Thirty years ago, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a widespread belief that democracy would rapidly spread to envelop the whole world. Now we're worried about whether democracy can survive, The Varieties of Democracy or V-Dem project, involving thousands of experts, typifies the current focus of the last few decades on what is called the "third wave of autocratization." But what if something important is being missed by not taking a longer view? A new book co-authored by a group of social scientists and data scientists, "The Deep Roots of Modern Democracy," argues that there is.
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." That famous quotation from Faulkner opens the book, which is ambitious in scope but modest in multiple other ways: It's mindful of the limitations of available data, open to other possibilities and reluctant to preach. Its fundamental lesson, perhaps, is that democracy today is not the same as it was or as it will be, but its past will always be with us. It is our choice how to understand and interpret that history, and how to use it to create a future. Any informed democratic debate about democracy itself will benefit greatly from the lessons gathered and drawn in this book.
