This book focuses on political deterioration and crisis, so it is not altogether cheerful. The process of writing it, however, has been much happier—despite the frustrations of the daily news and the need to eliminate large sections, whole chapters, and favorite sentences to keep the length manageable. We must acknowledge first the enormous value of friendship.
The idea for the book was born when the three of us presented interestingly intersecting papers at a conference organized by Shalini Randeria at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at Geneva’s International Graduate Institute at the end of 2017. We were in the midst of a “populist” political wave headlined by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. This included European rightists from Viktor Orbán to Marine Le Pen and “left” populists in Greece and Spain. Farther afield, populism tangled with democracy in India’s election of Narendra Modi, lip service to democracy in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and anti-democracy in Xi Jinping’s China.
We initially planned a shorter, quicker, and more abstract volume consisting of the three original papers. As we talked with each other and as we worked, our understanding grew deeper and the book longer. We tried to attend to more actual cases, at least in the world’s established democracies. The book grew longer and less finished. Eventually, we reached the compromise of looking at the general and more global issues largely through consideration of the United States, with some attention to Canada and Europe (and Britain if it still counts as Europe) more sustained comparison to India. Our delay meant the book could not appear before the 2020 US presidential election, as we once hoped. Predictably, the issues remain current.
We have discussed every aspect of the book together, learning from each other, debating, being surprised sometimes by our agreements and sometimes by what we saw differently. We come from different countries and different academic disciplines. We share a great deal, but not everything (appropriately enough for a book on democracy).
We have maintained and acknowledged our distinct voices. All chapters emerged from dialogue, however, and in many cases have been improved by questions from other members of the authorial team. While it is necessary to bring any book to an end, we hope these conversations and collaborations will continue. And it is fitting for a book on democracy that there seems always so much more work to do.
Like all authors, we have received intellectual gifts and incurred debts while writing. Our slower than anticipated progress gave us the chance to accumulate more. After the Geneva event that set this project in motion, we made similar intersecting presentations at conferences organized by Claudio Lomnitz at Centro de Investigacón y Docencia Económica (CIDE), Mexico City, in 2018; by Nilufer Gole of PublicDemos Project at EHESS, Paris, in 2019; and by Dilip Gaonkar and Shalini Randeria at Institute für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna, in 2019. We have also rehearsed these ideas and arguments at numerous conferences and workshops organized by the Democratic Agendas Network sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC) at Northwestern University for the last four years. We have also spoken individually at too many symposia to mention, learning from the questions and criticisms of many colleagues. We are grateful to all the organizers and the attentive audiences they assembled.
Our friendship and collaboration have been nurtured by the Center for Transcultural Studies. Founded nearly fifty years ago in Chicago by the late (and wonderful) Bernard Weissbourd, the center is no longer a place. It is a network of far-flung participants in conversations about the transformations of culture, society, and politics. Since the 1980s, the center has been literally central to our intellectual growth and efforts to think through challenging public questions. It reminds us that our individual achievements—such as they may be—are possible only in social relationships.
We are grateful to too many other members of the center network to list them all. Jianying Zha, Ben Lee, and Michael Warner were particularly influential as we developed this project. Our partners, Pamela DeLargy, Sally Ewing, and Aube Billard, have been drawn into this network and these discussions. They are indispensable to our lives as well as to our thinking.
Liam Mayes provided sustained research and editorial support. Elizabeth Whiteman provided further valuable editorial suggestions. Dale Whittington and Boris Vormann read and offered helpful suggestions on a draft manuscript. We have also benefited from the supportive management of the editorial process by Ian Malcolm, Lindsay Waters and anonymous copyeditors and proofreaders at Harvard University Press.