Democracy: A History

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

A history of democracy is definitely a good idea. It disappeared from
ancient Athens and did not resurface for 2000 years. It is vulnerable
now. Voters in many countries are cynical about politicians, and many
who could do not inform themselves or bother to vote. There is a strong
case that Americans did not get the president whom they elected in 2000.

This book is fine as far as it goes, but it is difficult to write a
history of democracy in such a short number of pages. Dunn does justice
to ancient Athens as well as to the late-18th-century revolutions in the
United States and France. However, even within that page limit, he might
have been wiser to reduce the philosophizing and discuss democracy and
attempts at democracy elsewhere. A chapter on the evolution of
parliamentary democracy in England would have been appropriate. Chapters
on the European revolutions of 1848 and 1989 would have been good ideas.
Dunn could have answered a number of serious questions: Why did people
who lived under other systems want democracy? Why has the transition to
democracy been more successful in the Czech Republic and Estonia than in
Serbia or Russia? Why, and by what processes, did South Korea, Taiwan,
and post-Pinochet Chile make the transition to democracy? To what extent
have the former British Caribbean colonies become democracies? Why has
democracy failed in most African countries and failed even to appear in
most Muslim ones? Why did Singapore, unlike South Korea and Taiwan,
remain authoritarian? Can democracy function more successfully in
smaller countries like New Zealand, Sweden, and Canada than in larger
ones like the United States and India?

Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect any one author to be an expert on
all these topics. However, Penguin Books could have asked Dunn to be an
editor rather than sole author and recruited a team of writers, of which
Dunn was one. The result would have been a superior product.