A book excerpt and interview with James Miller, author of “Can Democracy Work?”
DEMOCRACY IS THE most widely accepted form of governance, yet its flaws have become increasingly apparent in recent years. Gridlocked legislatures, low trust in the press, and judiciaries challenged by expansive executive power have all called attention to the many ways in which Western institutions can become dysfunctional. The rise of China, moreover, is held up by some as proof that democracy is neither inevitable nor necessary for countries seeking economic growth and political stability.
The revolutionary democrats in France weren’t able to implement the world’s first democratic constitution, drafted by Condorcet in 1793, in part because they never could reconcile the demands of the armed artisans in the big cities, for a republic of equals, with the wishes of the peasants in rural areas, who still recognised the hierarchical authority of the Catholic church.
To put it mildly, the record of these elites has been mixed. In the past generation, both liberal and social democratic regimes have presided over a galloping growth in inequality, and, in more than one case, they have plunged their nations into reckless wars of choice. Under a democratic government animated by such shared values, and with a justly regulated economy—the aspiration of most liberal democrats and social democrats—citizens would not only have equal civil and political rights; they would also know that those who are lucky enough to be born with greater natural talents are not going to get rich at the expense of those less fortunate. In such a democratic community, we agree to share one another’s fate, as did the citizens of ancient Athens.
*The psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman explored a range of failures of reason and biases in making decisions. They demonstrated cases in which “cognitive illusions” affect judgement, and highlighted the conditions in which humans tend to make irrational decisions. Excerpt from “Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World” by James Miller .
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