Can democracy work? : a short history of a radical idea, from ancient Athens to our world

Can democracy work? A short history of a radical idea, from ancient Athens to our world

Jim Miller, 1947-

Book - 2018

"Today, democracy is the world's only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In [this book], James Miller, author of the classic history of 1960s protest Democracy Is in the Streets, offers a lively, surprising, and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present. A profound reckoning with a paradoxical phenomenon--the struggle of human beings to govern themselves--Miller's book shows how democracy has always been rife with inner tensions. In ancient Athens, citizens preferred to choose leaders by lottery and regarded elections as undemocratic--but had no problem excluding most residents from political power. Th...e French revolutionaries sought to incarnate the popular will, but many of them came to see the people as the enemy. And in the United States, the franchise would be extended to some even as it was taken from others. Amid the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, communists, liberals, and nationalists all sought to claim the ideals of democracy for themselves--even as they manifestly failed to realize them. Ranging from the theaters of Athens to the tents of Occupy Wall Street, [this book] combines an authoritative history of ideas with colorful portraits of democracy's champions and antagonists, from Pericles and Plato, to Rousseau and Robespierre, to Walt Whitman, Rosa Luxemburg, and Donald Trump. Can Democracy Work? is an entertaining and insightful guide to our most cherished--and vexed--ideal."--Dust jacket.

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Subjects
Democracy > History.
Democracy > Philosophy.
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018.
Language
English
Main Author
Jim Miller, 1947- (-)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
ix, 306 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780374137649
  • Prelude: What Is Democracy?
  • The riddle posed, and some answers explored, in five histories essays
  • 1. A Closed Community Of Self-Governing Citizens
  • The strangeness of Greek democracy
  • Solon sets Athens on a path toward aristocratic self-rule
  • The Athenian uprising of 508 B.C.
  • Cleisthenes extends political power to ordinary citizens
  • The use of political lotteries, rather than elections, to select officers in Athens
  • The first appearance of the word demokratia
  • Excluding others: Athenian autochthony
  • Pericles as exemplary demagogue
  • Thucydides describes the Athenian democracy at war
  • Plato's critique of democracy: knowledge vs. opinion
  • The resilience of Athenian democracy, and Hannah Arendt's idealized view of it
  • How Athenian democracy actually worked in the fourth century B.C.
  • Classical democracy in decay and eclipse
  • The sublime value of unity, and the martial virtues as constitutive of the ideal democratic citizen
  • 2. A Revolutionary Assertion Of Popular Sovereignty
  • Radical democrats seize power in Paris
  • Republican thought, from Polybius to Rousseau
  • The French Revolution, from the fall of the Bastille to the fall of the monarchy
  • The journée of August 10, 1792
  • A carnival of atrocities
  • First calls for a democratic constitution
  • Condorcet in the French Convention
  • Drafting the world's first democratic constitution
  • Robespierre, Marat, and the debate over Condorcet's democratic constitution
  • The Terror, and fresh doubts about the wisdom of direct democracy
  • The appearance of a new idea, "representative democracy"
  • The retreat of democratic ideals in France
  • The human toll
  • 3. A Commercial Republic of Free Individuals
  • American distrust of popular passions; the tempering influence of commerce in eighteenth-centery America
  • 1776: Thomas Paine, Common Sense, and the Declaration of Independence
  • The ambiguous place of democracy in America during the revolutionary era
  • Modern democracy from France to America: the democratic-republican societies of the 1790s
  • The American dream of a commercial democracy
  • America's first great demagogue, Andrew Jackson
  • Tocqueville celebrates the Fourth of July in Albany, New Ttork, 1831
  • Tocqueville on democracy as an egalitarian form of life
  • The strange insurrection over the right to vote in Rhode Island, 1842
  • Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the American struggle over the franchise
  • Demotic culture in America: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, minstrelsy
  • Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas and the fantasy of a democracy still to come
  • 4. A Struggle For Political And Social Equality
  • The Chartists and the London Democratic Association; the first Chartist Convention and first Chartist petition, 1839
  • Karl Marx's ambivalence about democracy; communism as the realization of individual freedom and social equality
  • Conflict as the paradoxical essence of nascent modern democratic societies
  • Mazzini and his democratic faith in cosmopolitan nationalism
  • The Paris Commune of 1871
  • The Commune as revolutionary icon
  • The rise of mass political parties; the ease of the German Social Democratic Party
  • The Russian general strike of 1905 and the St. Petersburg soviet
  • Rosa Luxemburg on revolutionary self-government
  • Robert Michels and Max Weber debate democracy vs. domination as the key categories for modem social thought; the "iron law of oligarehy"
  • Disenchanted democracy at the dawn of the twentieth century
  • 5. A Hall of Mirrors
  • What Woodrow Wilson meant by democracy in proposing a world "made safe for democracy"; his 1885 manuscript "The Modern Democratic Stale"
  • Wilson as president; the Great War as a crusade to promote liberal democracy
  • Russia in revolution
  • The improvisatory democracy of the Petrograd soviet
  • Lenin and the Bolsheviks seize power through Russia's Soviets
  • Existential conflict over the meaning of democracy: Wilsonian liberalism vs. Leninist communism; the Versailles Peace Treaty and the League of Nations
  • The Guild Socialism of G.D.H. Cole: a vision of democratic socialism for an industrial society
  • Walter Lippmann on the psychological limits to an informed public
  • John Dewey and the persistence of the democratic faith
  • Edward Bernays and the value of propaganda
  • George Gallup and the rise of survey research and public opinion polling
  • Joseph Schumpeler on democracy as "rule of the politician"
  • The cruel game of modern politics; sham democracies vs. democracy as a universal ideal, solemnized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948
  • Coda: Who Are We?
  • Manhattan, January 2017, protesting the election of Donald Trump: "This is what democracy looks like"; but a democratic process also elected President Trump
  • When President Barack Obama said, "That's not who we are," who are "we"?
  • "There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide"
  • Global democratization from an elite perspective; the life and times of Samuel P. Huntington
  • "Democracy is in the streets": the return of participatory democracy in 2011; Occupy Wall Street
  • Problems with the direct democratic program of the postwar global left
  • Protecting pluralism in a framework of liberal rights the only viable approach to realizing a modern democracy
  • Condoleezza Rice keeps the American faith: exporting democracy at gunpoint
  • Measuring the advance and retreat of democracy worldwide as a form of government: the Freedom House index, The Economist's Democracy Index, and the United Nations Human Development Index
  • Challenges to democracy today as an ideology and ideal
  • Václav Havel on the dangers of political demoralization faced with the challenges of self-government
  • Upholding Abraham Lincoln's conception of democratic hope
  • Notes
  • Selected Bibliography and Suggestions For Further Reading
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

The answer Miller (New School) poses to the title of his book is "not really." That answer is highly qualified, however. Miller traces democracy in impressive detail in ancient Athens, during the French Revolution, and in the American experience as well as several other expressions of democracy or democratic aspirations in much less detail. In each, he finds that democratic ideals, which often shift from time to time and place to place, tend to fall short in practice. For Miller, this does not mean democracy is doomed; as an ideal of self-governing citizens, it invariably faces numerous obstacles. But the very fact that citizens aspire to democratic ideals means democracy is, in large measure, about struggle. This well-written, deeply researched work by a strong advocate of democracy is a welcome tonic in troubled times. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. --Ronald J. Terchek, emeritus, University of Maryland College Park

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

"If both North Korea and the United States consider themselves democratic - and if liberals and conservatives, and socialists and Communists, and nationalists and populists, and American politicians of every stripe can all claim to embody the will of a people - then what, in practice, can the idea of democracy possibly mean?" Miller, a political scientist, poses this question at the outset of this searching and somewhat sprawling book, answering it through an idiosyncratic combination of historical analysis, political theory and personal reflection. Miller begins by drawing the crucial distinction between democracy and liberalism, noting that democracy, "when it first appeared in Greece, had nothing to do" with liberal concepts like popular sovereignty, equality under the law and freedoms of speech and conscience. Today, the connection is no less tenuous: hence the rise of "illiberal democracy" in places like Hungary, where governments elected to run liberal states have dismantled obstacles to strongman rule and one-party control. Miller shows how, in the absence of moderating institutions and constraints, the radical promise of democracy can slip into despotism, as it did in the wake of the French Revolution. Turning to the present, he sees the surge of right-wing populism that resulted in the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the pro-Brexit vote in the United Kingdom "not as a protest against democracy per se but rather as a protest against the limits of modern democracy." As a young man in the 1960s, Miller was enamored of radical left-wing politics, as he relates in sometimes distracting bits of memoir. Today, however, he doubts whether that era's "experiments in rule-by-consensus" or their present-day inheritors (like the Occupy movement) "will ever generate the kinds of alternative institutions that are needed." He hopes for the development of "new ways" to restore democratic systems and people's faith in them, but doesn't spell out what those might be.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* As an ideal, democracy is broadly embraced, but it has many, often conflicting meanings. In this smart, tremendously readable history, Miller (Examined Lives, 2011) tackles the paradox at the center of the democratic dream. Democracy, he shows, is three things at once: the form of government that bears the name, a manipulable ideology, and the ideal of free institutions and self-determination. By exploring how the Western World has understood and sought to practice democracy, he reveals how the tensions among these ideals create theoretical controversies over its nature and can potentially undermine its practical effectiveness. The story begins with a look at democracy's roots in ancient Athens, but focuses on the period between its reemergence during the French Revolution and the aftermath of WWII, when, through the addition of new concepts like representative democracy and the link between democracy and political liberalism, it gradually achieved its modern form. Miller closes with an assessment, informed by his own early activist experiences, of the current state of Western democracies, answering the title question with a qualified, ""Maybe."" He doesn't offer easy answers, but his analysis encourages readers to ask important questions. Both challenging and accessible, this title is highly recommended.--Sara Jorgensen Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Government by the people-exercising power themselves without delegating it to representatives or administrators-remains a conflicted, elusive goal, according to this incisive study of direct democracy. Politics professor Miller (Examined Lives) explores examples of direct and participatory democracy: ancient Athens, where 60,000 citizens assembled regularly to vote on law, policy, and war, and random people were appointed to government offices by lottery; the French Revolution, when Parisian neighborhood assemblies overthrew the national legislature; the rise of America's Jacksonian democracy, granting the vote to all white men; the Russian Revolution, when local soviets of workers and soldiers became a rival government; and Occupy Wall Street's experiment in all-inclusive consensus decision-making. Drawing on political thought from Aristotle to Rousseau to Walter Lipmann, Miller cogently identifies both the strengths of direct democracy (challenging unresponsive representative government and propelling change) and its weaknesses: instability and violence, vulnerability to demagogues, the difficulty of telling what a divided people really want, the need for specialist legislators and bureaucrats in a complex modern society, and a legacy of "destructive and illiberal totalitarian democracy." Miller's engaging, thoughtful exploration of some of history's most dramatic episodes illuminates the ongoing discontent with flawed systems of self-rule. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Miller (Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche) argues that a standard definition of democracy does not exist, as the word has been used to describe both representative political systems and dictatorships. He looks at several democratic systems and movements to determine their nature and effectiveness, starting with ancient Athens to the French, American, and Russian Revolutions and ending with governments of the present day. In each example, Miller considers the nature of public participation and the institutions that support the democracy. As Miller admits, the examples are Eurocentric and do not represent a comprehensive survey of democratic movements. Detailed background information is omitted by necessity, which could confuse readers less familiar with the historical events described. Miller also discusses prominent democratic and social theorists Karl Marx, Cleisthenes, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Samuel Huntington, and ends by speculating on improvements that would make democracy adhere closer to their ideals. VERDICT A thoughtful but sometimes dense exploration of Western democracy. Recommended for readers interested in political systems.--Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The meaning of democracy has changed dramatically throughout history.With autocratic leaders emerging in so-called democratic nations, Miller (Political Science/New School; Eminent Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche, 2011, etc.) investigates the slippery term "democracy" and the "inherently unstable" democratic project. "If both North Korea and the United States consider themselves democratic," writes the author, and if all manner of politicians claim "to embody the will of the peoplethen what, in practice, can the idea of democracy possibly mean?" In response to this vexing question, Miller offers an informative historical overview of democratic efforts, from ancient Greece to contemporary times, including revolutions in France (1792) and America (1776), 19th-century socialist uprisings in Europe, the early-20th-century revolution in Russia, and current populist movements. Although Athens has been acclaimed as the birthplace of democracy, the author counters that assumption: While a lottery system insured wide participation in government, women and slaves were excluded; moreover, throughout Greece, most cities were aristocracies or oligarchies. Many revolutions enacted to promote democracythe French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the British Chartist movementended in defeat and bloodshed, tainting the idea of democracy as ill-advised, creating "a new kind of tyranny, a collective tyranny of the majority" who were largely uninformed and easily swayed by inflammatory rhetoric. The term became "widely associated with the danger of mob rule" and anarchy. America's Founding Fathers did not think of themselves as democrats, believing "the election of representatives to be preferable to, and a necessary check on, the unruly excesses of a purely direct democracy." Not until the presidential campaign of 1800 did Thomas Jefferson bring the term democracy into political discourse, conflating its usage with "fealty to the Constitution." Miller is hopeful that even if democracy is threatened by political propagandists disseminating lies and creating confusion, democratic ideals and liberal principles will persist as long as democracy functions "as a shared faith."A revealing examination of the successes and perils of popular participation in government. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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