Within the last sixty years democracy has become the political core of our civilisation. Yet, a now familiar refrain is that democracy is in crisis;1 that despite being a regime that was widely accepted across the world (especially, in the Western part of it), democracy is instead currently being contested as a weak and inadequate form of government.2 Although democratic values are widely shared today, their global attainment is farther away and even in Europe they meet increasing threats. The democratic deficit has become a common parlance. Even within the EU there is increasing scepticism about the peopleâs resources to scrutinise their governments and supranational organisations. Similarly at the forefront of media talk are the crisis facing democratic leadership in light of the recent electoral success of far-right movements across Europe; the consequences of the Brexit referendum; the policies of Donald Trump; and the emergence of various illiberal solutions proposed to the perceived difficulties of democratic governance in countries such as Turkey, Russia, Poland and Hungary.3 This recent rise of populism and the challenges it poses to our democratic institutions make our project especially timely. Today, more urgently than ever before, we need to understand what the long history of democracy really is. It is here that the history of political thought has a lot to offer. It can show where certain ideas of democracy came from, highlight their contingencies and the context in which they emerged. It can illustrate how embracing a certain idea of democracy was itself a choice, that there were other choices and ideas of democracy available â other paths, as it were, which were not taken. By examining crucial, though hitherto neglected, aspects of democracy, and providing a new historical account of its development, the volume will offer new perspectives on the history and present-day civil philosophy as well as discussions of political participation and democracy in the global world.
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Whether concerned with the ârepresentative versus direct democracyâ question, or with the coexistence of economic, gender, ethnic disparities (caused by capitalismâs advanced phase) and the legal requirements of equal citizenship, or with the exportability of democratic procedures and values to areas of the planet that might be less receptive to them, multidisciplinary research on democracy is growing steadily.4 Democracy is thus the object of myriad theoretical and political reflections as well as public discussion with regard to its nature, identity and fortune. We would make a mistake though if we thought that this was not also the case long ago. We would not do better either by maintaining that before the twenty-first century this process only occurred in classical Athens. In fact, democracy was a highly disputed notion in seventeenth-century England. By investigating how this came to be so during that historically eventful and intellectually rich century, we might come closer to a better, less blinkered, and perhaps inspiring understanding of democracy and of how it worked/s or of why it did not/does not work (as it should). This means to avoid the history of democracy Plato-to-NATO style, which turns out to be profoundly disconnected from the realities of socio-economic, cultural and political dynamics going on at a specific point in time in a given context. This tunnel-vision type of reading neglects the importance of context in the study of ideas as well as the latterâs practical impact on society, politics and intellectual life. Our book intends to rectify this tendency.
As for a standard definition, âdemocracyâ is generally characterised as the âgovernment by the people; esp. a system of government in which all the people of a state or polity [â¦] are involved in making decisions about its affairs, typically by voting to elect representatives to a parliament or similar assemblyâ (oed, âdemocracyâ,
See e.g. Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, âThe Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnectâ, Journal of Democracy, 27 (2016), pp. 5â17, esp. p. 16.
Be it sufficient to check the websites of some of the main European (e.g. The Guardian, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Le Monde, LaStampa, El Pais) or North American newspapers (e.g. The New York Times, The Washington Post) for examples of this phenomenon. For one journalistic instance specifically addressing the alleged failures of liberal democracyâs institutions, notably vis-Ã -vis the consolidation of authoritarianism in countries like Turkey, see Simon Jenkins, âBlame Liberal Democracyâs Flaws for ErdoÄanâs Win, Not the Votersâ,
See e.g. David Runciman, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).