Democracy

This short volume examines democracy as both an ideal and a working system of government, beginning from the basic principle that people who are governed should have a voice in how they are ruled. Naomi Zack argues that the history of democracy is also a history of exclusion, since the versions practised at different times and places often left large groups without a real share in decisions. She offers a fresh account of how the idea developed and of its main conceptions.

Zack starts in antiquity, where the direct and representative systems of Athens and Rome mostly benefited a privileged minority, a pattern she finds in deliberative assemblies elsewhere in Africa, India, the Middle East and China. Plato, Aristotle and Cicero regarded rule by the masses with suspicion. Later centuries brought checks on kings, the Magna Carta among them. The social contract thinkers Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau argued that government should rest on the consent of the governed and serve their interests.

The book then turns to the American and French Revolutions, which Zack distinguishes sharply. The first established a new sovereignty built on British governmental traditions, while the second proclaimed universal humanitarian ideals. In the nineteenth century, Bentham, Mill, Kant and Marx pushed toward a more democratic society. Mary Wollstonecraft championed women's education and rights, a cause Mill took further, and campaigns to abolish slavery, win women's suffrage and organize labour unions gathered strength. After the Second World War, many countries, including India and South Africa, adopted new democratic governments, and Popper, Arendt and Rawls stressed orderly transfers of power, inclusion and fairness. Equality for racial and ethnic minorities and for women remains central to this story.

The twenty-first century, Zack notes, brings fresh difficulties, among them disasters and poorly informed electorates, and she treats a democratic order among nations as a goal still ahead. The book is part of Oxford University Press's Very Short Introductions series, a collection of hundreds of pocket-sized titles across nearly every field, written by specialist authors to help readers grasp a new subject quickly.