Setting the people free: The story of democracy

Abstract

It is uncommon for a theoretical discussion of democracy to resonate throughout everyday political discussion. The removal of dictatorial re-gimes in Afghanistan and Iraq created a rare opportunity for political scientists to remind us of the historical thread connecting democratic theory with practice. Despite the devastation and dashed expectations of the Iraq war, in particular, one should now be able to point, at the very least, to a better and more widespread understanding of the democrati-zation process and to exactly what it is that we in the West mean when we declare a political system to be a " democracy, " or a nation to be " democratic. " Regrettably, that particular window of opportunity has al-most closed. Especially in book-length form, substantive examinations of either the meaning of democracy or the means by which democratization occurs have been noticeable by their absence. Dunn tells the astonishing story of democ-racy. It is the story of a word, the story of an idea, and the story of a range of widely varying practices associated with that idea. His quest is to answer two enormous questions. First, why does democracy loom so large today? Second, why has the state form known as modern represen-tative capitalist democracy won the competitive global struggle for wealth and power? For Dunn, " Democracy has come to be our preferred name for the sole basis on which we accept either our belonging or our de-pendence. What the term means . . . is that the people hold power and exercise rule. That was what it meant at Athens, where the claim bore some relation to the truth. That is what it means today, when it very much appears a thumping falsehood " (p. 51). Dunn holds to the view popularized by the Austrian émigré economist, Joseph Schumpeter, who CATO JOURNAL 208 maintained that electoral democracy as practiced in Western nations is, in truth, the " rule of the politician. " Modern political history, according to Dunn, has been a long, slow, resentful reconciliation to this obvious falsehood, " a process within which democracy has often proved a far from preferred term for political identification " (p. 51). In Dunn's words, his story of democracy sets out to explain the extraordinary presence of democracy in to-day's world. It shows how it began as an improvised remedy for a very local Greek difficulty two and a half thousand years ago, flour-ished briefly but scintillatingly, and then faded away almost every-where for all but two thousand years. It tells how it came back to life as a real modern political option, explaining why it first did so, under another name, in the struggle for American independence and with the founding of the new American republic. It shows how it then returned, almost immediately and under its own name, if far more erratically, amid the struggles of France's Revolution. It reg-isters its slow but insistent rise over the next century and a half, and its overwhelming triumph in the years since 1945 . . . Within the last three-quarters of a century democracy has become the political core of the civilization which the West offers to the rest of the world. Now, as never before, we need to understand what that core really is. As do those to whom we make that offer [pp. 13–14].