Democracy: A User's Guide
It comes in many forms and often disappoints, yet democracy has come to be regarded as the most desirable of all political systems. Paul Cartledge offers a guide to its roots in ancient Greece and reminds us of its long absence in the West.
There has been, in the last couple of decades, an outpouring of research, as well as agitational literature, on the subject of democracy. Most of it concerns its contemporary condition, a sense that democracy is not all it is cracked up to be. Winston Churchill’s quip, made in the House of Commons in November 1947, that it is ‘the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’, may not be far off the mark. A contributor to the letters page of a national newspaper lately claimed: ‘The illusion that we live in any sort of democracy evaporates by the day.’
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