not a few surprises, including the certainty - this book shows for the first time - that it was not a Greek invention. The belief that democracy is or could be a universal Western value, a gift of Europe to the whole world, dies hard. That is why one of the first matters to be straightened out in any history of democracy is what might be described as the Greek plagiarism of democracy. The claim put forward within most Greek plays, poems and philosophical tracts, that fifth century Athens and other city states win the prize for creating both the idea and the practice of democracy, seemed plausible to contemporaries. It continues until this day to be repeated by most observers. But it is false.

The Life and Death of Democracy, the first attempt to write a life and times of democracy for more than a century, shows that the little word democracy is much older than classical Greek commentators made out. Its roots are in fact traceable to the Linear B script of the Mycenaean period, seven to ten centuries earlier, to the late Bronze Age civilization (c. 1500-1200 BCE) that was centred on Mycenae and other urban settlements of the Peloponnese. Exactly where the Mycenaeans learned terms like damos [insert figure] and damokoi [insert figure] is unclear, but that uncertainty is tempered by another remarkable discovery by contemporary archaeologists : it turns out that the practice of self-governing assemblies is also not a Greek invention. It was an innovation of the ‘East', by peoples and lands that geographically correspond to contemporary Iraq and Iran. The custom of popular self-government was a child of what has been called western Asia. It was later transported eastwards, towards the Indian sub-continent. [2] It also travelled westwards, first to city states like Byblos and Sidon, then to Athens, where during the fifth century BCE it was claimed as something unique to the West, as a sign of its superiority over the ‘barbarism' of the East.

Like gunpowder and print and other exotic imports from afar, the arrival of popular assemblies and (later) the strange-sounding word dēmokratia in the region that today we call the West changed the course of history. Understood simply as people governing themselves, democracy implied something that continues to have a radical bite : it supposed that humans could invent and use special institutional means to decide for themselves as equals how they would live together on Earth. It may seem rather simple and straightforward to us, but think about it just for a moment. The whole idea that breathing, blinking, flesh-and-blood mortals could organise themselves as equals into forums or assemblies, where they could pause and consider and then decide this or that or some other thing - democracy in this sense was a breathtaking invention because it was in effect the first-ever human form of government. All government is of course ‘human' in the sense that it is created and built up and operated by human beings. The exceptional thing about the type of government called democracy is that it demanded that people see that nothing that is human is carved in stone, that everything is built on the shifting sands of time and place, and that therefore they would be wise to build and maintain ways of living together as equals, openly and flexibly. Democracy required that people see through talk of gods and nature and claims to privilege based on superiority. Democracy meant the de-naturing of power. It implied that we are not what we are – that within any political order who gets what, when and how should be permanently an open question. Democracy meant self-government among equals, the lawful rule of an assembly of people whose sovereign power to decide things was no longer to be given over to imaginary gods, the stentorian voices of tradition, to blood-guzzling despots, or simply handed over to the everyday habit of unthinkingly allowing others to decide matters of any importance.

Why should democracy in this sense still be of interest two thousand five hundred years later? Why bother with democracy? Why do we need yet another history of the life and times of democracy? The question prompts a range of different answers, the first of which is the most straightforward. For those who relish the history of human inventions, The Life and Death of Democracy provides fresh details of the obscure origins of old institutions and ideals like government by public assembly, votes for women, the secret ballot, trial by jury, and parliamentary representation. Those curious about these and other institutions of what we now call democracy – political parties, compulsory voting, judicial review, referenda, electoral colleges, civil society and civil liberties such as press freedom – will find much to interest them here. So too will those with a sense of wonder about the changing, often hotly disputed meanings of democracy, or the origins of its key terms.

Every page of this book tries to hammer home the point that while time seduces us into forgetting, things that seem timeless are never so. Take one simple example that turns out to be rather complicated: the language of elections, whose vocabulary resembles a magpie's nest woven from different terms that have disparate origins. The word ‘election' stems from the old Latin meaning ‘to choose; to pick out (from among several possibilities)'. The group term for those who can so choose, the ‘electorate', is much more recent; its first recorded usage dates only from 1879. Before then, the word that everybody used was ‘electors'. Their general entitlement to vote is nowadays called the ‘franchise', but that word (in thirteenth-century English) originally meant ‘freedom, exemption from servitude or domination'. Talk of the franchise later came to refer to the legal immunity to prosecution, only then to evolve into several new meanings, including the act of granting a right or privilege, as when a sovereign monarch granted exemption from arrest or an ‘elective franchise' (the right to vote) or, as in today's use of the word, to describe a licence granted by a business to someone to sell or trade its products within a given area. Then there are words like ‘voting', a word from Latin (votum) that first entered the English language during the sixteenth century to mean ‘to wish, or to vow', then was transformed in Scotland around 1600 to mean what it means today : the act of expressing a choice in an election. The word ‘poll' is also used to describe the act of casting a vote. In its old Dutch and Germanic origins (and in several surviving dialects) it meant ‘head'. During the last years of the sixteenth century, a poll came to refer to the brand new practice, during an election, of conducting an actual head count of supporters. The invention had its detractors : ‘to poll' also meant to cut the hair or behead a person or animal. The poll was however designed to put an end to the old corrupt practice of elections being decided by those supporters who shouted loudest in favour of their own ‘candidate'. That word stems from the days of the Roman Republic, where the Latin word candidatus meant ‘clothed in white'. It referred to political men who tried to draw attention to themselves by dressing up in white togas as part of their bid to become members of the Senate.

It goes without saying that connotations of whiteness and purity are today not normally associated with candidates for election. Equally strange are the connotations of blackness of election words like ‘ballot' – a word that comes to us from the Italian ballotta, the little ball that is secretly placed in an urn or box when voting, which was exactly the meaning that members of eighteenth-century gentlemen's clubs had in mind when they voted in secret to veto some or other proposal by placing a ‘black ball' in a voting container, or ‘ballot box'. ‘Blackballing' (to reject or to vote against something or somebody) is an expression that we still sometimes associate with elections (as in the Citizens Alliance campaign against ‘unfit' candidates in the National Assembly elections in Korea in 2000 [3] ), but the small example is telling of a much bigger point : that the families of terms that make up the languages through which people know and experience democracy today are not timeless. Whether in Japan or Nigeria or Canada or the Ukraine, the languages of democracy are profoundly historical.

The Life and Death of Democracy tries to remind readers that every turn of phrase, every custom and every institution of actually existing democracies is time-bound. It does this by distinguishing three overlapping historical epochs in which democracy as a way of life has so far developed (see Appendix 1). Its beginnings in the geographic area that is today known as the Middle East stretch from around 2,500 BCE through to the rise and maturation of Islamic civilization around 950 AD and, more or less at the same time, the spread of self-governing assemblies (called dings and loegthingi and althingi) to Iceland, the Faroe islands and other off-shore havens of what came to be called Europe. Except for the bright moments associated with classical Athens and republican Rome, this period is usually seen as a dark period of undemocratic degeneracy. ‘With the fall of the [Roman] Republic,' says one respected commentator, typically, ‘popular rule entirely disappeared in southern Europe. Except for the political systems of small, scattered tribes it vanished from the face of the earth for nearly a thousand years.' [4] That perception, steeped in modern Western prejudice, is piteously false. The truth is that during this first phase a basic institution of democracy as we have come to experience it – self-government through an assembly of equals – was born and gradually planted in different soils and climes stretching from the Indian subcontinent through to the western shores of Europe. These popular assemblies had siblings: they spawned various ancillary institutional rules and customs, like written constitutions, nascent second chambers (called damiorgoi in some Greek city states), the freedom to speak in public, voting machines, voting by lot, trial before elected or selected juries, and efforts to stop bossy leaders in their tracks using such peaceful methods as limited terms of office and – in an age yet without political parties - the peaceful (if usually rowdy) ostracism of demagogic leaders by majority vote. This period also saw the first experiments in creating a federated alliance or consortium of democratic governments. In addition, it witnessed important efforts to create ways of being that would later be regarded as vital components of a democratic way of life. Most of these innovations were centred in the Islamic world. They included a culture of printing and efforts to cultivate self-governing associations and (in the field of economic life) partnerships that were independent of rulers. Islam also defended shared virtues like toleration and mutual respect among sceptics and believers in the sacred. It emphasised the duty to respect others' interpretations of life. And the thought that human beings were bound to treat Nature with compassionate regard, as if it was their equal, because both were divine creations, also surfaced during this period. It would later come to trouble democracies.

The second chapter of the life and times of democracy was written within the Atlantic region – in the watery geographic triangle that stretched from the shores of Europe across to Baltimore and New York down to Caracas, Montevideo and Buenos Aires. This period opened with the military resistance to Islamic civilization in the Iberian peninsular, which saw the invention of representative parliamentary assemblies during the twelfth century AD. It ended on a sorry note, with the near-destruction worldwide of democratic institutions and ways of life by the storms of mechanised war, dictatorship and totalitarian rule that racked the first half of the twentieth century. In between, extraordinary things happened.

Especially from the time of the religious struggles of the Reformation and the revolutions in the Low Countries (1581), England (1644), Sweden (1701) and America (1776), this period witnessed a remarkable revival of the old language of democracy, but with new meanings that would have struck ancient observers as oxymoronic, or as an outright nonsense. Democracy saddled itself with new epithets. There was talk of ‘aristocratic democracy' (that first happened in the Low Countries) and new references (beginning in The United States) to ‘republican democracy'. Later came ‘social democracy' and ‘liberal democracy' and ‘Christian democracy', even ‘bourgeois democracy', ‘workers democracy' and ‘socialist democracy'. During this second period, democratic dreams and practical experiments became entangled with the birth of territorial states and large-scale empires. One result – it first happened in 1188 AD, in the church of Alfonso XI, in the little walled town of Léon in northern Spain - was the invention of parliamentary assemblies whose members thought of themselves as recallable representatives of others' interests. ‘Representation' later caused democracies permanent headaches, but it was definitely something new in the history of democracy. This period also witnessed many kinds of struggles by groups for equal access to governmental power that resulted, sometimes by design and sometimes by simple accident or unintended consequence, in institutions and ideals and ways of life that had no precedent. Written constitutions based on a formal separation of powers, periodic elections and parties and different electoral systems were new. So too was the invention of ‘civil societies' founded on new social habits and customs – experiences as varied as dining in a public restaurant, or controlling one's temper by using polite language - and new associations that kept an arm's length from government by using non-violent weapons like liberty of the printing press, publicly circulated petitions, and constitutional conventions called to draw up brand-new constitutions. This period unleashed what the French writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) called a ‘great democratic revolution' in favour of political and social equality. Spreading from the Atlantic triangle, this revolution often suffered setbacks and reversals, especially in Europe, where it was to collapse. It was fuelled by rowdy struggles and breathtaking acts, like the public execution of monarchs, that called into question the anti-democratic prejudices of those – the rich and powerful - who supposed that inequalities among people were ‘natural'. New groups, like slaves, women and workers, won the franchise. Local self-government flourished in some quarters. A culture of modern citizenship rights and duties was born. Remarkably, this period also spawned – in the co-operative and workers' movement in the Atlantic region, for instance – the first talk of ‘international democracy'. And it saw the invention of devices that at first seemed of minor importance, but have subsequently come to play vital roles in the democracies of today : inventions like habeas corpus (prohibitions upon torture and imprisonment), ombudsmen, initiative and recall, and judicial review, with its firm commitment to the view that in matters of politics and life politicians should not explain and decide everything.

What gives the third age of the history of democracy such pique and prescience is its incompleteness. It is an historical experiment whose final results have yet to be tabulated. When analysing present-day democracies, The Life and Death of Democracy plays the role of time's advocate. It aims to heighten the sense among readers that the history of democracy is being made as the world's clocks tick, as each sunrise gives way to each new sunset. It does this by sketching, through the eyes of an imaginary observer writing fifty years from now, the characters, ideas, events and institutions that together shaped the fortunes of democracy since its grand rebirth in post-colonial India at the end of World War II. This literary technique of looking back on our times, of trying to imagine what sober observers of our age will say about us, has the advantage of training our minds on present-day novelties. The technique of looking backwards highlights how the worldwide rebirth of democratic politics in the second half of the twentieth century had effects that continued to be felt well into the twenty-first century. The renaissance brought with it things that were exciting because they pushed beyond familiar horizons. The new distinction between ‘direct' or ‘participatory' democracy and ‘indirect' or ‘representative' democracy flourished. The sting of racial inequality was extracted from the ideals of democracy, such that for the first time democrats found themselves embarrassed or angered by talk of ‘backward' or ‘uncivilised' or ‘naturally inferior' peoples. The language of self-government meanwhile spread to the four corners of the earth. Along with ‘OK' and ‘Coca-Cola', the term ‘democracy' became the world's most frequently used English word. The institutions of democracy spread and mutated as well. There were significant experiments with citizen-based commissions, parliaments for minorities, citizens' juries and other methods of making publicly accountable those who exercise power over others. There were loud calls for ‘global democracy'. There were even creative efforts to ‘green' democracy - in effect, attempts to extend a vote in favour of solidarity with our biosphere.

During the third age of democracy, new challenges also surfaced. This period saw the dramatic decline nearly everywhere of political party membership and, especially among young people, growing disrespect for ‘politicians' and official ‘politics', even boycotts and satirical campaigns against all parties and candidates. Fun was poked into the face of democracy, like this popular jibe from Japan. ‘What's the best way to restore the public's faith in parties and governments', asks a television chat-show presenter. ‘The best way', answers a panellist, ‘is first to let the political system collapse.' Whether and how democracies could function as stable planets within the new galaxy of corporate global media – the question of whether democracy might disappear into the black holes of Italian-style mediacracy - proved equally challenging. Just as perplexing was the issue – felt strongly in countries as different as India and Taiwan and Canada – of whether and how democracies could come to terms with their ‘multi-cultural' societies. The coming of an age of ‘silver democracy', in which growing numbers of citizens lived to ripe old ages in conditions of growing material and emotional insecurity, proved to be just as daunting. Then there were the deep-seated trends that cut like jagged knives into the bodies of democracies everywhere : trends for which there was no historical precedent and no easy solutions, like the rise of the United States as the world's first democratic empire; the spread of destructive uncivil wars; the step-by-step wrecking of this planet's biosphere; and the proliferation of new weapons systems with killing power many times greater than that of all democracies combined.

In paying careful attention to the current – unfinished - phase of democracy, this book tries to move beyond mere history for the sake of history. It supposes that the future of democracy strongly depends on its past and its present; and that the history of democracy is therefore the business of everybody, that it is not just a matter of interest to antiquarians, or to professional historians. Among the big ideas developed within The Life and Death of Democracy is that the times are ripe for a comprehensive history because democracies as we know them are sleepwalking their way into deep trouble. A bad moon is rising over all democracies : they are confronted by problems for which there are no historical precedents, or current solutions.

The vexing thought that democracy as we now know it in its geographically different forms might not survive indefinitely, that it could slit its own throat in an act of ‘democide', even that it could be killed off by outside forces that escape its attention, of course runs counter to much recent optimism about the global triumph of democracy. For some time now, most people have been talking about its global victory. Journalists, citizen activists, politicians and political thinkers commonly note that democracy has in recent decades become, for the first time ever in its history, a global political language. They point out that its dialects are now spoken in many countries on every continent – in India, Taiwan, Egypt, Australia, the Ukraine, Argentina and Kenya – and they take heart from think tank reports that sing the praises of democracy using back-up evidence to prove its unstoppable advance.

One well-known report speaks of the twentieth century as the Democratic Century. It points out that in 1900 monarchies and empires predominated. There were no states that could be judged as electoral democracies by the standard of universal suffrage for competitive multi-party elections; there were merely a few ‘restricted democracies' – 25 of them, accounting for just 12.4% of the world's population. By 1950, with the military defeat of Nazism and the beginnings of de-colonization and the post-war reconstruction of Europe and Japan, there were 22 democracies accounting for 31 per cent of the world's population; a further 21 states were ‘restricted democracies' and they accounted for 11.9% of the world's population. By the end of the century, the report notes, the so-called Third Wave of democracy lapped the shores of democracy in Latin America, post-communist Europe and parts of Africa and Asia. Out of 192 countries, 119 could be described as ‘electoral democracies' – 58.2% of the globe's population – with 85 of these countries – 38% of the world's inhabitants - enjoying forms of democracy ‘respectful of basic human rights and the rule of law' (see illustration). So the report finds that the ideal of democracy is now within reach of the whole world. ‘In a very real sense', runs the conclusion, ‘the twentieth century has become the “Democratic Century”….A growing global human rights and democratic consciousness is reflected in the expansion of democratic practices and in the extension of the democratic franchise to all parts of the world and to all major civilizations and religions.' [5]

Such talk has been seductive - it seems obvious that ordinary people and not dictators who think themselves extra-ordinary people should rule – and its conclusion that there has been a climate change in favour of democracy is certainly not unfounded. Dictators everywhere have indeed been experiencing bad weather, the force of which can be measured by re-reading the classic American novel Democracy, written in the late nineteenth century by Henry Adams. Its heroine, Madeleine Lee, finds herself fed up with the corrupting effects of power struggles, intrigues and general wheeling and dealing in Washington DC. ‘Democracy has shaken my nerves to pieces', she says, resigned, with a deep sigh. ‘I want to go to Egypt.' Within the current, third phase of democracy, under pressure from a great global democratic revolution, not even countries like Egypt are today safe havens for those afraid or sick of democracy. After devastating setbacks during the first half of the twentieth century, democracy has bounced back from oblivion. It survived aerial bombing and threats of military invasion and economic and moral collapse in countries like Britain, the United States and New Zealand. Against amazing odds, it took root in India, where the world's first-ever large-scale democracy was successfully created among materially impoverished peoples of multiple faiths, many different languages and low rates of literacy. Democratic ideals and ways of life came to southern Africa and resurfaced in parts of Latin America and throughout central-eastern Europe. Struggles for democracy erupted in unlikely places – in the early years of the twenty-first century, there was a cedar revolution in the Lebanon, a rose revolution in Georgia, an orange revolution in the Ukraine. The spirits of democracy came alive in Japan and Taiwan and South Korea; they stalked the halls and passageways of China, Burma and North Korea, and knocked firmly on their bolted doors.

The overall consequence has been that during the past sixty years democracy – considered as both fact and ideal - became more powerful and popular than at any moment since it began as a wishful thought in ancient Mesopotamia, Mycenaea and the Greek city-states. Contemporary democracies, led by the United States, have come to exert world power and world influence. The ‘democracy club' (the alliance of democratic states first proposed by the former United States Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright [6] ) have together put the name of democracy on the map, and on trial, in all four corners of the earth. The number of democratic states has more than doubled in a generation. During this third era of democracy, dictators, who seldom need pretexts, have everywhere dressed up in democratic clothes. Forced onto the back foot, most of them, Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin and Lee Kuan Yew for instance, claimed to be democrats, all the while using the language of democracy to cover their tracks. [7] Meanwhile, following the collapse of communism, all the old democracies, including those like Germany that had once slipped into ruin, managed to keep out of trouble. The European Union, the world's leading experiment in regional integration, committed itself (amidst much controversy among citizens and frequent confusion among policy makers about the appropriate rules and regulations) to the principle of fashioning cross-border democratic structures. And in some cases, its member states practised their own versions of the art of democratic reform. An example was the setting up of science and technology assessment bodies, like the Danish Board of Technology, a body rooted in much older Danish traditions of folkeoplysnig and designed to enable high-profile public consultation exercises to raise the level of parliamentary understanding of citizens' hopes and concerns. The fears in such matters as genetically modified food and the effects of so-called development projects on the biosphere.

Institutional innovations infused with spirit similar to that of the Danish reform have appeared in other democracies. The clean-up and public accountability and civic involvement schemes (machizukuri) in Japanese cities such as Yokohama and Kawasaki during the past two decades, for instance, illustrate the pertinent points : that what we mean by democracy changes through time; that democratic institutions are never set in stone; and that democracies - exactly because they are the most power-sensitive polities ever - are capable of democratising themselves by encouraging equal and open public access to all sorts of institutions. The conviction that democracy can be significantly improved by changing people's perceptions and making those who exercise power over others more publicly accountable currently fuels desires to plant the seeds of democracy everywhere, from the bedroom and the boardroom to the battlefield. So among the most surprising developments during the long spell of democratization that may now be coming to an end was the loud call to extend democracy to global institutions as different as the World Trade Organisation, the International Olympic Committee and the United Nations. The Life and Death of Democracy asks whether the ideals and present methods of democracy, heavily dependent as they now are on the power of territorial states, could ever be stretched so far. It also asks whether and to what extent democracy within national settings can survive. The book proposes that the continuation of democracy as a special way of life will require it to change – in response not only to new problems for which there are currently no solutions, but also to old issues, like widening gaps between rich and poor, continuing discrimination against women, religious and nationalist intolerance, and political figures who give a bad name to democratic politics because they like to help themselves to greenbacks in brown envelopes.

In weighing up the probable long-term effects of such deep-rooted problems, The Life and Death of Democracy gives voice to what growing numbers of people quietly think : that despite all the huffing and puffing, the global triumph of democracy may well turn out to be a campfire on ice. The book explains why the great democratic renewal that first began in India is now breeding worldwide anxieties about whether democracy itself can cope with its own problems, let alone its adversaries. In probing these anxieties, the book does not draw easy conclusions. It does not favour simple-minded partisanship. It most certainly stands on the side of democracy. But it is not apologetic for the illusions, follies and weaknesses of democracy as we have come to experience it. In supposing that the obscurest phase in its history is now, the book argues the need to rethink some fundamental features of democracy, beginning with definitions of the term. With an even hand, and one eye on the past, the book tries to expose the worrying lack of clarity about what democracy means today, and why, if they are lucky, future generations will enjoy its fruits and find it indispensable. The book comes up with a new set of reasons for thinking that democracy is a superior method of government and a good way of life applicable to the whole of our planet; all the while, it tries to be sensitive to the sometimes dramatic, sometimes subtle historical shifts in both the meaning of ‘democracy' and its diverse institutional forms.

The great nineteenth-century American poet and writer, Walt Whitman, once noted that the history of democracy cannot yet be written because democracy as we know is not yet at an end. Of course! But it is equally the case that in matters of democracy life has to be lived now and forwards, helped by an understanding of the past. For this reason, The Life and Death of Democracy has been written as an open text. Relying on a variety of different literary styles, this biography of democracy aims to encourage readers to make up their own minds about the subject. It is certainly open-minded about the future of democracy - the tongue-in-cheek ending should be seen as a provocation, not as a literal prediction - but it does make a spirited case for fixing a new pair of eyes firmly in the backs of our heads when analysing its past triumphs and current and future troubles.

The Life and Death of Democracy tells the story of how, since the birth of assemblies in ancient Mesopotamia nearly five thousand years ago, democracy came profoundly to alter lives and to turn whole societies inside out. The book shows how the realities of those societies in turn changed - or destroyed – democracy itself. The Life and Death of Democracy is certainly sensitive to the brittleness of democracy or (to switch similes) to its vulnerability to predators. It describes in graphic detail the long history of opposition to the aims and methods of democracy, initially by taking readers back to ancient Greece. Here it introduces one of the strangest things about democracy : that until now most details of its history have been recorded by its enemies.

Right from the beginning, cold silence and animosity has enveloped the history of democracy, of the kind that lashes out from the surviving pages of its first powerful critic, Plato (c. 427-348 BCE). He supposed that people are inherently unequal and he therefore considered democracy to be a gimcrack invention. He disliked the way its acids corroded good government by pandering to the ignorant poor. He likened democracy to a ship manned by sapheaded sailors who refuse to believe that there is any such craft as navigation - sailors who treat helmsmen as useless stargazers. Switching metaphors, Plato even called it theatrocacy : its presumption that the common people are qualified to talk about anything and everything, without acknowledging the existence of immutable laws, leads in his view to the reign of posturing, the seduction of the powerless, and lawlessness among the powerful. Plato's conclusion was tough : democracy should be overthrown because it always ends in political trouble and human tragedy.

That spleenful attack illustrates how misgivings about democracy have been at the heart of its history, right from the beginning. Its enemies took measures to destroy, or hide, its achievements. Those who spoke and wrote in its favour were shoved aside, denounced, compulsorily forgotten. Victors' justice of this kind was first dispensed by the founding historian of democracy – an aristocrat named Thucydides (c. 460 - 400 BCE), who emphasised time and again just how easily democracy, ‘effeminate government', could be muscled aside by the immutable realities of power politics. A loser who was exiled from Athens because the naval fleet he commanded (in 424 BCE) failed to accomplish its mission, Thucydides had a chip on his shoulder against democracy. He accused it of imprudence and political incompetence. Democracy was irresponsible, short-sighted, selfish and fickle – negative qualities that were symbolised, in his view, by the Athenian mob that one day, under the influence of demagogues, voted to kill all of the adult male population and to sell into slavery the women and children who had resisted the imperial rule of Athens, only on the next day to change its mind, thanks to the prompting of more moderate leaders.

Most subsequent treatments of the life and times of democracy have been as unfair-minded as Thucydides. Since his The Peloponnesian War, several handfuls of potted histories of democracy in various languages have been published. Some of them have been rather naïve, like the last major treatment of the subject, Nahum Capen's two-volume The History of Democracy (1874). It tried to heal the hurt caused by civil war by seducing its American readers into believing that the progress of democracy in the world, especially its triumph in the United States of America, was guaranteed by ‘the infinite attributes of the Deity' and ‘the sublime truths of Christianity'. Other histories of democracy have displayed a deep ambivalence towards their subject. An example is James Bryce's Modern Democracies (1921), which worried that constitutional democracies, for all their moral appeal, might well produce majorities that behaved like all oligarchies : selfishly and self-destructively. [8] That judgement easily morphed into the strong condemnation of democracy that until now has defined the overwhelming majority of histories of democracy. Consider just one example : the classic nineteenth-century account of the rise of popular government by Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1822-1888), who concluded that if democracy had triumphed in Britain then ‘there would have been no reformation of religion, no change of dynasty, no toleration of Dissent, not even an accurate Calendar.' Maine added : ‘The threshing-machine, the power-loom, the spinning-jenny, and possibly the steam-engine, would have been prohibited.' [9]

The negative tone of most histories of democracy confirms the rule that conventional history should always be suspected of harbouring the prejudices of the powerful. It sounds odd to put things in this way, but any new history of democracy worthy of the name has to start again. It needs to relinquish the bad habit of thinking that the original foes of democracy were its first allies. It needs as well to bear in mind that democracy has plenty of mimickers and false or fair-weather friends, and that recorded history is always a record produced by someone in some particular time and place. The Life and Death of Democracy comes with a warning to those who are interested in the past and present and future of democracy : history often resembles a big bag of tricks played by the living on the dead. That being so, those interested in democracy and its history must be prepared to have their prejudices challenged. Buoyed by a strong sense of irony, they must try hard to be sensitive to the complexities of democracy, its unintended effects, the setbacks it has suffered, its weaknesses - and its enduring strengths. They need to see that democracy has no built-in historical guarantees, and that its future is bound up with what has happened in the past, and with what is happening in the present.

To make a case for putting an extra pair of eyes in the back of our heads, so that we can think in fresh ways about present-day democracies and their possible destinies, is not to make the mistake of supposing that this new history should be seated on a throne. The Life and Death of Democracy merely sets out to cause trouble by humbling all previous accounts of democracy. It aims to question humbug by putting forward lots of bold and unfamiliar conjectures. With one eye on the future, it tries to unsettle the present by emphasising the importance of remembering things past. In sum, it tries to bring democracy to the history of democracy : initially by granting a vote to events, institutions and people whose enduring contributions to democracy have been buried by their enemies in the deep holes of the past.

History of Democracy

CiSoNet

Project outline, London, June 2005