‘The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today’ review: The past spells the future

A political scientist explores the transition from early to modern democracy and points out that it is an experiment whose transformation is ongoing amid a fresh wave of technological progress

July 18, 2020 04:53 pm | Updated 04:53 pm IST

Debates on democracy are often noisy and inconclusive, appropriately perhaps, but there is near universal agreement on its moral superiority over other forms of social organisation. David Stasavage, professor of politics at New York University, is a self-declared optimist on democracy but he is cautious of the romanticism associated with it. His new book, The Decline and Rise of Democracy , is a rich and coherent account of democracy’s evolution over millennia and across diverse geographical and environmental settings, “a deep history.”

“The democracy we have today is but one potential way of organizing things,” and there could be other forms also, and the volume pays particular attention to autocracy which is often considered its antithesis. There is nothing inevitable about the birth of a democracy and there is nothing deterministic about the course of its evolution, but a long view of history allows some generalisations.

People and rulers

Rulers listen to the people when they need to, rather than an act of enlightenment — it could be to devise efficient mechanisms for tax collection at one point and to mobilise soldiers at another. The ruler needs the council to gather information and seek consent of the ruled, when he is weak and his powers not far-reaching.

Places where an efficient bureaucracy took root earlier on turned out to be less hospitable for democracy — China and Islamic West Asia being the living examples.

The Communist Party of China or the Islamic ideology cannot be linked to the present-day organisation of these societies in any absolute terms. Islam had consultation as an elementary component of its faith but early Islamic empire builders inherited strong bureaucracies that made resource extraction and exercise of power easy in the lands they freshly conquered. They did not need councils. The CCP built on the long tradition of bureaucratic control over people in China. After the revolutionary takeover of the state, Mao Zedong declared that “our present task is to strengthen the people’s state apparatus.” Technological advancements that reinforce bureaucratic authority can be inimical to democracy in certain situations.

The historically diffused nature of its social organisation, its ‘king and council’ template, was the differentiator that made Europe fertile for the seeds of modern democracy. It is here that representative democracy takes its current form. Commercial vibrancy and democracy are not necessarily correlated, with China and Islamic empires offering illustrations. There is also no empirical evidence historically to validate the suggestion that democracy creates wealth or wealth creates democracies. When France turned into a democracy with the Third Republic in 1870, its per capita income was around the same as that of Tanzania today.

As for creating wealth, democracies and autocracies both have advantages and disadvantages. Poor countries have become democracies too, and India is a forceful example. The village councils as an institution survived many empires that created prototypes of a central authority occasionally. A resistance to centralisation continued and that helped the survival of Indian democracy.

What happened in America

Europeans transplanted to the Americas, where no form of state existed, to build a robust form of democracy. Land was in abundance, labour was in shortage, and there was no apparatus of state control. The only means of forming a community was allowing participation of everyone.

Classical ideas and medieval experiments in democracy in Europe had the perfect setting for growth and evolution in America. Suffrage was the most expansive in America — but still it was only restricted to white males. It would take several centuries before African Americans — brought as slaves to create a labour class that did not have political options — could get equal voting rights.

Chiselled and formatted in the U.S., modern democracy circulated back to Europe and other parts of the world, but this by no means should obscure the fact that democracies existed in many societies in antiquity, including what is present day Bihar in India.

Mass redistribution

An old elite worry that democracy might force mass redistribution of wealth has turned out be unfounded. In fact, democracy has not even resulted in any massive reduction in inequality. In recent years, representative democracy has raised fresh concerns of trust and concentration of executive power.

Altogether, this volume is an unsentimental and rigorous analysis of democracy drawn from the author’s engagement with the topic over two decades. “In the end, China is not a deviation from the European pattern of political development; it is simply a different path that has its own logic to it and may well stay that way,” he says, in a suggestion that might not please democratic evangelists. The author is also critical of what passes of as democracy these days. “Instead of only asking whether democracy will survive, we need to also ask whether we will be satisfied with the democracy that does survive.” Democracy is facing its biggest threat in history, in the fresh wave of unprecedented technological progress. This volume helps us look into the future, and one might be unsettled by what can be seen.

The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today ; David Stasavage, Princeton University Press, ₹1,592 (Kindle price).

varghese.g@thehindu.co.in

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