Can Democracy Work?

August 6, 2018
Government by the people—exercising power themselves without delegating it to representatives or administrators—remains a conflicted, elusive goal, according to this incisive study of direct democracy. Politics professor Miller (Examined Lives) explores examples of direct and participatory democracy: ancient Athens, where 60,000 citizens assembled regularly to vote on law, policy, and war, and random people were appointed to government offices by lottery; the French Revolution, when Parisian neighborhood assemblies overthrew the national legislature; the rise of America’s Jacksonian democracy, granting the vote to all white men; the Russian Revolution, when local soviets of workers and soldiers became a rival government; and Occupy Wall Street’s experiment in all-inclusive consensus decision-making. Drawing on political thought from Aristotle to Rousseau to Walter Lipmann, Miller cogently identifies both the strengths of direct democracy (challenging unresponsive representative government and propelling change) and its weaknesses: instability and violence, vulnerability to demagogues, the difficulty of telling what a divided people really want, the need for specialist legislators and bureaucrats in a complex modern society, and a legacy of “destructive and illiberal totalitarian democracy.” Miller’s engaging, thoughtful exploration of some of history’s most dramatic episodes illuminates the ongoing discontent with flawed systems of self-rule.