Is here.

It looks at The Secret History of Democracy by Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). And finds it more tendentious than enlightening.

Basically, straining to demonstrate that the ‘Western narrative'( sic) of democracy is seriously incomplete, the editors define democracy in a dumbed-down prim post-modern way which allows all sorts of other less effective consultative processes to qualify (emphasis added):

The editors’ Introduction labours to identify a unifying theme by eschewing an ‘undemocratic comprehensive and static’ definition of democracy. Instead we are offered Jacques Derrida’s obscurely open-ended celebration of the ‘multiplicitous nature of democracy’ and its ‘emancipatory promise’.

To move towards this promise three factors must (say the editors) be evident: willingness to participate; equality of access to information, free speech and voting; and civic virtue to accept the rule of law and majority decisions. “If democracy can be understood in this way, it is inconceivable that it has only (sic) occurred in the small collection of historical epochs with which it is usually associated.”

Well sure. But so what? All through human history the reach of leaders’ rule has been tempered by some sort of participatory or consultative process. The collection gives us all sorts of examples of how and where this has systematically happened, many of which might deserve a mention in our history books. But the editors’ factors surely exclude the most important one, namely a robust mechanism for changing leaders. Without that focus for leaders and voters alike, participatory and consensus-building activity is not going far?

And the various contributors miss another vital issue:

Most importantly, the contributors show no understanding of the importance of sheer scale. Human dialogue and participation in any extended family or clan or even larger ethnic community may not work in a much bigger context. Quite different issues of managing trust appear. Rules need to be drawn up, promulgated and enforced.

The power of the Western democratic model lies here, namely in the breadth and depth of the civilisational achievement to deliver codified rules for some sort of fair-minded governance scaled-up for larger populations and (in the case of the early years of the USA) designed to be applicable across vast thinly populated territories with rudimentary communications. In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace by David Post (2009) is a brilliant study of that organisational challenge, exploring how principles developed back then might apply in cyberspace.

I warmly recommend that David Post book to anyone who wants to learn some fascinating history – and to think about why things work at different levels of scale, including now on the Internet. I previously wrote about it here. 

Buy it. Right now: