Democracy a History

Why is democracy so important today? Why does democracy, as both a word and an idea, linger so large in the current political imagination? Within the last three-quarters of a century, democracy has become the political core of the civilization that the West offers to the rest of the world.

In Democracy: A History, John Dunn—England’s leading political theorist—sets out to explain the extraordinary presence of democracy in today’s world. The story begins in Greece, where democracy started as an improvised remedy for a very local difficulty twenty-five hundred years ago. But, democracy’s tenure was short-lived, fading away almost everywhere for nearly two thousand years. It reappeared with the founding of the new American republic and amid the struggles of the French Revolution.

Charting democracy’s slow but insistent evolution from its ancient roots to its overwhelming triumph in a significant number of countries around the world in the years since 1945, Democracy: A History is a unique and brilliant account of this unique political phenomenon.