Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions

How debates over secrecy and transparency in politics during the eighteenth century shaped modern democracy

Does democracy die in darkness, as the saying suggests? This book reveals that modern democracy was born in secrecy, despite the widespread conviction that transparency was its very essence.

In the years preceding the American and French revolutions, state secrecy came to be seen as despotic—an instrument of monarchy. But as revolutionaries sought to fashion representative governmen...