NOTES

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PRELUDE: WHAT IS DEMOCRACY?

“If we take the number of people”: Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Democratic Disconnect,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 3 (July 2016): 16. Cf. Arne Næss, Jens A. Christophersen, and Kjell Kvalø, Democracy, Ideology and Objectivity (Oslo: Oslo University Press, 1956).

“sovereign democracy”: Ivan Krastev, “‘Sovereign Democracy,’ Russian-style,” OpenDemocracy (November 16, 2006), a gloss on Nikita Garadya, ed., Sovereignty (Moscow, 2006; in Russian).

“Democratic People’s Republic”: See the text of the 2016 revised constitution, at https://nkleadershipwatch.wordpress.com/2016/09/04/dprk-constitution-text-released-following-2016-amdendments.

the heart and soul of modern democracy: Cf. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy, and Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. Like many other proponents of liberal democracy, these authors of two important recent studies tend to focus not on revolts but rather on the salience to modern democracy of an “ethic of responsibility” and of “tolerance” and “forbearance” as political norms.

“The history of philosophy”: Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 116–117.

They have suggested instead: See, for example, the contributors to Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell, eds., The Secret History of Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

“their impact on history, on later societies”: Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern, 14.

a friend: The novelist Rick Moody, email of July 30, 2017, sent after a public reading of a portion of this book: “I think in the common discourse of the papers and the middle schools, etc., there is still this propagandistic idea that we are conducting a democracy, which seems very nearly laughable. But what I also liked about the implications of what you read is the opposite thought, too, that neither do we have NOTHING to do with a democracy. It’s just not as simple as all that.”

description of nineteenth-century origins of “liberalism”: See Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism. Cf. Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?,” Political Theory 42, no. 6 (2014): 682–715.

In the United States, liberalism was introduced: See Walter Lippmann, “Liberalism in America,” The New Republic (December 31, 1919), 150.

collective freedom to wield their power: A point memorably made by Benjamin Constant in “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns,” speech delivered at the Athénée Royal in Paris, 1819.

“It was not religious liberty they sought”: Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 98.

“What! Freedom can only be maintained”: Rousseau, Contrat social, 3:xiv.

“Even with the limitless expansion of state power”: Hans Kelsen, The Essence and Value of Democracy, trans. Brian Graf (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 32.

“illiberal state”: Viktor Orbán, speech at the 25th Balvanyos Free Summer University and Youth Camp, July 26, 2015, http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/full-text-of-viktor-orbans-speech-at-baile-tusnad-tusnadfurdo-of-26-july-2014/10592.

“Few leaders and movements in the West”: William Galston, “The Populist Moment,” Journal of Democracy 28, no. 2 (April 2017): 30.

Such worries are nothing new: Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy.

1. A CLOSED COMMUNITY OF SELF-GOVERNING CITIZENS

When American political scientists speak of democracy: For these and other criteria of a modern democracy, see Larry Diamond, “What Is Democracy?,” lecture delivered at Hilla University for Humanistic Studies, January 21, 2004, https://web.stanford.edu/~ldiamond/iraq/WhaIsDemocracy012004.htm.

“insolence, anarchy, wastefulness, and shamelessness”: Plato, Republic, 560e.

“subservience to the rulers of the day”: Demosthenes, “Against Timocrates,” Orations, 24 §171. Cynthia Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), makes a heroic effort to deduce democratic theories from the modest evidence we have for philosophers like Protagoras and Democritus, while Josiah Ober deftly analyzes the rhetoric deployed by democratic orators in Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens.

“like frogs around a pond”: Plato, Phaedo, 109b.

the exact number of total residents, including slaves: “no more than a tenth of the whole population”: Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, 94.

Insofar as ordinary citizens (the demos) had a role to play: Dean Hammer, “Plebiscitary Politics in Archaic Greece,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 54, no. 2 (2005): 107–131.

He was legendary for enhancing the power: Herodotus, The Histories, 1.29.

A period of relative stability began: Ibid., 1.59.

Shortly afterward, Cleisthenes personally intervened with the Pythia: Ibid., 5.63.

“process of steady expansion of political equality”: Kurt Raaflaub, “Equalities and Inequalities in Athenian Democracy,” in Dēmokratia, ed. Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 143–148.

The result in Athens … was also a “revolution”: Josiah Ober, “The Athenian Revolution of 508/7 B.C.: Violence, Authority, and the Origins of Democracy,” in Ober, The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 46–50. For the argument against Ober’s interpretation, see Kurt A. Raaflaub, “Power in the Hands of the People: Foundations of Athenian Democracy,” in Ian Morris and Kurt A. Raaflaub, eds., Democracy 2500? Questions and Challenges (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1998), 41–42.

“Although Athens had been a great city before”: Herodotus, The Histories, 5.66.

At the time, the Athenian citizenry consisted of free-born males: Martin Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law: Law, Society, and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 24.

An amphitheater was built for the Assembly: Pierre Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Cleisthenes the Athenian, trans. David Ames Curtis (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 13, 16 figure 4.

“one of the first things that most forcibly struck outside observers”: Cartledge, Democracy, 68.

As it evolved in Athens, a central role: Following the account in John J. Winkler, “The Ephebes’ Song: Tragoidia and Polis,” Representations 11 (Summer 1985): 26–62. Cf. A. W. Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 59–67.

To anyone accustomed to the importance of periodic elections: For the history and use of this device from ancient Athens to modern societies, see Hubertus Buchstein, Demokratie und Lotterie (New York: Campus Verlag, 2009).

That is why Aristotle regarded elections: Aristotle, Politics, IV. 9, 1294b8.

By the end of the century, there were perhaps several hundred: Cartledge, Democracy, 146–147.

The polis in Athens began to eclipse in ethical significance: Raaflaub, “Power in the Hands of the People,” 49.

The significance of this exclusivity was incalculable: Cf. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.41.1: “As a city we are the school of Hellas; while I doubt if the world can produce a man, who where he has only himself to depend upon, is equal to so many emergencies, and graced by so happy a versatility as the Athenian.”

Aristotle, a careful analyst of the structure of Greek city-states: Aristotle, Politics, 1291b14–30.

Still, it is a bit misleading to call such eloquent leaders of the Assembly “politicians”: See Mogens Herman Hansen, “The Athenian ‘Politicians,’ 403–322 B.C.,” in Hansen, The Athenian Ecclesia II, 3–4.

“Our constitution,” says Pericles: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.37.1. I am using the translation of Donald Kagan in Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1991), 143, who also makes the connection with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

By the time he delivered his funeral oration: Plutarch, “Pericles,” 39.

“The rest of their array moved out and on”: Aeschylus, The Persians, 399–405, the 1908 verse translation by Edmund Doidge Anderson Morshead.

“No one, moreover, if he has it in him to do some good”: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.37.1.

As soon as he was eligible: Kagan, Pericles of Athens, 38.

Ephialtes represented a new kind of Athenian leader: Christian Meier, Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), 291.

“Remember, too, that if your country has the greatest name”: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.64.3.

“sixty triremes annually”: Plutarch, “Pericles,” 11.

He also introduced a fund: Vincent Azoulay, Pericles of Athens, trans. Janet Lloyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 73.

“to redistribute wealth to the people on a scale never before seen in history”: Ibid., 80.

“the growth of the power of Athens”: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 1.23.6.

“in assemblies, courts, theaters, army camps”: Plato, Republic, 492bc.

The place where the Assembly convened: Cartledge, Democracy, 69.

Large crowds packed into confined public spaces: The short-lived experiment with general assemblies in Occupy Wall Street in New York in the fall of 2011 is a good example; real deliberation occurred only offstage, in various smaller working groups, as I explain in my coda. For the Swiss comparison, see Hansen, The Athenian Ecclesia, 207–226.

“There were no theoretical limits to the power of the state”: Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern, 116.

“The Athenian community during the Periclean time”: Alfred E. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 367n.

So wrote the British scholar: Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 66–103.

the prevailing tradition in the West: see Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought.

“Throughout the world the aristocracy are opposed to democracy”: “The Constitution of the Athenians,” §5, in J. M. Moore, ed. and trans., Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 38.

By empowering an impoverished multitude in this manner: The Cambridge classicist Paul Cartledge, basing his work in part on the authority of Aristotle’s suggestion in his Politics that democracy in its most radical (Athenian) form was rule by the poor, makes a surprisingly strong argument for seeing ancient Athens as a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in his excellent Democracy.

“he was the first to shout when addressing the people”: “First to shout”: The Constitution of Athens, 28.3. For the rest, I am paraphrasing the portrait painted by George Grote, A History of Greece (London, 1870), 6:27.

“the most violent man at Athens”: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 3.36.6.

As Thucydides himself emphasized: The revisionist views on this matter of M. I. Finley, above all in Democracy Ancient and Modern, have become widely shared (for example, by Josiah Ober and Paul Cartledge).

“led the multitude rather than being led by it”: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.65.8–9.

As tensions flared in Athens, Socrates tried to stay above the fray: Freely paraphrasing Xenophon, Memoirs, I, 2, 36.

homonomia, literally, same-mindedness: See Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, 297.

“Do you know anyone who is less a slave?”: Xenophon, Apology, 18.

But in the eyes of his philosophical followers: See Cartledge, Democracy, 175–180, for the most trenchant short defense of the democratic legitimacy of the trial of Socrates.

“no knowledge of true being”: I am using a nineteenth-century summary of Book VI of Plato’s Republic by Benjamin Jowett: see The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Jowett (Oxford, 1871), 2:59.

In this parable, Socrates asks his audience: see Plato, Republic, VI, 488a–489a. I am using the translation of G.M.A. Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve, in John M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1,111.

“The problem was that democracy pandered”: Runciman, The Confidence Trap, 7.

“acknowledged folly”: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 6.89.6.

“It was no light matter to deprive the Athenian people”: Ibid., 8.68.4.

“a remarkably efficient State”: A.H.M. Jones, Athenian Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), 99. This is a collection of the classical historian’s pioneering monographs from the 1950s, which paved the way for the subsequent work of Finley, Hansen, Ober, and Cartledge.

“polis was supposed to multiply the occasions to win ‘immortal fame’”: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 197.

“a deed deserving fame would not be forgotten”: Ibid.

“the Greeks, in distinction from all later developments”: Ibid., 194.

A pig was slaughtered and dragged around the Pnyx: For this and other details about how the Assembly functioned in the third quarter of the fourth century, see Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, 125–160.

“Who of those above fifty years of age wishes to address the assembly?”: Aeschines, Against Timarchus, 1.23, 3–4.

Apollo … advised leaving the land in question fallow: Cartledge, Democracy, 133.

any citizen, if he chose, could charge under oath: See Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, 205–210. Some uncertainty surrounds how this institution operated; for more details, see Hansen, “Graphe Paranomon against Psephismata Not Yet Passed by the Ekklesia,” in The Athenian Ecclesia II, 271–281.

“the Herald having read prayers”: Demosthenes, “Against Timocrates,” Orations, 24 §§20–21.

Roughly once a month, the Assembly, according to a fixed agenda, voted: For more details on the duties of the Council, see Aristotle, Constitution of Athens, esp. §§42–52; Cartledge, Democracy, 110–114.

“Never before or since in world history”: Hansen, The Athenian Ecclesia II, 265.

“participatory democracy with a vengeance”: Cartledge, Democracy, 111.

“an inevitable cost of the democratic decision-making mode”: Ibid., 159.

“spirit of feverish litigation”: Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, ed. Oswyn Murray, trans. Sheila Stern (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 229.

“the constitutional trend in political actuality”: Cartledge, Democracy, 244.

“calamitous verbal collapse”: Ibid., 265.

“there has been established through out the world”: Quoted ibid., 273.

“the safest general characterization”: Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 39.

Faced with the skepticism of critics like Plato: For the link between Mill and Grote, see Kyriakos N. Demetriou, “The Spirit of Athens: George Grote and John Stuart Mill on Classical Republicanism,” in Demetriou and Antis Loizides, eds., John Stuart Mill: A British Socrates (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 176–206.

In sharp distinction to the Romans: Cartledge, Democracy, 148–149.

administrative tasks under the democracy: See Paulin Ismard, Democracy’s Slaves, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); cf. Cartledge, Democracy, 139.

“does not sit at his post”: Ronald Stroud, “An Athenian Law on Silver Coinage,” Hesperia 43, no. 2 (April–June 1974): 157–188.

It wasn’t as obsessed with cultivating the martial virtues: The links between war making and state making were acutely noted by my colleague the sociologist Charles Tilly, perhaps most memorably in his paper “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169–191.

2. A REVOLUTIONARY ASSERTION OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY

They represented a cross section of ordinary Parisians: From a census of civilian casualties taken after August 10, quoted in Christopher Hibbert, The Days of the French Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 156. Cf. a census of the occupations of leading figures in one Parisian section in 1789–1790, in Rose, The Making of the Sans-Culottes, 65.

“there was no other perpetrator of August 10”: Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution Française (Paris, 1849), IV: 6n.

“No insurrection has ever been more openly prepared”: Albert Mathiez, Le dix Août (Paris: Hachette, 1934), p. 84.

In many neighborhoods, Parisians who had assembled: See Rose, The Making of the Sans-Culottes.

“The great become small, the rich become poor”: Rousseau, Émile, Book III, in Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1995), 4:468.

“Nobody has proposed a more just idea of the people”: Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, ed. Société des études Robespierristes, 11 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1910–1967), 8:90. The quote is from Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 6.

“democratic or popular”: Révolutions de Paris 18 (November 8, 1789): 2.

“the Immortal Rousseau”: Quoted in Haim Burstin, Une révolution à l’œuvre: Le Faubourg Saint-Marcel, 1789–1794 (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2005), 391.

For example, at the Gobelins section: Ibid., 404–405.

“Swift now, therefore”: Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History (London, 1837), bk. 2, chap. 6.

“When the people place themselves in a state of insurrection”: Quoted in Hibbert, Days of the French Revolution, 154.

an “assembly of delegates”: From declarations made on August 10, 1792, in the Archives Nationales, quoted in Morris Slavin, The Making of an Insurrection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 189n14.

“an indefeasible right, an inalienable right”: Remarks made in an assembly of the Cité section, November 3, 1792, quoted in Soboul, The Sans-Culottes, 95.

“propelled by an impulse so violent”: Charles-Alexis Alexandre, from the section of Gobelins, quoted in Burstin, Une révolution à l’œuvre, 403.

For the first time since ancient Athens: Cf. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 24.

“the license and lawlessness”: Polybius, The Histories, bk. VI, §4, 6–9. Cf. Cicero, De Re Publica, I, xxviii.

“like a well-trimmed boat”: Polybius, The Histories, bk. VI, §10, 6–11.

“The best armies are those of armed peoples”: Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, August 23, 1513, in Machiavelli, The Chief Works, and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), 3:925.

“Machiavellian democracy”: John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

“spirit of extreme equality”: Niccolò Machiavelli, History of Florence, bk. 4, chap. 1. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 8, chap. 2.

It was in order to avoid such confusion that James Madison: Federalist, no. 10. On the widespread conflation of republic and democracy in this era, see Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005), 276–281.

In the context of conventional republican theories: Rousseau’s views were not, however, unprecedented; he was following an insight first broached, though not consistently elaborated, by Thomas Hobbes in his 1642 treatise De Cive (translated from the Latin into English in 1651 by Hobbes as The Citizen: Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society). See Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign.

“aristo-democracy”: See James Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 13–17; and the much more detailed account of Genevan politics, and Rousseau’s relation with various Genevan activists, in Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva.

In one famous passage, he remarks that a democracy: Rousseau, On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Right, bk. 3, chap. 4, in Œuvres complètes, 3:406.

“the peculiar advantage of a democratic government”: Ibid., bk. 3, chap. 17, in Œuvres complètes, 3:433–434. Cf. Hobbes, De Cive, 7:5.

“If one seeks what precisely comprises the greatest good of all”: Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 11, in Œuvres complètes, 3:391.

Although in a genuine community the general will: This is a condensed account of the longer analysis and interpretation offered in my Rousseau, esp. pp. 61–65.

“which its members call State when it is passive”: Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. 1, chap. 6, in Œuvres complètes, 3:361–362.

“destructive of society and of all government”: Quoted in Miller, Rousseau, 82.

“The democratic constitution”: Rousseau, Letters Written from the Mountain, in Œuvres complètes, 3:837–838.

“virtue and freedom find refuge”: Mme Roland is quoted in Jacques Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille, July 14th, 1789, trans. Jean Stewart (New York: Scribner, 1970), 31.

“sovereignty lies with the people”: Quoted ibid.

“as many perhaps as one adult French male”: Patrice Higgonet, Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 14.

Like the Parisian sectional assemblies: See Rose, The Making of the Sans-Culottes.

“so long as a revolution is not complete”: Condorcet, Chronique de Paris, February 21, 1792, 38, quoted in Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 310.

“public opinion grows more enlightened”: Chronique de Paris, June 16, 1792, quoted in Baker, Condorcet, 311.

The Legislative Assembly decreed that all citizens: Decree on pikes, August 1, 1792, Archives parlementaires de 1787 a 1860 … Première série (1787 à 1799), 2nd ed. (Paris, 1879–1914), 47:365–366.

“an exemplary and unforgettable act of vengeance”: From the Brunswick Manifesto (English translation: https://history.hanover.edu/texts/bruns.html).

“the truth of the thunderous anathema”: Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. 3, chap. 15, in Œuvres complètes, 3:431.

“the primary assemblies have the power to evaluate”: Robespierre, Œuvres, 8:410–420.

“The country is in danger”: Morris Slavin, The French Revolution in Miniature: Section Droits-de-l’Homme, 1789–1795 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 109.

Although the neighborhood contained 2,000 active citizens: Ibid., 111.

“Secret Directory of the Insurrection”: Ibid., 112.

They were pursued by soldiers and sans-culottes: See the accounts in Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution Française, vol. 4, chap. 1, 35–39; and Hibbert, The Days of the French Revolution, 160–162.

“I remained … until four o’clock”: M. Cléry, Journal de ce qui s’est passé à la Tour du Temple, pendant la captivité de Louis XVI, Roi de France (Paris, 1798), 4. This memoir, a bestseller in its day, was written by Jean Baptiste Cléry, valet de chambre to the king.

“bloodshed was not the unfortunate by-product of revolution”: Simon Schama, Citizens (New York: Knopf, 1989), 615.

previous scholars have been wrong to imply: In her rich and suggestive On Revolution, Hannah Arendt praises the sans-culottes for their political institutions while blaming their violence on their various social demands—an arbitrary and quite unhistorical distinction that cannot withstand serious scrutiny.

“the uneasy coincidence of democracy and fanaticism”: Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 6.

“The solemn manner in which”: Robespierre, “Sur les événements du 10 août 1792,” Le Défenseur de la Constitution, no. 12; Robespierre, Œuvres, 4: 352–353.

“even major political issues could only rarely”: Rose, The Making of the Sans-Culottes, 93.

rationalize the drafting of laws: See Baker, Condorcet, p. 243. Baker was one of the first modern historians to stress Condorcet’s tacit preoccupation with offering his own novel answers to questions Rousseau had explored in the Social Contract.

unique among the revolutionary leaders: Alexandre Koyré, “Condorcet,” Journal of the History of Ideas 9, no. 2 (April 1948): 131. The most vivid short essay on Condorcet in English remains the chapter on him in Frank Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 55–102.

“godfather of modern probability theory”: Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 42; “mathématique sociale” appears in Condorcet’s posthumously published Outlines of an Historical view of the progress of the human mind, written while he was in hiding in 1793.

“religious scrupulosity”: John Morley, “Condorcet,” in Critical Miscellanies (London, 1858), 2:255.

“In politics a total rejection of any idea”: M. Arago, Biographie de Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet, read to the Academy of Sciences, December 28, 1841 (Paris, 1849), vi.

a “volcano covered with snow”: Ibid., cvii.

“Men who, like the French, love true liberty”: Condorcet, On the English Revolution of 1688, and That of the French, August 10, 1792 (London, 1792), 7, 11, 18.

“the common reason”: See the discussion in Lucien Jaume, Le discours Jacobin et la démocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 305–323.

“Take away from these … wills the pluses and minuses”: Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 3, in Œuvres complètes, 3:371.

According to Condorcet’s mathematical argument: See Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 70–75.

“the wisdom of crowds”: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Doubleday, 2004).

“I saw people pass by, arm in arm”: Louis-Sébestien Mercier, Paris pendant la Révolution (1789–1798), ou, Le Nouveau Paris (Paris, 1862), bk. 3, chap. 82.

“To form a constitution for a territory”: An Authentic Copy of the New Plan of the French Constitution, as Presented to the National Convention, by the Committee of Constitution, to Which Is Prefixed the Speech of M. Condorcet, on Friday, February 15, 1793, (M. Breard, President,) Delivered in the Name of the Committee of Constitution (London, 1793), i. By now many of the important speeches by the key leaders of the French Revolution were being quickly translated into English and widely distributed in both England and the United States. There is a good analysis of the draft in Jaume, Le discours Jacobin et la démocratie, 312–323.

Because Condorcet was hoarse that day: Elisabeth Badinter and Robert Badinter, Condorcet, 1743–1794: Un intellectual en politique (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 540.

“private societies”: Speech of M. Condorcet…, vi.

“No man should be deprived of any means”: Ibid., vii.

Elsewhere Condorcet had also made it plain: Condorcet, The Nature and Purpose of Public Education, the first of five journal articles published in 1791 on the educational views behind his plan for public education, which he presented to the National Assembly in 1792, in Baker, Condorcet: Selected Writings, 105–142.

“it would be equally dangerous”: Speech of M. Condorcet…, xiii.

“primary assemblies”: Ibid., xi–xii.

“the constitution to reform, at a determined epoch”: Ibid., xlvi.

In later years, Thomas Jefferson: Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, Thomas Jefferson, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1395–1403. A long letter (admired by Hannah Arendt) in which Jefferson proposes periodic constitutional conventions, and also a system of wards, strikingly similar to the primary assemblies of Condorcet.

“contrary to that equality between the parts”: Speech of M. Condorcet…, xi.

“is no new institution”: Ibid., xxx.

“a constitution expressly adopted by the citizens”: Ibid., xlviii.

But inside the Convention: Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, 540–541.

“Everything the sectional assemblies do so well”: Marat, “Idée de la nouvelle Constitution, Observations rapides sur ce fatras girondin,” Journal de la République Française, par Marat, L’Ami du Peuple 126, February 26, 1793.

“The power of ideas can inflame”: Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 171.

“sovereignty of the people, with equality”: Speech of M. Condorcet…, i.

Meanwhile, the Parisian sans-culottes: The standard source remains Soboul, The Sans-Culottes.

“written from the heart”: Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, Œuvres complètes, ed. Michèle Duval (Paris: Gérard Lebovici, 1984), 423.

“to give to every government the force necessary”: Robespierre, Œuvres, 9:495–496, 498–502.

“Under the eyes of so great a number of witnesses”: Ibid., 9:503.

By then, the people would either: Condorcet, Discours prononcé à la Convention, sur la convocation d’une nouvelle Convention nationale, in Œuvres Complètes, 12:583–597.

“The people, Rousseau says, are sovereign”: Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique applicable à tous les gouvernements—et particulièrement à constitution actuelle de la France (Paris, 1815), chap. 1; in English, Political Writings, trans. and ed. Biancamaria Fontana (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 179.

In the context of the American Revolution: See Alexander Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris, May 19, 1777, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-01-02-0162.

“Simple Democracy was society governing itself”: Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, pt. 2, chap. 3.

“A democracy is not a state where the people”: Robespierre, “Report on the Principles of Public Morality,” speech to the Convention, February 5, 1794, Œuvres, 10:352–353.

By slowly but surely alienating: See Albert Soboul, “Robespierre and the Popular Movement of 1793–4,” Past and Present 5 (1954): 54–70.

Before this pioneering venture in “total war”: David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 156.

3. A COMMERCIAL REPUBLIC OF FREE INDIVIDUALS

“America’s most distinguishing characteristic”: Wiebe, Self-Rule, p. 1.

“All power is derived from the people”: Benjamin Rush, “Address to the People of the United States,” delivered at the American Museum, Philadelphia, February 1787, in Colleen Sheehan and Gary McDowell, eds., Friends of the Constitution: Writings of the “Other” Federalists, 1787–1788 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998).

“moral and political depravity”: Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, September 10, 1814, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-07-02-0471.

“I tremble for my country”: Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London, 1787), Query XVIII, “Manners: The particular customs and manners that may happen to be received in that state?”

“played out in counterpoint to chattel slavery”: Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1.

a vision eloquently expressed by Thomas Paine: See Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984).

The first issue included a profile of Voltaire: John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 92–95.

By the end of the year: See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

“Virginians may have had a special appreciation”: Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 376.

“art of democratic writing”: Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (New York: Liveright, 2014), 83–104.

“meant to set up a standard maxim”: Abraham Lincoln, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision,” June 26, 1857, http://www.virginia.edu/woodson/courses/aas-hius366a/lincoln.html.

The idea of “consent”: For more on the genealogy of this concept, see my essay, “Consent,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 3, no. 5 (Fall 2016), www.politicalconcepts.org/consent-james-miller.

In English, the word “individual”: See the entries for “individual” and “individualism” in the Oxford English Dictionary; cf. Steven Lukes, Individualism (London: Basil Blackwell, 1973).

“Our plan is commerce”: Thomas Paine, Common Sense, in Thomas Paine, Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 24.

“It is a pacific system”: Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, part 2, ibid., 508–509.

“Society is in every state a blessing”: Paine, Common Sense, 6.

Paine in time acknowledged the tension: Agrarian Justice (1787), ibid., 400–408.

“was in the minds of the people”: John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, August 25, 1815, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-08-02-0560.

“representative democracy, where the right of election”: Alexander Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris, May 19, 1777.

“the rich and the well-born”: Quoted in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), 1:299.

“the Government which this Bodie Politick”: Government of Rhode Island—March 16–19, 1641, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/ri02.asp.

In 1717, the word “democracy”: John Wise, A Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches (Boston, 1717), 57, 61.

“would still grope for terms”: Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1970), 46.

In the case of the Pennsylvania constitution: See Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 226–237; for the constitution’s influence on Brissot and Condorcet, see Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, 235–236.

Many of them began to confuse republicanism: See Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era, expanded ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 103–110.

Only a small percentage of Americans: Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 2.

“which have ever been spectacles”: James Madison, Federalist, no. 10.

“a democracy is a volcano”: Fisher Ames, speaking at the Massachusetts Convention, January 1788, in The Debate on the Constitution (New York: Library of America, 1993), part 1, 892.

“In giving a definition of the simple kinds”: James Wilson, “Remarks in Pennsylvania Convention,” in Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall, eds., Collected Works of James Wilson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 1:235.

“sent them through the city in triumph”: Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, July 19, 1789, scans of some manuscript pages available at www.archives.gov/exhibits/eyewitness/html.php?section=1.

“the earth belongs to each of these generations”: Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789, in Jefferson, Writings, 960.

When Jacques-Louis David presented his portrait of Marat: See National Gazette, December 19, 1792 (for Père Duchesne); General Advertiser, February 10, 1794 (for David and Marat); Columbian Gazetter, September 5 and 9, 1793 (for the Jacobin Constitution); General Advertiser, March 10–14, 1794, and May 2 and 3, 1794 (for Robespierre speeches). Also see Howard Mumford Jones, America and French Culture, 1750–1848 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927), 534–35n.; Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763–1797 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 350; Charles Downer Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (Baltimore, 1897), 248. A more extensive version of this section appears in James Miller, “Modern Democracy from France to America,” Salmagundi 84 (Fall 1989): 177–202.

“breathe the air of liberty”: Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution, 166–169.

“all the old spirit of 1776 is rekindling”: Jefferson to James Monroe, May 5, 1793, quoted in Eugene Perry Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 46.

“What an age of WONDERS and REVOLUTIONS!!”: “Turn-Coat” (from the Virginia Gazette), National Gazette, August 3, 1793.

“democratic” society: Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 16.

“not only to discuss the proceedings of Government”: Quoted in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 457.

To make plain their own patriotism: Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York, 411.

“the different members of the government”: Newark Gazette, December 31, 1794, quoted in Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 106.

“The government is responsible to the sovereign people”: Declaration of the New York Democratic Society, quoted in Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York, 426–427.

“Self-interest, the great moving principle”: An American Sans Culottes, “To the Freemen of America,” General Advertiser, April 3, 1794.

“We have too long been amused and misled by names”: Anon., “For the National Gazette,” National Gazette, December 12, 1792.

“I am, sir, a true Democrat”: General Advertiser, May 27, 1794.

“I pronounce them all Democrats”: Quoted in Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York, 416.

“self-created”: George Washington, Sixth Annual Message to Congress, November 19, 1794, University of Virginia, Washington Papers, Presidential Series [1788–1797].

Washington suspected radical democrats: Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 165.

“The American people came to believe”: Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, 1922), 179.

This political culture was nourished: An important point made by Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

“every thing to which a man may attach a value”: James Madison, “Private Property,” National Gazette, March 29, 1792, in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 14, ed. Robert A. Rutland (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 266.

“In America,… [every man] will with pleasure”: Anon., “Extract,” National Gazette, May 1, 1793.

because the franchise was broadened: I am paraphrasing Robert H. Wiebe, Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 68–69, who is summarizing an argument he makes more extensively in his 1995 book Self-Rule.

“all the presidents had been statesmen”: James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 1:74.

“It will not be too strong to say”: Alexander Hamilton, Federalist, no. 68.

“at the head of the Democracy”: New York journalist and editor William Leggett, quoted in Sean Wilentz, Andrew Jackson (New York: Times Books, 2005), 6.

“the democracy of numbers”: Jurist James Kent, quoted ibid.

his most indomitable political passion was hatred: Here and elsewhere I am relying on the facts marshaled in Wilentz, Andrew Jackson, 9.

“the planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer”: Jackson, Farewell Address as President, March 4, 1837, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=67087.

“democracy is the oxygen or vital air”: Vividly defending his father’s Federalist convictions two generations later, John Quincy Adams, The Social Compact, Exemplified in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with Remarks on the Theories of Divine Right of Hobbes and Filmer, and the Counter Theories of Sidney, Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau (Providence, RI, 1842), 31–32.

overall number of eligible voters: Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson, vol. 2, The Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 (New York: Harper, 1981), 147–148.

“mighty democratic uprising”: Frederick A. Ogg, The Reign of Andrew Jackson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), p. 114; “soaring turnouts”: Wiebe, Self-Rule, 180–181.

“the self made man had a right to his success”: Frederick Jackson Turner, “The West and American Ideals,” The Washington Historical Quarterly 5, no. 4 (October 1914): 251.

“Jacksonian democracy flourished”: Ibid.

Early that morning, Tocqueville and Beaumont: See George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 179ff., for these and other details about Tocqueville’s Fourth of July in Albany.

“Child of the skies”: Quoted ibid., 182n.

“A profound silence reigned in the meeting”: Quoted ibid., 183.

“more like a true religion”: Runciman, The Confidence Trap, 5.

“Christianity that can best be described”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 2004), 1:332.

“Thus, even as the law allows the American people”: Ibid., 1:338.

“can be seen to be more equal”: Ibid., 1:59.

“Democracy does not give the people”: Ibid., 1:280–281.

“the dogma of popular sovereignty”: Ibid., 1:64.

The most recent scholarly work on Dorr and his rebellion is Erik J. Chaput, The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2013); see also Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 539–545.

“As I would not be a slave”: Abraham Lincoln, “Definition of Democracy” [August 1, 1858?], in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), 2:532. Some historians wonder if Lincoln really wrote these words on the scrap of paper that contains them.

“magazine beneath the fabric of civil society”: Quoted in Christian G. Fritz, American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 263.

“Even the most conservative estimates”: Ibid., 246.

“alter and amend their system”: Jackson to Francis Blair, May 23, 1842, quoted in Chaput, The People’s Martyr, 64.

On a visit to the city: Ibid., 133.

A small-d democrat with a weakness for pageantry: Ibid., 135.

“Thomas Wilson Dorr Governor of the State of Rhode Island”: Ibid., 136.

The powder flashed: Ibid., 139.

“these barriers were expressions of the nation’s reluctance”: Keyssar, The Right to Vote, p. 67. Other historians are less nuanced, cf. Daniel Walker Howe in What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 489–490.

Many states also maintained residency requirements: This information comes from the invaluable tables compiled by Keyssar, The Right to Vote, pp. 337–402.

“The imagined demon of the black rapist”: David Blight, from the typescript of his biography of Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

an extraordinary increase in America’s prison population: Jean Chung, communications manager at the Sentencing Project, Felony Disenfranchisement: A Primer (updated January 2017), http://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Felony-Disenfranchisement-Primer.pdf, figure B, p. 3.

“Its advantages far outweigh the normative”: Arend Lijphart, “Unequal Participation: Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma,” The American Political Science Review 91, no. 1 (March 1997): 1–14.

“I see an innumerable multitude of men”: Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:816–821.

a distinctively clamorous style of public culture: See Eric Lott, Love and Theft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. 63–88.

In midcentury America, it was popular novels and public lectures: This has been argued at length by Michael Rogin and Greil Marcus, among other students of American politics and popular culture.

“the universal diffusion of knowledge”: Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 418–419.

“the herd of independent minds”: See Irving Howe, Socialism and America (San Diego: Harcourt, 1985), 134–135. Cf. Harold Rosenberg, “The Herd of Independent Minds: Has the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture?,” Commentary, September 1, 1948, www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-herd-of-independent-mindshas-the-avant-garde-its-own-mass-culture.

“I do not wish to expiate but to live”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 263, 262.

“a new degree of culture”: Emerson, “Circles,” ibid., 408.

“Some fetish of a government”: Emerson, “The American Scholar,” ibid., 64.

“make the gallows as glorious as the cross”: See James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1888), 2:597.

When the self-reliant Emersonian: Cf. Henry David Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 2001), 396–421.

“it is read equally in the parlor and the kitchen”: Quoted in Richardson, Emerson, 508.

his story was dramatized throughout America in minstrel shows: The staging of Uncle Tom is examined at length in Lott, Love and Theft, 211–233, and Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 45–95.

“blackface was their bohemianism”: Williams, Playing the Race Card, 68.

“We lived and moved at that time”: Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (New York: Scribner, 1913), 167–168.

“Whoever degrades another degrades me”: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1855), 29.

“In all people I see myself”: Ibid., 26.

“The people! Like our huge earth itself”: Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (New York, 1870), 18.

“We had the strangest procession here”: Letter quoted in Ed Folsom, “Textual Note,” in Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas: The Original Edition in Facsimile (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), xxix.

“I will not gloss over the appalling dangers”: Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 4.

“perfect individualism”: Ibid., 16.

4. A STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL AND SOCIAL EQUALITY

The delegates were escorting a petition: Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007), 73. David J. Moss, Thomas Attwood: The Biography of a Radical (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 284.

Each demand had been ratified: See the early accounts in William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett in his pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (London, 1876), 201–205. R. G. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement 1837–1854 (Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1894 [1854]), 105–130.

The delegates included shoemakers: See list of delegates posted on Chartist Ancestors website, www.chartists.net/conferences_and_conventions/first-convention-1839.

“Reasoning from effect to cause”: Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 9.

“No man is too poor to unite with us”: Quoted in Jennifer Bennett, “The London Democratic Association 1837–41: A Study in London Radicalism,” in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson, eds., The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–60 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 90.

“a new social order into society”: Bronterre O’Brien, “To the Reader,” in Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality (London, 1836), xv.

“the enjoyment of an equal share”: “Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf,” a text posted throughout Paris in April 1796, and reprinted as Piece No. VIII, ibid., 318.

“schoolmaster of Chartism”: Feargus O’Connor, quoted in Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 101.

When fully unfurled, the petition was three miles long: Chase, Chartism, 73.

“We perform the duties of freemen”: Text of the first Chartist Petition, Chartist Ancestors website, www.chartists.net/petitions/first-chartist-petition-1839.

“It appeared to have the circumference”: The Examiner, June 16, 1839.

“loud laughter”: Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 138.

“that it might please their honourable House”: Hansard, HC Deb 14 June 1839 vol. 48 cc222–7.

For many Chartists, temperance: Ulterior measures ratified in 1839, Chartist Ancestors website, www.chartists.net/conferences_and_conventions/first-convention-1839.

The prominent Whig and future Liberal Party leader: Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 141.

“I owe the British Government no allegiance”: The Northern Star (August 3, 1839): 7.

Between January 1839 and June 1840: Eileen Yeo, “Some Practices and Problems of Chartist Democracy,” in Epstein and Thompson, The Chartist Experience, 361.

a banquet held on September 22, 1845: A. R. Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge: A Portrait of George Julian Harney (London: Heinemann, 1958), 135.

Like Blanqui, Schapper fancied secret societies: The British utopian socialist John Goodwyn Barmby, who knew of Babeuf and was familiar with other early French proponents of communism as well, claimed credit for popularizing the English word in these years. In 1841, he founded the London Communist Propaganda Society, which he later turned into a church.

“governments elected by, and responsible to, the entire people”: The Northern Star (September 26, 1846): 7.

“a still barely moving yet faintly stirring”: Gareth Stedman Jones, “The Redemptive Power of Violence? Carlyle, Marx and Dickens,” History Workshop Journal 65, no. 1 (2008): 1–22.

“democracy is the solved riddle”: Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works [hereafter M/ECW], 50 vols. (Moscow, 1975–2004; in English), 3:29.

“egoistic, independent individuals”: Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” ibid., 3:168.

“In order to bring true democracy to life”: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1950), 236.

the coming violent conflict: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, chap. 1, “Bourgeois and Proletariats.”

“Robespierre saw in great poverty”: Karl Marx, “Critical Notes on ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform,’” in M/ECW, 3:199.

“where the proper aim and spirit”: Ibid., 3:205.

As his friend and frequent collaborator: Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, part 3, chap. 2, in M/ECW, 25:268. (In this English translation, the famous phrase “withering away” withers away, even though it remains in the index: “The state is not abolished. It dies out.”)

“achieved the result of structuring”: Marcel Gauchet, “Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the Genesis of Democratic Societies,” trans. Jacob Hamburger, The Tocqueville Review 37, no. 2 (2016): 180, 184.

“the democratic tendency of our times”: Mazzini, “Thoughts Upon Democracy in Europe,” in Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini (London, 1891), 6:98.

“The law of God has not two weights”: Ibid., 6:100–101.

“Rome of the People”: Bolton King, Mazzini (New York: Dutton, 1902), 127.

inseparable from explicitly national movements: See Pierre Manent, “Populist Demagogy and the Fanaticism of the Center,” American Affairs 1, no. 2 (May 20, 2017), https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/populist-demagogy-and-the-fanaticism-of-the-center.

Mazzini also hoped that a democratic revolt: The standard biography in English is Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

“to have more love, more feeling for the beautiful”: Mazzini, “Thoughts Upon Democracy in Europe,” 109.

“the mere liberty of all”: Ibid., 115.

“Women were the first to act”: Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, chap. 3, “The 18th of March.” First published in French in Paris in 1876 and translated into English by Eleanor Marx (one of Karl Marx’s daughters) in 1886.

Barricades of cobblestones sprang up: See John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 30. Despite his sympathy for the Communards, Merriman presents a vivid and trustworthy account. See also Frank Jellinek, The Paris Commune of 1871 (London: Gollancz, 1937), a more orthodox Marxist chronicle.

“One returns from such exaltations”: Louis Barron, Sous le drapeau rouge (Paris, 1889), 112.

Only about half of the electorate turned out: Merriman, Massacre, 38.

“citizen delegate to the Ministry of War”: Ibid., 42.

The Commune gloried in such purely symbolic gestures: Ibid., 52.

If any one figure could be said to typify: Jules Forni, Raoul Rigault, Procureur de la Commune (Paris, 1871).

“I am going to have you shot!”: Merriman, Massacre, xxii–xxv. Details about Rigault come from Forni’s biography and Merriman’s book.

“We are not dispensing justice”: Merriman, Massacre, 60.

“officer shot him with a pistol”: George B. Benham, The Proletarian Revolt: A History of the Paris Commune of 1871 (San Francisco, 1898), 152. A work written from a frankly Marxist perspective and featuring an epigraph on the title page from Rigault: “War is immoral, yet we fight.”

“supplied the Republic with the basis”: Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in M/ECW, 22:34.

“a new era in that long series of revolutions”: Pyotr Kropotkin, “The Paris Commune,” first published in Le Révolté, March 20, 1880.

“The Chartist movement in Britain ended in defeat”: Rosa Luxemburg, “Order Prevails in Germany,” Rote Fahne, January 14, 1919.

“totalitarian democracy”: See J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1960). Though ignored in Talmon’s account (which focuses on the French Revolution, not the Commune of 1871), Rigault perfectly embodies the political type Talmon describes.

“one of real democracy’s most important elements”: Hans Kelsen, The Essence and Value of Democracy, trans. Brian Graf (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 38 (emphasis added).

“The victories of the ballot box, no less than of the sword”: James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995 [1910]), 2:749.

recent research suggests: Daniel Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

“nothing beyond the old democratic litany”: Karl Marx, “Marginal Notes on the Program of the German Workers’ Party” (1875), in M/ECW, 24:95; posthumously published by Engels in 1890 as Critique of the Gotha Program.

“Gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship”: Friedrich Engels, Introduction, dated March 18, 1891, to the German republication of Marx’s Civil War in France, in M/ECW, 27:191.

“A neatly structured hierarchy of professional politicians”: Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 116.

Eduard Bernstein’s 1899 The Preconditions of Socialism: Eduard Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie, translated into English in 1909 as Evolutionary Socialism.

Bernstein’s heresy was swiftly reproved: The classic account of this schism remains Schorske’s German Social Democracy.

“the old democratic litany”: Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, chap. 7, “Co-operatives, Unions, Democracy.”

“a classic example of a momentous historical event”: Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988), 211.

“Neither gas nor electric lights work”: Ibid., 215. Cf. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking, 1997), 189–192.

“this people which produces everything”: Quoted in Wilfrid Harris Crook, “The General Strike,” in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 6:608.

some other advocates of the democratic control of industry: See Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. J. Roth and T. E. Hulme (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950 [1915]; originally published in French in Paris in 1910), chap. 5, “The Political General Strike,” §1. (In Sorel’s view, the Russian strike of 1905 was neither sufficiently violent nor authentically “proletarian” but merely a political simulacrum of a genuine myth-inspiring general strike—never underestimate the capacity of French philosophers to make a hash of historical reality.)

On October 17, the new group met: Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905–1921, trans. Ruth Hein (New York: Pantheon, 1974; originally published in German in Leiden in 1958), 43–47; cf. Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 219–222.

“to grant the population the unshakable foundations”: Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 199.

“We were certain in our hearts”: Quoted ibid., 199.

“the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party must be organized”: Michael Waller, Democratic Centralism: An Historical Commentary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 20.

“The principle of democratic centralism is beyond dispute”: Ibid., 21.

a party congress held in Jena: Schorske, German Social Democracy, 43.

“the living picture of a genuine movement”: Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions, chap. 6, “Cooperation of Organized and Unorganized Workers Necessary for Victory.” Cf. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 55–58 (I am using Schorske’s translation of Luxemburg here).

“The feeble embryo of the general strike”: Robert Michels, “Le Socialisme allemande après Mannheim,” Mouvement socialiste: Revue de critique social, littéraire et artistique 182 (January 1907): 6.

“the iron law of oligarchy”: The full title of the 1911 book (in part, a pastiche of the monographs) was Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie; Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens (The Sociology of Party Systems in Modern Democracy; Inquiry into the Oligarchic Tendency of Life in Groups), translated into English in 1915 as Political Parties.

he joined the Partito Socialista Italiano: See Arthur Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement (New York: Knopf, 1973), 267–338, for a brief biography of Michels until World War I; and David Beetham, “From Socialism to Fascism: The Relation Between Theory and Practice in the Work of Robert Michels,” Political Studies 25, no. 1 (March 1977): 3–24.

In this highly speculative work: Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus,” first published in 1904–1905 in two parts in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, vols. 20 and 21, and then published as a book in 1920. In the final paragraphs, Weber alludes explicitly to Nietzsche’s “Last Man” as an outcome of the developments he has traced (a reference expunged in the English translation), and refers to a civilization of “mechanisierte Versteinerung.” See Max Weber, Schriften 1894–1922, ed. Dirk Kaesler (Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag, 2002), 225.

He encouraged Michels to document the situation: See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 87–105; and Lawrence A. Scaff, “Max Weber and Robert Michels,” American Journal of Sociology 86, no. 6 (May 1981): 1269–1286.

Weber disagreed: Max Weber to Robert Michels, August 4, 1908, Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Turin. Max Weber, “Briefe 1906–1908,” ed. M. Rainer Lepsius and Wolfgang J. Mommsen, in Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, 2:615–616.

Weber himself would subsequently rethink his own views: Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 268–269, 984–985, 1132–1133. Cf. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), esp. 72–94.

The radical democrats of the SPD: Cf. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 50, summarizing why Karl Kautsky in 1906 thought that the members of the trade unions should be subordinated to the strategy propounded by the party leaders, who understood, and would promote, a “total struggle for the liberation of the proletariat,” unlike the rank and file, who were compromised and corrupted by their short-term interest in winning material gains.

like many other anarcho-syndicalists: Roberto Michels, First Lectures in Political Sociology, trans. Alfred de Grazia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1949 [1927]), 121.

In his lectures in the 1920s on political sociology: Ibid., 123.

“the Fascist State”: Giovanni Gentile, “The Philosophic Basis of Fascism,” Foreign Affairs 6, no. 2 (1928): 302 (emphasis added).

“revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”: the title of a 1905 pamphlet by Lenin.

“The democratic currents of history”: Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 371.

5. A HALL OF MIRRORS

“The world must be made safe for democracy”: Woodrow Wilson, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War Against Germany,” April 2, 1917, the American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=65366; “Must Exert All Our Power; To Bring a ‘Government That Is Running Amuck to Terms.’ Wants Liberal Credits and Universal Service, for ‘the World Must Be Made Safe for Democracy.’ A Tumultuous Greeting Congress Adjourns After ‘State of War’ Resolution Is Introduced—Acts Today,” The New York Times (April 3, 1917): 1.

Wilson was astonishingly consistent: On this key point, I agree with the interpretation of Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Born into an extended family of Presbyterian ministers: All biographical details are drawn from John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2009), the first major work able to draw on all sixty-nine volumes of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966–1994).

“Democracy … is, of course, wrongly conceived”: Woodrow Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” c. December 1–20, 1885, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 5:63.

“Starting, as from one terminus of history”: Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (London, 1861), 169.

Karl Marx, for example, attacked Maine’s account: See, e.g., The Ethnographical Notebooks of Karl Marx, ed. Lawrence Krader (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1974).

“to answer Sir Henry Maine’s ‘Popular Government’”: Woodrow Wilson to Horace Elisha Scudder, May [12], 1886, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 5:218.

“Democracy in Europe,” he explains: Ibid., 5:69–70. In effect, Wilson puts America at the end of history, as Hegel put Prussia in his Philosophy of Right, and Marx put communism in his Manifesto.

“It had not to overthrow other polities”: Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” Ibid., 5:67.

Democracy “in its most modern sense”: Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 5:70.

“practical political education is everywhere spreading”: Ibid., 5:74.

this “sovereignty is of a peculiar sort”: Ibid., 5:75 (emphasis added).

“the many led by the few”: Ibid., 5:83.

Enlightened leaders in Congress: Ibid., 5:70.

This is the main reason an American conservative: The subtitle of a blog post on Wilson by Tony Listi, May 29, 2008, on the website Conservative Colloquium, https://conservativecolloquium.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/woodrow-wilson-americas-worst-and-first-fascist-president/. A similar but more nuanced case is elegantly laid out against Wilson by the Straussian scholar Ronald Pestritto, in Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism.

“should be used not to destroy representative government”: Theodore Roosevelt, A Charter of Democracy: Address by Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, ex-President of the United States, Before the Ohio Constitutional Convention on February 21, 1912 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912), 9.

“an industrial and social democracy”: Eugene Debs, “Debs’ Speech of Acceptance” (of Socialist Party presidential nomination), International Socialist Review 13, no. 4 (October 1912): 307.

“born under other flags but welcomed”: Woodrow Wilson, Third Annual Message to Congress, December 7, 1915, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29556.

“And so the modern age began”: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 98–99.

As a young scholar, Wilson had argued: Woodrow Wilson, “Leaders of Men,” The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 6:646–671.

“They are conscious of being represented by him”: Woodrow Wilson, “The Democratic State,” The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 5:87.

“every door is open”: Woodrow Wilson, “Address Accepting the Lincoln Homestead at Hodgenville, Kentucky,” September 4, 1916 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1916), 3.

“a process that has no endpoint”: Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 310.

For the first time, political banners appeared: Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 310.

“warnings not to assemble were disregarded”: The Times (London), (Friday, March 16, 1917): 7.

“the revolution found us, the party members”: Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 323.

“We are sorry for you…”: The Times (London) (March 16, 1917): 7.

“disorderly groups of grey greatcoats”: N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record, ed. Joel Carmichael (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 34.

The Executive Committee of the Petrograd soviet quickly emerged: Ibid., 38–39. Anweiler, The Soviets, 104.

“In order to conclude successfully the struggle for democracy”: Anweiler, The Soviets, 105.

“The worst of the fighting took place in the vestibule”: Stinton Jones, Russia in Revolution: Being the Experiences of an Englishman in Petrograd During the Upheaval (London: H. Jenkins, 1917), 165.

“To me it seemed, on the contrary, self-evident”: Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 95–96.

From the start, the Petrograd soviet’s Executive Committee: Anweiler, The Soviets, 105. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 359.

the soviets themselves, like the Parisian sections: Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 326.

The soviet’s voting procedures: Ibid., 325.

The deputies debated in front of a standing-room-only crowd: Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990), 289–293.

“A man of astounding strength of will”: Maxim Gorky, Days with Lenin, trans. Harry Gould (Bombay: People’s Publishing House, 1944), “Lenin’s Qualities,” 34.

“The party of the proletariat cannot rest content”: V. I. Lenin, “Draft of Revised Program,” Collected Works, 45 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960–1970; in English, translation approved by CPSU), 24:471 (emphasis added).

“the Russian soviet movement”: Anweiler, The Soviets, 112–113.

In one of his first official acts: V. I. Lenin, “Decree on Peace,” in Collected Works, 26:249. On the Wilsonian flourishes, see Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1913–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 148–149.

Wilson responded in kind: Woodrow Wilson, “President Wilson’s Fourteen Points,” delivered to a joint session of Congress, January 8, 1918, World War I Document Archive, https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/President_Wilson’s_Fourteen_Points.

When the Japanese mustered majority support: The language of the Japanese resolution shelved by Wilson: “The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to all alien nationals of States members of the League equal and just treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.” See Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 70.

But for Woodrow Wilson, it was also: Ibid., 64.

the Dutch astronomer and labor activist: Anton Pannekoek, “Massenaktion und Revolution,” Die Neue Zeit 30, no. 2 (1912).

Since everyone in such a society had an interest: G.D.H. Cole, Guild Socialism Restated (London: Leonard Parsons, 1920), 33–34.

“The trouble with socialism” is generally attributed to Wilde, though I can find no written evidence he ever said any such thing.

Cole took it for granted: Cole, Guild Socialism Restated, 13.

“For democracy in industry”: Ibid., 115–116.

“man is not interested enough to vote”: G.D.H. Cole, Social Theory (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1920), 115–116.

When news of the Petrograd uprising of February 1917: Margaret Cole, The Life of G.D.H. Cole (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971), 121.

Wallas arguably had the best mind: This is the judgment of Eric Hobsbawm, “The Lesser Fabians,” pamphlet No. 28 of Our History, published quarterly by the Communist Party History Group (London, 1962), 8, http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/shs/pdf/28%20less%20fabians.pdf.

“I know of no better way than democracy”: Wallas to Shaw, cited in M. J. Wiener, Between Two Worlds: The Political Thought of Graham Wallas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 141.

“the first time that democracy had been discussed”: Harold J. Laski, “Graham Wallas: Address Given at the London School of Economics and Political Science, October 19th, 1932,” Economica 38 (November 1932): 405.

“The political opinions of most men”: Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 103.

But despite acknowledging that the democratic movement: Ibid., 199, 240.

“Socialism stands or falls by its fruits in practice”: Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 27–28.

In an essay published in the International: Walter Lippmann, “Political Notes,” International, May 1912.

“brighten the coinage”: Herbert Croly, quoted in Steel, Walter Lippmann, 88.

“the prelude to quarrels”: Unsigned editorial, written by Lippmann, The New Republic, May 17, 1919.

“the news about Russia”: Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, “A Test of the News,” published as a stand-alone forty-two-page monograph in The New Republic (August 4, 1920): 3.

“the reliability of the news is the premise”: Ibid., 4.

“all the testimony is uncertain”: Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (New York: Harcourt, 1920), 55.

“establishment of more or less semi-official institutes”: Ibid., 91.

Building on the work of Graham Wallas: Research summarized in Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

“government by popular opinion”: Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 5:70.

What follows suggests that the great majority: See Lippmann, Public Opinion, 36.

“approach a condition in which everyone”: Condorcet, “The Sketch” (Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, 1794), in Political Writings, ed. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 126.

“looked at a complicated civilization”: Lippmann, Public Opinion, 173.

“a self-centered opinion into a social judgment”: Ibid., 194.

“presupposes an unceasing, untiring round”: Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 28.

“The individual man does not have opinions”: Ibid., 195.

“into clearer relief than any other writer”: John Dewey, “Public Opinion,” The New Republic (May 3, 1922): 288.

“The next religious prophet”: John Dewey, “The Relation of Philosophy to Theology,” Monthly Bulletin (of the Students’ Christian Association of the University of Michigan) 16 (January 1893): 66–68. The quote comes from a Q and A with the audience; see John Dewey, The Early Works, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 4:367.

“a form of moral and spiritual association”: John Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy” (1888), ibid., 1:248–249.

In 1893, at a time when Woodrow Wilson: John Dewey, “Renan’s Loss of Faith in Science” (1893), ibid., 4:17.

“We lie, as Emerson said”: John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1927), 219.

Born in Vienna in 1892, Bernays: For biographical details, see Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965); cf. Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Crown, 1998).

Sensing an opportunity to promote public relations: Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923); cf. Lippmann, Public Opinion, 19, 140–141.

Since Lippmann had in fact criticized: See Lippmann, Public Opinion, 218: “The picture which the publicity man makes for the reporters is the one he wishes the public to see. He is censor and propagandist, responsible only to his employers, and to the whole truth responsible only as it accords with the employers’ conception of his own interests.” See also Sue Curry Jansen, “Semantic Tyranny: How Edward L. Bernays Stole Walter Lippmann’s Mojo and Got Away with It and Why It Still Matters,” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013): 1094–1111. Despite its cute title, it’s a very fine piece of scholarship.

To paraphrase Lippmann: Cf. Lippmann and Merz, “A Test of the News,” 3.

Taking as his premise Lippmann’s observations: Cf. Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Liveright, 1928), where this argument is explicit.

“The average citizen”: Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 133.

“there is a different set of facts”: Ibid., 201–202, referring to the famous dissent of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in Abrams v. United States (1919).

“the mirrors of the public mind”: Ibid., 113.

“under the impact of propaganda”: Lippmann, Public Opinion, 158.

Since the nineteenth century, American newspapers: For the straw vote tradition, see Jean M. Converse, Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence, 1890–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 116–120.

By winning this bet, Gallup helped launch: For Gallup, see ibid., 114–127.

what “the common man is thinking”: George Gallup and Saul Forbes Rae, The Pulse of Democracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940), v.

“if the will of the majority of citizens”: James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995 [1888]), 2:919.

“to the extent that polls also are accurate”: American Association for Public Opinion Research, “AAPOR’s Statement on 2012 Presidential Election Polling,” www.aapor.org/Communications/Press-Releases/AAPOR-s-Statement-on-2012-Presidential-Election-Po.aspx.

The more refined such data: For a recent discussion of this problem, see Cass Sunstein, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

“were increasingly listening to what people”: James W. Beniger, “Comment on Charles Tilly,” Public Opinion Quarterly 47, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 481–482.

“What we are confronted with”: Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, p. 263 (quoting from the third edition; the first edition appeared in 1942, the second in 1947).

“view that the role of the people is to produce a government”: Ibid., 269.

“democracy is the rule of the politician”: Ibid., 285.

In the United States, it entailed a dramatic increase: Moynihan, Secrecy.

“socialist democracy may eventually turn out to be”: Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 302.

After some hesitation, and with compromising caveats: Mazower, No Enchanted Palace.

One result was the active involvement: See Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).

Article 21 of the Declaration: See ibid., 312-313. As Glendon points out (ibid., 155), section 3 of article 21 was a crucial (and controversial) passage, added to specify the actionable content of the right to participate in government.

“a world in which faith, deference”: Dunn, Democracy, 184.

in the decades since the ratification: See Condoleezza Rice, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (New York: Twelve, 2017).

It has seen the election of demagogues: See Müller, What Is Populism?

Under these circumstances, it’s perhaps not surprising: See Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), and Krastev, Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest.

CODA: WHO ARE WE?

“Grab ’em by the pussy”: “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women,” The New York Times, October 8, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html?mcubz=1.

“Nobody knows the system better than me”: Donald J. Trump, acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, July 21, 2016, www.politico.com/story/2016/07/full-transcript-donald-trump-nomination-acceptance-speech-at-rnc-225974.

“This is what democracy looks like!”: Anemona Hartocollis and Yamiche Alcindor, “Women’s March Highlights as Huge Crowds Protest Trump: ‘We’re Not Going Away,’” The New York Times, January 21, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/us/womens-march.html?mcubz=1.

“Who was sovereign?”: Steve Bannon, speaking at the victory party for Roy Moore, a white nationalist candidate in the Alabama Republican Senate Primary, on September 28, 2017. Alex Isenstadt, “Moore’s win spells trouble for GOP establishment in 2018: The insurgent’s victory in Alabama is likely to fuel other primary challenges in a year that was supposed to be kind to the GOP,” Politico, September 27, 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/09/27/alabama-republicans-moore-midterms-strange-243188.

“Men fight and lose”: William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, a novel first published in 1888.

“ideological consensus”: Huntington, American Politics, 11.

“What the Marxists mistakenly attribute”: Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy, 73.

“a democratic distemper”: Ibid., 102.

“expertise, seniority, experience, and special talents”: Ibid., 113.

“there never was a democracy yet”: John Adams to John Taylor, December 17, 1814, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6371. Cf. Andrew Sullivan, “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic,” New York, May 2, 2016, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html.

He descended from old Yankee stock: Robert D. Putnam, “Samuel P. Huntington: An Appreciation,” PS 19, no. 4 (Autumn 1986): 837.

He was just the kind of learned expert: My account of Huntington, whom I never met, is colored by the years I spent working at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 2000 to 2008 as the editor of that august honorific society’s flagship journal Daedalus. In the course of doing my job, I came to see from the inside—especially with the sympathetic mentorship of Daniel Bell, who was still intellectually active in the Academy in those days—how the country’s self-selected intellectual ruling class understood itself and its political obligations and prerogatives.

“hierarchy, coercion, secrecy and deception”: Huntington, in Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy, 93.

“nuclear brinksmanship”: Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Cf. Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Knopf, 1982).

A lifelong supporter of America’s Democratic Party: Robert D. Kaplan, “Looking the World in the Eye,” The Atlantic, December 2001. This sensitive profile of Huntington, along with the appreciation of Robert Putnam cited above, is my source for the biographical details that follow.

It is worth noting that Niebuhr’s 1944 maxim: Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Scribner, 1944), xxxvi.

“average men succeeding”: Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 51, 464–465. Putnam, “Samuel P. Huntington: An Appreciation,” 840.

“hopeful air of unreality”: Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 35.

as declassified documents subsequently revealed: Andrew J. Gawthorpe, “‘Mad Dog?’ Samuel Huntington and the Vietnam War,” Journal of Strategic Studies, December 20, 2016, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2016.1265510.

“Men may have order without liberty”: Huntington, Political Order, 7–8.

“‘Does anybody govern?’”: Samuel P. Huntington, “The Democratic Distemper,” The Public Interest 41 (Fall 1975): 23.

“A multicultural world is unavoidable”: Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 318.

“One very plausible reaction”: Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 310.

“which involved the enslavement”: Samuel P. Huntington, Letter to the Editor, Harvard Crimson, March 19, 2004.

“Can a people remain a people”: Ibid.

the Occupy Wall Street movement: The account that follows is based on my own observations of Occupy Wall Street in the fall of 2011, and is drawn in part from an essay published shortly after under the title “Is Democracy Still in the Streets?,” in Janet Byrne, ed., The Occupy Handbook (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2012).

Samuel Huntington had identified “three waves” of global democratization: Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

other scholars have suggested a “fourth wave”: Joshua Kurlantzick, Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 51.

“the power of organizing without organization”: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

one of the most radical forms of direct democracy conceivable: For the instituting of participatory democracy within OWS, see David Graeber, “Enacting the Impossible: On Consensus Decision Making,” The Occupied Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2011; Drake Bennett, “David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street,” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 26, 2011; and Jeff Sharlet, “Inside Occupy Wall Street,” Rolling Stone, November 10, 2011. For an invaluable survey of some of the movement’s participants (based, unfortunately, on a survey conducted on May 1, 2012, months after the movement’s glory days in the fall of 2011), see Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis, Changing the Subject: A Bottom-Up Account of Occupy Wall Street in New York City (New York: Murphy Institute, 2013).

“reignited hope in the possibility of a free society”: Yotam Marom, “Occupy Wall Street Is Winning, So What’s Next?” MetroFocus, October 6, 2011, www.thirteen.org/metrofocus/news/2011/10/were-winning-%E2%80%93-so-what-do-we-want.

“the incompatibility of rule by consensus”: Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets,” 326, reiterating an argument made by others, notably Jane Mansbridge in Beyond Adversary Democracy.

“for anyone who joined in the search for a democracy”: Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets,” 328.

“every person is free to do as they wish”: “Quick Guide on Group Dynamics in People’s Assemblies,” recommended on the New York City General Assembly website; available at http://takethesquare.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Quickguidetodynamicsofpeoplesassemblies_13_6_2011.pdf.

“When faced with a decision, the normal response”: Commission for Group Dynamics in Assemblies of the Puerta del Sol Protest Camp (Madrid), “Quick Guide on Group Dynamics in People’s Assemblies.”

“Prejudice and ideology must be left at home”: Ibid.

“new subjectivity”: See Marina Sitrin, “Horizontalism,” http://marinasitrin.com/?page_id=108.

“If you want to see what real democracy”: GE, “News from the Front,” 16beaver website, www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms09.23.11.htm.

“There is an energy and an amazing consensus”: DG, “Some Impressions from Saturday and Monday,” 16beaver website, www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms09.23.11.htm.

“Consensus only works if working groups”: David Graeber, “Some Remarks on Consensus,” February 26, 2013, http://occupywallst.org, and http://occupywallstreet.net/story/some-remarks-consensus.

the militancy of Occupy Oakland: The infatuation with Oakland’s Black Bloc anarchists and their tactics provoked a heated debate. See Chris Hedges, “The Cancer in Occupy,” February 6, 2012, www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206. David Graeber—the most prominent of those infatuated—responded to Hedges with an “open letter,” “Concerning the Violent Peace Police,” February 9, 2012, http://nplusonemag.com/concerning-the-violent-peace-police.

“experiences of visionary inspiration”: David Graeber, “Revolution in Reverse,” in Revolutions in Reverse: Essays in Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (London: Minor Compositions, 2011), 64.

“the law of group polarization”: Cass R. Sunstein, “The Law of Group Polarization,” John M. Olin Law & Economics Working Paper No. 91, www.law.uchicago.edu/Publications/Working/index.html.

“the most important negative liberties”: Arendt, On Revolution, 284.

Instead of single-mindedly pursuing a new form of “collective thinking”: Cf. John Gray, The Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: New Press, 2000), who has come to a similar conclusion. Analogous arguments appear in the work of William Galston, Bernard Williams, and Judith Shklar. My current views have been even more deeply shaped by the example of Montaigne, which I briefly describe in Examined Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

“democratic, federal, representative republic”: Rice, Democracy, 297.

“If democracy is broadly understood”: Ibid., 6.

“democratic recession” … “democratic disconnect”: Larry Diamond, “Facing up to the Democratic Recession,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 1 (January 2015): 141–155. Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Democratic Disconnect,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 3 (July 2016).

In 1970, Robert Dahl: See Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).

the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels: Achen and Bartels, Democracy for Realists, 8, 12.

a convincing body of empirical research: Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (September 2015): 564–581. Cf. Bartels, Unequal Democracy.

“This marked the 12th consecutive year”: Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2018, “Democracy in Crisis,” https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2018.

The Economist measures the functioning of government: Democracy Index 2017: Free Speech Under Attack, http://pages.eiu.com/Jan-18-Democracy-Index_Thank-you-page.html?aliId=55895996.

“the average levels of democracy in the world”: Democracy at Dusk? V-Dem Annual Report 2017, compiled by the V-Dem Institute, housed at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame University, www.v-dem.net/en/news-publications/annual-report, 14.

UN Human Development Index: United Nations Development Programme, Overview—Human Development Report 2016: Human Development for Everyone, http://hdr.undp.org/en/2016-report.

And the United States, which ranks “very high”: The Economist Intelligence Unit, Democracy Index 2016: Revenge of the “Deplorables,” www.eiu.com/public/thankyou_download.aspx?activity=download&campaignid=DemocracyIndex2016.

Both elections expressed a desire: The Economist’s Democracy Index 2016 is especially nuanced in its treatment of Brexit and the Trump election, unlike the Freedom House report, which criticizes populist movements as an unambiguous threat to democracies.

“We sometimes expect too little”: Estlund, Democratic Authority, 259, 269.

“men agree to share one another’s fate”: John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 102 (a passage dropped from the revised edition of 1999).

“a modern democratic state is only possible”: Lindsay, The Modern Democratic State, 261; he remarks on the rarity of common sense on 276–281.

“is chiefly the manipulation of power and public opinion”: Václav Havel, “Politics, Morals and Civility,” in Summer Meditations, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1992), 5–6.

“the idea that the world might actually be changed”: Ibid., 5.

If we abandon a virtue like truthfulness: In treating truthfulness as a virtue, I follow Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

“I am convinced that we will never build a democratic state”: Havel, “Politics, Morals and Civility,” 18.

“I feel that the dormant goodwill in people”: Ibid., 8–9.

In part, this failure has occurred because Condorcet’s constitution: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

“Censorship, the terror, and concentration camps”: Havel, “What I Believe,” in Summer Meditations, 62–63.

Through online platforms like Facebook: See Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott, Digital Deceit: The Technologies Behind Precision Propaganda on the Internet, January 23, 2018, https://www.newamerica.org/public-interest-technology/policy-papers/digitaldeceit; Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas; and Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” The New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=0. Cf. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), and Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Knopf, 2016).