INTRODUCTION
1. Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, William Heinemann, London and Toronto, 1948 (first published 1936), p. 198.
PART I: ASSEMBLY DEMOCRACY
1. A translation of the text appears in W.G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, Oxford, London, 1960, pp. 112–15.
2. See Francis Joannès, ‘Haradum et le pays de Suhum’, Archéologie 205, September 1985, p. 58: ‘Concerning the silver, which Habasanu during his tenure as mayor had made the town pay, the entire town assembled and spoke in these terms to Habasanu: “Of the silver which you made us pay, a great amount has stayed in your house, as well as the sheep which we gave on top as voluntary gifts.”’
3. For further details of these republics (called gana dhina) – whose assemblies appear to have been dominated by warrior aristocrats (kshatriya) but also included ritual specialists (brahmana) and merchants (vaisya), although not labourers (shudra) – see Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, ‘Early City-States in South Asia: Comparing the Harappan Phase and Early Historic Period’, in Deborah L. Nichols and Thomas H. Charlton (eds), The Archaeology of City-States: Cross-Cultural Approaches, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London, 1997, pp. 51–70; Ananat S. Altekar, State and Government in Ancient India, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1958; Jagdish Sharma, Republics in Ancient India: c. 1500 BC–500 BC, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1968; and Romila Thapar, ‘States and Cities of the Indo-Gangetic Plain c. 600–300 BC’, in Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002, pp. 137–73.
4. The account of Wen-Amon is translated in James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1906, volume 4, §§ 557 ff.
5. Aristotle, Politics, 1304a 31–3; ibid. 1303a 22–4 and 1311a 39.
6. Plato, Republic, 557 BCE and 492 BCE.
7. Produced in 424 BCE, the scathing satire features a chorus of young aristocrats (the knights) who side with the sausage seller, Agoracritus, in his efforts to control Demos by outmanoeuvring his current overseer, a slave called the Paphlagonian. The two coarse rivals for power over Demos resort to flattery and Greek gifts: in order better to control him, they praise Demos as Tyrant and Sole Ruler of the Earth, and tempt him with everything from freshly trapped rabbits and cheap fish to pillows to soften the stone seats at the pnyx. Demos appears pleased by the trickery: he is depicted, through most of the play, as a conceited rogue whose foolishness is compounded by his insistence that he knows precisely what is going on.
8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social ou principes du droit politique, Larousse, Paris, 1973 (first published 1762), book 3, chapter 15, p. 168.
9. Plato, Statesman 291 D 1–29 A 4.
10. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.37–45; see Kurt A. Raaflaub, ‘Democracy, Power, Imperialism’ in J. Peter Euben et al. (eds), Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1994, pp. 103–46.
PART II: ELECTORAL DEMOCRACY
1. Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 26 August 1816, retrieved from The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib022558
2. David Runciman, ‘The Paradox of Political Representation’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, volume 15, no. 1, 2007, pp. 111–12.
3. Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Hafner Press, New York and London, 1949 (first published 1748), book 2, chapter 2 (‘Of the Republican Government, and the Laws in Relation to Democracy’), p. 9.
4. René-Louis de Voyer d’Argenson, Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France, Chez Marc Michel Rey, Amsterdam, 1764, p. 8.
5. James Madison, ‘The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection (Continued)’, Daily Advertiser, 22 November 1787: ‘The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.’
6. Alexander Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris, 19 May 1777, in Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke (eds.), The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Columbia University Press, New York, 1961, volume 1, pp. 254–56.
7. From a speech by James Wilson to the Federal Convention, 6 June 1787, in Max Farrand (ed.), The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1937, volume 1, chapter 13, document 18, pp. 132–33.
8. Henry Brougham, Political Philosophy, H.G. Bohn, London, 1849, part 3, chapter 6, p. 33.
9. Thomas Jefferson, ‘Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush [17 August 1811]’, in William B. Parker and Jonas Viles (ed.), Letters and Addresses of Thomas Jefferson, Unit Book Publishing, New York, 1905, p. 204.
10. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, J.S. Jordan, London, 1971, part 1, pp. 272–74.
11. ibid.
12. A.F. Pollard, The Evolution of Parliament, Longmans, Green & Company, London and New York, 1920, p. 3; an identical claim is made by Alan F. Hattersley, A Short History of Democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1930, pp. 78–79.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (trans. W. Kaufmann), Vintage, New York, 1966, p. 202.
14. Alexander Henderson, The Bishops’ Doom: A Sermon Preached before the General Assembly Which Sat at Glasgow Anno. 1638, On Occasion of Pronouncing the Sentence of the Greater Excommunication against Eight of the Bishops, and Deposing or Suspending the Other Six, John Gray and Gavin Alston, Edinburgh, 1792, pp. 17–18.
15. Walter Thomas Mills, Democracy or Despotism, University of California, Berkeley, 1916, p. 61.
16. Francisco I. Madero, La sucesión presidencial en 1910: El Partido Nacional Democrático, Colección Reforma-Revolución, Mexico, 1908, pp. 179–85, 230–41.
17. Gyula (Julius) Schvarcz, Die Demokratie von Athen, E. Avenarius, Leipzig, 1901, volume 1, pp. 29–69.
18. Cited in Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics, Liveright, New York, 2014, p. 106.
19. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, Basic Books, New York, 2001, p. 98.
20. Paul Groussac’s remarks are found in his Del Plata al Niágara, Administracion de la Biblioteca, Buenos Aires, 1897); Bolívar’s confession is cited in Enrique Krauze, Redeeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America, New York, 2011, p. 342.
21. Conservative Party founding statement in Ludolf Parisius, Deutschlands politische Parteien und das Ministerium Bismarcks, J. Guttentag, Berlin, 1878, pp. 219–20; Henry Sumner Maine, Popular Government, John Murray, London, 1886, p. 36, who added that democracy resembled ‘a mutinous crew, feasting on a ship’s provisions, gorging themselves on the meat and intoxicating themselves with the liquors, but refusing to navigate the vessel to port’ (pp. 45–46).
22. From a letter to Captain Mercer, 26 February 1790, in Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke: Between the Year 1744, and the Period of his Decease, in 1797, F. & J. Rivington, London, 1844, p. 147.
23. Catherine Cleverdon, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada, Toronto University Press, Toronto, 1950, p. 215.
24. François Guizot, Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif, 1821–1822, 1822, Didier, Paris, translated as The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe, Henry G. Bohn, London, 1861, part 1, lecture 1, p. 12.
25. Charles F. Adams (ed.), The Works of John Adams, Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1856, volume 6, p. 469.
26. Benjamin Franklin, ‘Madison Debates’, 26 July 1787, retrieved from Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_726.asp
27. James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat: Or, Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America, C.K. McHary, Cooperstown, 1838, pp. 122–23.
28. The phrase ‘democratic caesarism’ was the title of a most interesting, still untranslated work by the Venezuelan diplomat, former customs officer, scholar, journalist, publisher and director of the national archives, Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, Cesarismo democrático. Estudios sobre las bases sociológicas de la constitución efectiva de Venezuela, Empresa El Cojo, Caracas, 1919.
29. From the interview with Rosas by Vicente G. and Ernesto Quesada (Southampton 1873), in Arturo Enrique Sampay, Las ideas políticas de Juan Manuel de Rosas, Icon Juárez, Buenos Aires, 1972, pp. 215, 218–19; the Palermo speech is described in the correspondence of Enrique Lafuente to Félix Frías, 18 April 1839, in Gregorio F. Rodríguez (ed.), Contribución histórica y documental, Casa Jacobo Peuser, Buenos Aires, 1921–22, volume 2, pp. 468–69.
30. John Stuart Mill, ‘Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform’ (1859), in J.M. Robson (ed.), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XIX: Essays on Politics and Society, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1977, pp. 322–25.
31. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (ed. J.P. Mayer), Doubleday, Garden City, 1969, volume 1, p. 12.
32. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, Basic Books, New York, 2000.
33. Twelve months into World War II, the surviving electoral democracies included Australia, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Uruguay. Despite its use of an electoral college to choose a president under high-security, wartime conditions, Finland might also be included in the band of survivors.
34. The quotations are from ‘Duce (1922–42)’, TIME, 2 August 1943; Emil Ludwig, Talks with Mussolini (trans. Eden and Cedar Paul), Allen & Unwin, London, 1932; Stephen J. Lee, Aspects of European History, 1789–1980, Taylor & Francis, London, 1988, p. 191; and Christopher Hibbert, Benito Mussolini: The Rise and Fall of Il Duce, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1965, p. 40.
35. José Batlle y Ordóñez, ‘Instrucción Para Todos’, El Día, 4 December 1914.
36. Thorstein Veblen, The Vested Interests and the Common Man, B.W. Huebsch, New York, 1946 (first published 1919), p. 125.
37. Max Scheler, Trois essais sur l’esprit du capitalisme. Sauvés par le travail?, Éditions Nouvelles Cécile Defaut, Nantes, 2016.
38. Harold J. Laski, Democracy at the Cross-Roads, National Council of Labour, London, 1934.
39. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Beacon Press, Boston, 1966, p. 418.
40. Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism Is Not Democratic and Democracy Not Capitalistic, Firenze University Press, Firenze, 2015, p. 24.
41. Cited in F.C. Egerton, Salazar, Rebuilder of Portugal, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1943, pp. 224–27.
42. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public, Routledge, New Brunswick and London, 1993 (first published 1925), pp. 15, 28; Edward Bernays, Propaganda, H. Liveright, New York, 1928, pp. 9–10.
PART III: MONITORY DEMOCRACY
1. Examples of these various interpretations include Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press, New York, 1992; Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System, Bloomsbury, London, 2017; David Stasavage, The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2020; and Nadia Urbinati and Arturo Zampaglione, The Antiegalitarian Mutation: The Failure of Institutional Politics in Liberal Democracies, Columbia University Press, New York, 2013.
2. Kader Asmal et al. (eds), Nelson Mandela in His Own Words: From Freedom to the Future, Little, Brown, London, 2003, p.62; the speech is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qj4e_q7_z4
3. The full audio text of the speech delivered in West Berlin on 26 June 1963 can be found at www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkichbineinberliner.html
4. Sidney Verba, ‘Problems of Democracy in the Developing Countries’, Harvard–MIT Joint Seminar on Political Development, remarks, 6 October 1976; Samuel E. Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 223.
5. John Keane, ‘Asia’s Orphan: Democracy in Taiwan, 1895–2000’, in Power and Humility: The Future of Monitory Democracy, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York, 2018, pp. 61–74.
6. Cited in John Keane, Violence and Democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2004, p. 1.
7. A full account of the Prague events is to be found in John Keane, Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts, Bloomsbury, London and New York, 1999.
8. See Freedom House, ‘Democracy’s Century: A Survey of Global Political Change in the 20th Century’, New York, 1999.
9. See Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, Summer 1989; and my interview with him, ‘On the Road to Utopia?’, The Independent, 19 June 1999.
10. The classic study is Frederic Charles Schaffer, Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2000; see also Sheldon Gellar, Democracy in Senegal: Tocquevillian Analytics in Africa, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005, pp. 156–71.
11. Alan F. Hattersley, A Short History of Democracy, p. 237.
12. Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, ‘Tryst with Democracy’, in To Kill A Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2021, pp. 3–37.
13. Friedrich von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People, University of Chicago Press, London and Henley, 1979: ‘I must frankly admit that if democracy is taken to mean government by the unrestricted will of the majority I am not a democrat, and even regard such government as pernicious and in the long run unworkable’ (p. 39); Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Harper & Brothers, New York and London, 1942, p. 269.
14. John Keane, ‘Hopes for Civil Society’, Global Perspectives, volume 1, no. 1, August 2020, pp. 1–11.
15. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution (trans. Stuart Gilbert), Garden City, 1955 (first published 1856), part 3, chapter 4, p. 177: ‘Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds. For the mere fact that certain abuses have been remedied draws attention to others and they now appear more galling; people may suffer less, but their sensibility is exacerbated.’
16. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address to the White House Correspondents’ Association, Washington, 15 March 1941.
17. The radical rethinking of the global future of democracy during the 1940s is discussed at length in John Keane, Power and Humility.
18. C.S. Lewis, ‘Equality’ (1943), in Walter Hooper (ed.), Present Concerns: Essays by C.S. Lewis, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1986, p. 17, paragraph 1; Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, pp. 277–78.
19. J.B. Priestley, Out of the People, Collins, London, 1941, pp. 16–17, 111; Jacques Maritain, ‘Christianity and Democracy’, typewritten manuscript prepared as an address at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, 29 December 1949; Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 263.
20. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defenders, Nisbet, London, 1945, p. vi.
21. Hannah Arendt, ‘Nightmare and Flight’ (1945), in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1994, p. 134; Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Democracy, Little, Brown, Boston, 1941, p. 34; and Thomas Mann, The Coming Victory of Democracy, Yale University Press, London, 1943, p. 22.
22. John Keane, Democracy and Media Decadence, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2013; see also Ronald J. Deibert, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society, House of Anansi, Toronto, 2020.
23. Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 14–41; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, 1993; and ‘The Parliament of Things’, https://theparliamentofthings.org/
24. Pierre Rosanvallon, Good Government: Democracy Beyond Elections (trans. Malcolm DeBevoise), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2018, pp. 2–19. The interpretation is insightful but hampered by lack of clarity about the timing of the transition (variously described as ‘over the last two centuries’ and ‘some thirty years’) and excessive reliance on the case of France. The proposed democratic reforms for a ‘permanent democracy’ equipped with robust ‘mechanisms of vigilance and oversight’ and ‘accountability’ look much like the monitory democracy born of the 1940s.
25. Richard Wike, Laura Silver and Alexandra Castillo, ‘Many Across the Globe Are Dissatisfied with How Democracy Is Working’, Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, 29 April 2019; Economist Intelligence Unit, ‘Democracy Index 2018’, London, 2018; ‘Democracy for All?’, The V-Dem Annual Democracy Report 2018, V-Dem, Gothenburg, 2018; Freedom House, ‘Freedom in the World 2018’, Washington, DC, 2018; and R.S. Foa et al., ‘Youth and Satisfaction with Democracy: Reversing the Democratic Disconnect?’, Bennett Institute for Public Policy, Cambridge, October 2020.
26. The various survey findings are analysed in Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, To Kill A Democracy.
27. Ruchir Sharma, ‘The Billionaire Boom’, Financial Times, 15–16 May 2021; Thorstein Veblen, The Vested Interests and the Common Man, p. 125.
28. Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spectre of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2008, pp. 286–87.
29. Simon Reid-Henry, Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971–2017, Simon & Schuster, New York and London, 2019, part 1.
30. Su Changhe, ‘Western Democracy Must Be Demoted from a Universal Idea to a Local Theory’ (需将西方民主从普世知识降级为地方理论), Guangming Daily, 28 May 2016, http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2013-05-28/092127244512.shtml; Thomas Hon Wing Polin, ‘Democracy: A Western Tool for Domination’, Global Times, 11 February 2018; the remark by Liu Cixin is cited in Jiaying Fan, ‘The War of the Worlds’, The New Yorker, 24 June 2019, p. 34; the internment is described in Liu Cixin, ‘Post-Deterrence Era, Year 2 Australia’, Death’s End, Tor, New York, 2016.
31. John Keane, The New Despotism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 2020.
32. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (trans. M. Hollingdale), London 1990, pp. ix, 38.
33. Nahum Capen, The History of Democracy: or, Political Progress, Historically Illustrated, From the Earliest to the Latest Periods, American Publishing Company, Hartford, 1874, p. v: ‘The History of Democracy is a history of principles, as connected with the nature of man and society. All principles centre in God … In the sublime truths of Christianity is to be found the high standard of human conduct and endeavour.’
34. James Mill, ‘Government’ (1820), reprinted as An Essay on Government, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1937.
35. Richard Rorty, ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’, in Richard Rorty, Volume I: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 257–82; compare my reply to this way of thinking in The Life and Death of Democracy, especially pp. 839–72.
36. Barack Obama, address to Rutgers University’s 250th anniversary commencement ceremony, 15 May 2016.
37. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, Fordham University Press, New York, 2010, p. 27.
38. John Keane, ‘Silence, Early Warnings and Catastrophes’, in Power and Humility, pp. 207–22
39. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Penguin Books, London and New York, 2011, p. 418.