CONTENTS
The riddle posed, and some answers explored, in five historical essays
ONE. 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
TWO. 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
THREE. A COMMERCIAL REPUBLIC OF FREE INDIVIDUALS
American distrust of popular passions; the tempering influence of commerce in eighteenth-century 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 York, 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
FOUR. 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 case 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 modern social thought; the “iron law of oligarchy” ||| disenchanted democracy at the dawn of the twentieth century
What Woodrow Wilson meant by democracy in proposing a world “made safe for democracy”; his 1885 manuscript “The Modern Democratic State” ||| 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 Schumpeter 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
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