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Where’s the stink and blood?

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF DEMOCRACY
By John Keane
960 pp. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. $35

Reviewed by George O’Har

Many of us in the west carry around in our heads a biased and shorthand version of how democracy got started. In The Life and Death of Democracy, John Keane, professor of politics at the University of Westminster, attempts to set the record straight. He does this by expanding the notion of democracy to include “streams of influence” some readers are going to find heretical and hard to digest. Those of us who believe democracy started in Greece, flickered on and off in ancient Rome, went to sleep for centuries, and then woke with a start in 1776, are working from a historically simplified and blinkered template. We need a new paradigm. In pointing this out, Keane does us all a service.

History is written by the victors. False starts and dead ends, not to mention defeated foes and failed empires, are often cast aside in the formation of new narratives that begin in the present and wend their way back in time in a manner that is often far too straightforward. Blind alleys and asides get deleted, along with the marginalized and forgotten actors who people them. History is easier to grasp if events proceed in a straight line, edges are not ragged, and the endpoint is concealed in the beginning. Truer versions of history, however, are checkered and oblique, even aimless. History is process. There are contradictions. Lines aren’t straight. Dead ends abound. Yet everything seems oddly connected. Does A give birth to B, or not?

To say that is to say this: the strength of the book is its weakness. Keane illuminates a hidden side of democracy’s long march, and in so doing whittles away at our western biases. We have more people to thank for representative democracy than we knew. Much of the evidence Keane cites in support of his thesis is scant, however, and too often only suggestive. To maintain that democracy “is not simply the single-minded invention of Athenians, or Greeks, or the Phoenicians, or the ancient Syrian-Mesopotamians” is unobjectionable; to claim also that “early Islam served as a covered bridge that enabled the peoples of the world to pass from the ancient forms of assembly-based democracy to the world of representative government” is not, and requires more support than this text offers. We can start from America and bounce our way, however incorrectly, back in time to Greece. No route yet known leads to the caravansary where Muslim traders jabbered about voting rights, pace Professor Keane.

The Life and Death of Democracy is strongest when the author is talking about the Greeks and the long and tortured emergence of democracy in Europe. The sections on the Islamic world, Latin America, Asia, and India are less convincing. I’m not going to say this book isn’t erudite—or long-winded—or that the author isn’t an expert on the topic. But in spreading the net of “democracy” over so wide a sea, Keane weakens the idea that “democracy has different, discordant and braided tempos, and that efforts must be made to track the long-term continuities, gradual changes and sudden upheavals that have defined its history.” A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, yes. But not all inputs are equal. Not every tree bears fruit. I came away from this book thinking that if Keane had been writing about the Mayans and their calendar he would have ended up telling us how close they were to developing space travel.

On the plus side, the book contains everything you need to know—and then some—about the origins and evolution of democracy, in every time and clime, although it is short on how things actually happen in any given polity. There’s no hurly-burly, no intrigue, no characters. It’s all polite discourse. I learned more about down and dirty democracy by watching John Adams on HBO. There’s no stink of history in this text, no blood. Democracy was bought—and continues to be bought—with blood.

The Life and Death of Democracy needed to be more like Thucydides, and less like Plato, whose Republic has as much to do with real political life as stamp collecting. The last section of the book, where Keane transforms himself into a kind of docent from the future who chatters on about some imagined crypto-democratic Tomorrowland, was pointless—a page from Fukuyama. Whatever possessed him? Keane is also a bit snide about America, quite pejorative in his remarks about our founding fathers, especially James Madison. But that’s to be expected. Procrustes worked in the same shop. A serious omission was the failure to include a bibliography. The publisher might have felt forty pages of endnotes interlaced with titles was an adequate substitute. He was mistaken.

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George O’Har teaches American Studies, Technology Studies, and literature, as well as fiction and non-fiction writing courses, at Boston College. Formerly, he was an electrical engineer. His novel Psychic Fair was published in 1989 and reissued in 2001.

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