Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World

by James Miller

Overview

"Of all the books on democracy in recent years one of the best is James Miller’s Can Democracy Work? . . . Miller provides an intelligent journey through the turbulent past of this great human experiment in whether we can actually govern ourselves." —David Blight, The Guardian

A new history of the world’s most embattled idea

Today, democracy is the world’s only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In Can Democracy Work? James Miller, the author of the classic history of 1960s protest Democracy Is in the Streets, offers a lively, surprising, and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present. As he shows, democracy has always been rife with inner tensions. The ancient Greeks preferred to choose leaders by lottery and regarded elections as inherently corrupt and undemocratic. The French revolutionaries sought to incarnate the popular will, but many of them came to see the people as the enemy. And in the United States, the franchise would be extended to some even as it was taken from others. Amid the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, communists, liberals, and nationalists all sought to claim the ideals of democracy for themselves—even as they manifestly failed to realize them.

Ranging from the theaters of Athens to the tents of Occupy Wall Street, Can Democracy Work? is an entertaining and insightful guide to our most cherished—and vexed—ideal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250234674
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	09/10/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

James Miller is a professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche; Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947–1977; and Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

PRELUDE: WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? 3
The riddle posed, and some answers explored, in five historical essays

ONE. A CLOSED COMMUNITY OF SELF-GOVERNING CITIZENS 19
The strangeness of Greek democracy ||| Solon sets Athens on a path toward aristocratic self-rule ||| the Athenian uprising of 508 B.C. ||| Cleisthenes extends political power to ordinary citizens ||| the use of political lotteries, rather than elections, to select officers in Athens ||| the first appearance of the word demokratia ||| excluding others: Athenian autochthony ||| Pericles as exemplary demagogue ||| Thucydides describes the Athenian democracy at war ||| Plato’s critique of democracy: knowledge vs. opinion ||| the resilience of Athenian democracy, and Hannah Arendt’s idealized view of it ||| how Athenian democracy actually worked in the fourth century B.C. ||| classical democracy in decay and eclipse ||| the sublime value of unity, and the martial virtues as constitutive of the ideal democratic citizen

TWO. A REVOLUTIONARY ASSERTION OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY 53
Radical democrats seize power in Paris ||| Republican thought, from Polybius to Rousseau ||| the French Revolution, from the fall of the Bastille to the fall of the monarchy ||| the journée of August 10, 1792 ||| a carnival of atrocities ||| first calls for a democratic constitution ||| Condorcet in the French Convention ||| drafting the world’s first democratic constitution ||| Robespierre, Marat, and the debate over Condorcet’s democratic constitution ||| the Terror, and fresh doubts about the wisdom of direct democracy ||| the appearance of a new idea, “representative democracy” ||| the retreat of democratic ideals in France ||| the human toll

THREE. A COMMERCIAL REPUBLIC OF FREE INDIVIDUALS 91
American distrust of popular passions; the tempering influence of commerce in eighteenth-century America ||| 1776: Thomas Paine, Common Sense, and the Declaration of Independence ||| the ambiguous place of democracy in America during the revolutionary era ||| modern democracy from France to America: the democratic-republican
societies of the 1790s ||| the American dream of a commercial democracy ||| America’s first great demagogue, Andrew Jackson ||| Tocqueville celebrates the Fourth of July in Albany, New York, 1831 ||| Tocqueville on democracy as an egalitarian form of life ||| the strange insurrection over the right to vote in Rhode Island, 1842 ||| Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the American struggle over the franchise ||| demotic culture in America: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, minstrelsy ||| Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas and the fantasy of a democracy still to come

FOUR. A STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL AND SOCIAL EQUALITY 133
The Chartists and the London Democratic Association; the first Chartist Convention and first Chartist petition, 1839 ||| Karl Marx’s ambivalence about democracy; communism as the realization of individual freedom and social equality ||| conflict as the paradoxical essence of nascent modern democratic societies ||| Mazzini and his democratic faith in cosmopolitan nationalism ||| the Paris Commune of 1871 ||| the Commune as revolutionary icon ||| the rise of mass political parties; the case of the German Social Democratic Party ||| the Russian general strike of 1905 and the St. Petersburg soviet ||| Rosa Luxemburg on revolutionary self-government ||| Robert Michels and Max Weber debate democracy vs. domination as the key categories for modern social thought; the “iron law of oligarchy” ||| disenchanted democracy at the dawn of the twentieth century

FIVE. A HALL OF MIRRORS 173
What Woodrow Wilson meant by democracy in proposing a world “made safe for democracy”; his 1885 manuscript “The Modern Democratic State” ||| Wilson as president; the Great War as a crusade to promote liberal democracy ||| Russia in revolution ||| the improvisatory democracy of the Petrograd soviet ||| Lenin and the Bolsheviks seize power through Russia’s soviets ||| existential conflict over the meaning of democracy: Wilsonian liberalism vs.
Leninist communism; the Versailles Peace Treaty and the League of Nations ||| the Guild Socialism of G.D.H. Cole: a vision of democratic socialism for an industrial society ||| Walter Lippmann on the psychological limits to an informed public ||| John Dewey and the persistence of the democratic faith ||| Edward Bernays and the value of propaganda ||| George Gallup and the rise of survey research and public opinion polling ||| Joseph Schumpeter on democracy as “rule of the politician” ||| the cruel game of modern politics: sham democracies vs. democracy as a universal ideal, solemnized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948

CODA: WHO ARE WE? 213
Manhattan, January 2017, protesting the election of Donald Trump: “This is what democracy looks like”; but a democratic process also elected President Trump ||| when President Barack Obama said, “That’s not who we are,” who are “we”? ||| “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide” ||| global democratization from an elite perspective: the life and times of Samuel P. Huntington ||| “Democracy is in the streets”: the return of participatory democracy in 2011; Occupy Wall Street ||| problems with the direct democratic program of the postwar global left ||| protecting pluralism in a framework of liberal rights the only viable approach to realizing a modern democracy ||| Condoleezza Rice keeps the American faith: exporting democracy at gunpoint ||| measuring the advance and retreat of democracy worldwide as a form of government: the Freedom House index, The Economist’s Democracy Index, and the United Nations Human Development Index ||| challenges to democracy today as an ideology and ideal ||| Václav Havel on the dangers of political demoralization faced with the challenges of self-government ||| upholding Abraham Lincoln’s conception of democratic hope

NOTES 247
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING 283
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 287
INDEX 289

Reading Group Guide

1. Discuss the book’s title: can democracy work? As you learned about democracy’s history, did you become more or less confident in the will of the people?

2. Should compulsory government service with selection by lottery—or any other aspects of the Athenian Assembly (Ekklesia)—be adopted by the United States? Should we revise the qualifications for becoming a legislator, judge, or juror?

3. How did you react to the “democratic” movements that restricted political power to property-owning white men? What did societies lose—culturally and intellectually—by suppressing the voices of women, slaves, and those who lived in poverty?

4. On page 72, the historian Simon Schama is quoted as saying, “Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, it was the source of its energy.” Do you agree? Was the Jacobin Reign of Terror the inevitable price for freeing France from monarchy? What determines whether military forces protect or abuse the powerless?

5. Which is less dangerous: direct democracy or indirect representation? Should the Electoral College be abolished in the United States?

6. From the oracle at Delphi to the U.S. Constitution, how has religion influenced the evolution of democracy?

7. As the architect of the first democratic constitution, Condorcet proposed a complex network of public assemblies in which every citizen would have “the knowledge necessary to conduct himself in the ordinary affairs of life, according to the light of his own reason, to preserve his mind free from prejudice” (page 200). What does it take to ensure that citizens are knowledgeable and reasonable?

8. The book illustrates the widely varying definitions of democracy, evolving from a radical Athenian regulatory body to Madison’s tempered republic and the Jeffersonian ideal that led self-made men like Andrew Jackson to rise to the highest office in the land. Now that you’ve read the saga of democracy, how do you personally define it? Do you think it can thrive among all populations of demos (ordinary citizens)?

9. The author calls the rise of the early American political party a normalizer, with elections becoming the cornerstone of our democracy. Does the rise of advertising and professionalized propaganda in the era of Edward Bernays, and the spread of social media a century later, threaten those cornerstones? Should journalists, political advertisers and publicists, and grassroots communicators all be held to the same legal standards when they publish their messages?

10. The Bolshevik orator Leon Trotsky and his followers advocated industrial democracy, and militant union activism was at the core of the revolutionary spirit sweeping Europe at the turn of the last century. Was William Morris right to advocate a rejection of factories and a return to an artisanal approach to production? Are capitalism and industrialism at odds with democracy? Is socialism the best way to ensure that more of humanity will enjoy a better quality of life?

11. What were the primary forces that undermined Woodrow Wilson’s new world order for peace?

12. Which of the book’s lesser-known democracy movements, from the London Chartists (who idolized Robespierre) to the German insurrectionist Karl Schapper and Italy’s secret Carbonari network, were most interesting to you? What common incentives and vulnerabilities did these groups share?

13. As you read the coda, what recent experiences from your own community came to mind? Do you share Huntington’s eventual belief that democracy is fragile, with a cloudy future?

14. How does Can Democracy Work? enhance any previous books you’ve read by James Miller? What common threads are woven into the history of democracy and the rise of rock and roll (Flowers in the Dustbin) as well as 1960s youth activism (“Democracy Is in the Streets”)?

Editorial Reviews

"What makes the book compelling is its focus on colorful thinkers, activists, and political leaders who lived and breathed the democratic moment throughout history, from Pericles and Socrates in ancient Athens to Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin in the early twentieth century. Miller shows that democracy’s ascent is best seen not as a gradual unfolding of a political principle driven by reason and moral destiny but rather as a grand roller coaster ride of struggle, revolution, and backlash. Today’s populist outbursts look quite ordinary alongside this history." —G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs

"The strength of this book lies . . . in the exquisite portraits it paints of characters who stand behind the immortalized Pericles, Robespierre, and Thomas Jefferson . . . [Miller] forces the reader to sit up and realize that history isn’t a definitive grayed parchment beyond reproach, but actually a living force constantly capable of new interpretation and meaning in our current world. . . Like the ekklesia in Athens, the constituent assembly in Versailles, and the soviet in Petrograd – Can Democracy Work? offers insightful context on how our own body politic will survive these turbulent times." —John Colin Marston, The Christian Science Monitor

“This is a bold, eloquent, and utterly convincing history of what democracy has meant and should mean—from the Assembly of ancient Greece to the anti-Trump resistance. James Miller has produced one of the wisest reflections on the glories and limits of popular rule I have ever read."—Michael Kazin, author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History

“Democracy has always been at the center of James Miller’s career, whether he was investigating the sublime theories of the Enlightenment or the street politics of the 1960s. Now, at the very moment of democracy’s apparent endangerment, one of its best friends offers up the most capacious and inspiring history of it ever composed. From the Greeks to the present, Miller’s light touch and profound insight join each other on every page to make this a truly indispensable work for the present crisis.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“No one is better qualified to wrestle with the riddle of democracy than James Miller, which is why I have been eagerly awaiting this brilliant and necessary book. Can Democracy Work? is an eloquent, clear-eyed account of democracy’s myriad challenges. This concise and compelling history deserves to be read and debated by all who still dare to dream of a society of equals. These pages left me feeling better prepared and reinvigorated to work toward a more democratic future.” —Astra Taylor, director of What is Democracy? and author of The People’s Platform

“James Miller, who has illuminated democracy's radical possibilities, now offers some sharp reflections on how those possibilities have fared over the centuries. At a moment when the very meaning of the word is up for grabs, Miller brings us back to philosophical essentials as forged by contingency, contradiction, and human folly. Refreshing and unsettling, here is some political intelligence in a dark and confusing time.” —Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy

“Distinguished historian of ideas James Miller’s short history of democracy and its different meanings is both compulsive and compulsory reading for our sometimes shockingly disenchanted times. Ever optimistic, Miller remains enamored of his native United States’s striking experiment in cosmopolitan self-governance, and stands proudly and persuasively tall for liberal—and democratic—ideals.” —Paul Cartledge, author of Democracy: A Life

“This sharp, spirited, engaged intellectual history of democracy, including its recent and often loose coupling with liberalism, combines an appraisal of both inherent and situational pitfalls with an appreciation of redemptive possibilities. If democracy is protean, what matters, this rich work teaches, is the quality of our normative choices and institutional imagination.” —Ira I. Katznelson, author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time

". . . An attractively broad and accessible account of democracy from the Greeks to the present day. . .[guides] readers through the mass of difficult material with enviable clarity . . . [offers] impressive new evidence and analyses." —David A. Bell, New York Review of Books

"Engaging ....I’m particularly drawn to Miller’s investigation of a concept that most of us think we understand. As Miller demonstrates, “democracy” deserves a second look." —Stan Persky, Dooney's Cafe

From the Publisher