Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller
The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century by Helena Rosenblatt On the Spirit of Rights by Dan Edelstein
Can Democracy Work?:
A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
306 pp., $27.00
The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century by Helena Rosenblatt.
Princeton University Press,
348 pp., $35.00
On the Spirit of Rights by Dan Edelstein. University of
Chicago Press,
325 pp., $40.00
While the collapse of communism did not bring history to an end, it did, briefly, seem to establish a worldwide consensus of sorts. Had one particular social and political system, by dint of hard experience, proven superior to all its rivals? Apparently yes. That system was what could be called the liberal ideal, constructed around representative democracy, human rights, and free-market capitalism complemented by a strong social safety net. If this system did not turn out to be the inevitable, placid, posthistorical future of all mankind, as predicted in Francis Fukuyama’s notorious 1989 essay, it nonetheless stood as a goal toward which all humanity was now going to strive. That consensus seemed to hold even after the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia and the September 11 attacks. Now, however, it is fracturing. Around the world, populist politicians on the right are winning elections by warning demagogically that representative democracy and human rights policies are too weak to protect hardworking, native-born families against threats from beyond their national borders—especially terrorists and migrant hordes. At the same time, a resurgent socialist left is gaining support by warning that liberal social democracy is too fragile to protect ordinary people from the ever more disruptive forces of global capitalism. While today’s ideological cleavages are not as wide as those of the 1930s, they are nonetheless more pronounced than at any time since the cold war. As always, when the ideological landscape changes, so does our sense of the history behind it. Take, for instance, the subject of human rights. Back in the distant past of 2007—before the financial crisis, before President Trump—the historian Lynn Hunt published a pioneering study that presented the ascent of universal human rights as inexorable.1 She recognized
1Inventing Human Rights: A History (Norton, 2007).
that it took time for the concept to achieve its full, mature shape. But once it did so in the eighteenth century, the “bulldozer force of the revolutionary logic of rights” propelled it irresistibly forward.
Three eventful years later, Samuel Moyn directly challenged Hunt’s account. In The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, he argued that modern human rights politics, far from following this inexorable path, had coalesced into their contemporary form and taken on their contemporary salience only in the 1970s thanks to
disillusionment with socialism, nationalism, anti-colonialist struggles, and the internationalism represented by the United Nations.2 Last year, Moyn’s new book, Not Enough, extended the case, suggesting that contemporary human rights activism serves the purposes of “neoliberal” free-market fundamentalism all too well. This activism may try to make free-market policies more humane, but it does little to challenge the enormous inequalities they produce, and in fact diverts political energies from such challenges.
Each of the three books under review makes a renewed case for elements of the liberal ideal, but with a powerfully heightened sense of its fragility and of the contingent factors behind its historical development. James Miller, whose earlier work has ranged from political philosophy to histories of rock and roll to a biography of Michel Foucault, offers an attractively broad and accessible account of democracy from the Greeks to the present. Helena Rosenblatt, a historian of European
2The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2010).
political thought, writing in a more scholarly vein, argues that liberalism has been thoroughly misunderstood by nearly everyone and proposes to set the record straight by exposing its deep roots reaching all the way back to ancient Rome. Dan Edelstein, a literary scholar who has written important studies of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, challenges Moyn’s account of the origins of human rights and offers his own original interpretation. All three authors guide readers through the masses of difficult material with enviable clarity.
Strikingly, while the authors go about their tasks in very different ways, they each look above all to the same place for inspiration: revolutionary France. Past histories of liberal freemarket democracy have tended to find its origins and fullest expression in the Anglo-American political tradition, with particular attention to the seventeenth-century English political writer John Locke. His arguments that men had a natural right to life, liberty, and property, and to resist tyranny, are easily cast as an origin point of the modern liberal ideal. These histories treated continental Europe as a place of great liberal hopes but even greater, indeed catastrophic failures: the French Revolutionary Terror, fascism, and many other varieties of political extremism. Miller, Rosenblatt, and Edelstein by contrast all urge us to look away from what Edelstein arrestingly calls the “strange and atypical” Anglo-American story. Miller barely mentions Locke, and Rosenblatt and Edelstein both try to knock him off the perch on which earlier histories placed him. Rosenblatt states categorically: “Liberalism owes its origins to the French Revolution.”
Taken together, the three books suggest that the Western liberal tradition may indeed have the strength and the resources necessary to withstand the political storms now gathering. But we should not conflate this tradition with the narrower set of mostly Anglo-American ideas that has been conventionally identified as its core, and labeled (mistakenly, according to Rosenblatt) “classical liberalism.” All three authors clearly believe that this narrower tradition has concerned itself too heavily with individual rights— above all, economic rights—as opposed to the common good. It has not paid enough attention to moral values and moral education, and it has not done enough to encourage broad democratic participation. Such arguments are not entirely new, but these books offer impressive new evidence and analyses. And at a moment when liberal democracy has shown itself rather more resilient in France and Germany (even with their current travails) than in Brexit Britain and Trumpist America, the case for looking to Continental sources for inspiration is particularly timely.
For
James Miller, a veteran of 1960s protests and Students for a Democratic Society, the democratic ideal is one that allows citizens not merely to vote for representatives but to participate as actively as possible in ruling themselves. He therefore starts his book with Athens, the first great experiment in direct democracy. At the same time, though, the Athenian citystate limited the category of citizen to a free, male minority and enforced “the complete subjection of the individual to the community.” Miller’s enthusiasm for it is distinctly muted.
Nor did Athens launch a durable democratic tradition. After its fall, democracy as a concept fell into long centuries of discredit and eclipse, with most leading Western commentators, up to and including the American Founding Fathers, seeing it as barely superior to mob rule. America, Miller reminds us, was not founded as a democracy but as a republic in which wise elites would restrain unruly expressions of the popular will. Only with the French Revolution did an ideal of egalitarian, participatory government again gain prominence. Miller here singles out the urban sans-culotte movement, which briefly turned the local electoral districts of some French cities into democratic assemblies, open to all male residents and meeting in permanent session. And he has particular praise for the Marquis de Condorcet’s draft constitution of 1793, which would have given local assemblies unprecedented power to challenge and curb the actions of a national legislature
(the draft was never approved, still less implemented).
Miller argues that this French plan represents perhaps the most promising model for democracy ever devised.
In a set of short, clear chapters, he holds it up as a model against which to measure various later attempts to give citizens greater participation in governance.
These include the British Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, the Paris Commune of 1871, and even,
in the West, early-twentieth-century hopes that opinion polling might give ordinary people more of a political
voice. Miller also recognizes that today, profound social transformations have left the democratic ideal more imperiled
than ever. Increasing inequality makes it more difficult for people to have their voices heard; government secrecy
deprives them of the information necessary for political participation; and in an age of globalization many of
the most pressing problems, such as climate change, require global, not local, solutions.
America’s current plight spurs Miller (drawing on F. Scott Fitzgerald) to some passionate and anguished prose:
This is what democracy in America often seems like: an elusive fantasy, forever out of reach, forever unrealized, even as its most eloquent bards, trapped in their own prejudices, are “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
But he still holds out hope that some version of the Condorcetian ideal of local democratic restraints on national governance might yet continue
to inspire contemporary democratic movements.
W ith Helena Rosenblatt’s ambitious study, we turn from the vexed story of democracy to the vexed story of liberalism. The word, of course, is notoriously
confusing. In America, it generally means something vaguely akin to European social democracy. In Europe, it comes close to American free-market conservatism. “Neoliberalism,” before
acquiring its current meaning of freemarket fundamentalism, most commonly referred in the US to a set of reform-minded Democrats associated with Senator Gary Hart. Then there is
“classical liberalism,” by which scholars often mean, in the words of the historian Isaac Kramnick, a “modern, self-interested, competitive, individualistic
ideology emphasizing private rights”—the ideology behind laissezfaire capitalism. They trace its origins
back to early modern Britain, giving particular attention to John Locke. It is this last definition that Rosenblatt takes aim at. She begins by noting that
in ancient Rome, the terms “liberal” and “liberality” (liberalitas) had no connection with individual freedom but signified
a noble, high-minded generosity and carried strong moral connotations. In the eighteenth century “liberality” also came to be associated with freedom
from bias, especially religious bias. The word “liberalism,” denoting a coherent system of thought, only appeared
in the nineteenth century, originally as a term of abuse for opponents of traditional religion and monarchy. Locke never called himself a “liberal.”
Most of this material is well known, but Rosenblatt builds upon it to argue that even in the nineteenth century, the supposed heyday of “classical liberalism,” the individualistic, laissez-faire ideology discussed in recent decades by so many scholars did not actually exist in anything like a coherent form. While some relatively obscure writers and politicians came close to it (Frédéric Bastiat in France, John Smith Prince in Germany), most self-described “liberals” did not. John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty, edged close to socialism in many of his opinions, and considered the label “liberal” largely meaningless (“the libéraux comprise every shade of political opinion”). To the extent that a self-conscious “liberal” movement existed, according to Rosenblatt, it was not to be found in Britain and America but on the European continent, starting in the French Revolution. While respectful of individual rights, this liberalism was moralizing, elitist, and concerned with the classic philosophical question of how to construct a stable, enduring, moderate regime. In France, the writers Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël, who came to prominence in the Revolution’s last stages, developed a political program that remained much closer to the earlier meanings of “liberty,” with an emphasis on a paternalistic “government of the best.” In the nineteenth century, German thinkers led the way in developing a “liberal” Protestant theology as well as economic ideas that anticipated the policies of modern welfare states. These selfproclaimed liberals, Rosenblatt notes, were emphatically not democrats.
They mistrusted the common people and advocated limited suffrage. Nor were they libertarians. They generally did not consider property a core right, and while they warned against government becoming tyrannical, they did not seek to minimize its powers. Constant defended laissez-faire in the economic realm; many others did not.
By the end of the nineteenth century, people who called themselves liberals had mostly made their peace with democracy, but remained deeply divided over other issues, including laissezfaire economics. Prominent British Liberal Party members like Leonard Hobhouse even argued that “true socialism serves to complete rather than to destroy the leading Liberal ideals.” While some liberals decried European imperialism, others defended a version of it that would spread “civilization” to supposedly benighted areas of the globe. Many defended eugenics and opposed women’s suffrage. The uniting factors, insofar as they existed, remained a strong moralism and an emphasis on education as essential to political progress. These same factors also pervaded the American liberalism that took shape in the early twentieth century under the influence of Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and the young intellectuals who banded together in 1914 to found The New Republic. It therefore makes little sense to posit a sharp distinction between this American liberalism and Europe’s supposedly more libertarian variety.
If this is the true (“lost”) history of liberalism, then where did the idea of liberalism as an individualistic ideology tied to laissez-faire capitalism