PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TO THE SECOND EDITION

THIS BOOK TELLS A STORY about the past. It also sets out an argument about the present and the future. Since Setting the People Free first appeared in 2005 that argument has risen sharply in urgency, but, for all that has happened across the world in the years in between, the past itself can scarcely have altered. Since this is how I see democracy’s history, I do not believe that its political implications can have changed either. What has changed and changed unmistakably is the immediate relevance and political force of those implications.

The core of my argument (what I believe this book to show) is that we have come to see what democracy is in quite the wrong way, and we think and feel about it accordingly in terms which are gratuitously confused and deeply imprudent. We have done so principally through (and hence in part because of) the history of a word and through the equivocations that history has made possible and come to licence. Once we have identified those equivocations, it may seem odd that anyone could still be confused by them; but when we register properly how the confusions arose, the oddity dissipates. Set against the history of the word, the equivocations are relatively recent. None goes back further than three centuries, whilst the word itself is well over two millennia older.

The political argument is quite simple. It is that it is a mistake to place any degree of trust in the category of democracy itself and at best an indiscretion to do so in any institutional features to which the term has come to be standardly applied. The level of indiscretion varies with the application we consider, but throughout those fluctuations it is sufficient to ensure that it will still be appropriate to ask just how much trust there is good reason to place in each application, and never wise in your own case to assume that you have better reason to do so than you have to place it in the goodwill or acumen of a clear majority of your fellow citizens.

What has made our pervasive misunderstanding of democracy so indiscreet is the cumulatively hypnotic effect of these equivocations. Over the past two centuries the populations of the West have come to hear this word as a name in several distinct and rationally incompatible ways. We hear it as a moral claim on the compliance and allegiance of individuals, as a supposedly clear idea about how alone political power can be authorized, or directed reliably for the better, and as a descriptive label for a particular kind of political regime. None of these judgments is fully warranted and the conjunction of them all is plainly absurd, but since each is now in some measure a rival to all the others, their endless conflict has become deeply inimical to political comprehension.

Democracy has long been recognized as a prime example of what the philosopher Bryce Gallie in the 1950s christened an essentially contested concept.1 Any concept with real political potency provokes and expresses acute conflict. Democracy by now provokes and expresses wider and more acute conflict than any other in the history of human speech. The time has come to recognize that outcome, acknowledge it frankly, and cease to ask democracy to carry so much of the burden of political understanding. Democracy is not in itself a clear political idea. It is not a valid title to the political compliance or allegiance of anyone. More important still, it is not a stable and descriptively clear or accurate name for any form of modern state. You can use it yourself to express clear political ideas, to develop better or worse grounds for political compliance or allegiance, or even to label some particular range of modern states in contrast to others. What you cannot in principle do is validate any political judgment of your own by so doing, and you will necessarily confuse yourself or deceive others if you merge any two of these uses.

It is an interesting question quite why we have come to confuse ourselves so thoroughly and so consequentially through this of all words. I have written further in the meantime about how and why we have done so in Breaking Democracy’s Spell.2 But this book, as it initially stood, simply tells the story of how we positioned ourselves for the opportunity to do so. What has happened since gives some indication of quite how precarious that outcome always was.

The title I chose for it was intended to carry a degree of irony and evoke both the exhilaration of that adoption and the disappointments it was always certain to foment. I did not then expect the fragility of the political construct within which we now live in the West to become so prominent quite so quickly. Now that it has, I hope the book will help others to make better sense of a devastating sequence of political experience. The original edition had an ending, but it did not have a conclusion. The conclusion it carries here draws amply on the benefits of hindsight, but I hope it also makes it easier to read what was there already in a more alert and politically intelligent way. I very much meant it as a story, but I thought of it not as a chronicle which breaks off oddly early but as a fable which happens to be true, and one which still assuredly applies to those of us who live in the West. It is for those who live elsewhere to judge how far it applies to them too.

In this new guise I would especially like to thank Toby Mundy for his continued and effective championship, and Ben Tate and his colleagues at Princeton University Press, especially Anita O’Brien, for their skilled and gracious aid in bringing it back to life.

I owe as much as ever in thinking it through to colleagues and friends across the world who have encouraged and chastened my continuing efforts to grasp what democracy has come to mean: above all Richard Bourke, Jude Browne, Quentin Skinner, Raymond Geuss, Ian Harris, James Alexander, Gulsen Seven, Tim Stanton, Ian Shapiro, Cynthia Farrar, Adam Przeworski, Han Sang-Jin, Takeshi Kato, I-Chung Chen, and Mon-Han Tsai, and far further back to Robert Bolt, Moses Finley, and Istvan Hont, all still so potently alive for me through what they taught me to look for and see so long ago.