The Life and Death of Democracy
By John Keane
Simon & Schuster £30 992 pages
FT Bookshop price: £24

The story of democracy is replete with surprising disappointments and triumphs. Witness in recent weeks the collapse of the moral authority of the “mother of all parliaments” in the UK in a scatter of expense claims. Meanwhile, in India, that land of democratic improbabilities, nearly half a billion people – most of them illiterate – voted to install a stable, progressive government. Who would have thought it?

Something intrinsic to the democratic idea has impelled it towards unlikely destinations and forms: its capacity to explode all types of authority known to man. Once a group of humans decides to pick up the term and hurl it, no political authority can be sure it will survive. Democracy’s recent global spread is also, however, the result of contingencies. The idea came to be conflated with a political and economic model embodied by the US – and that model, upheld as the definition of democracy itself, has been vigorously propagated by American power.

The need to recover democracy’s promiscuous, many-stranded history from its recent domestication is something John Keane understands well. The professor of politics at the University of Westminster claims that his “present-minded history of democracy” is the first comprehensive history of the term in more than a century. Those older histories (and their modern-day echoes) were European-centred and in them democracy’s necessary progress was propelled by God, reason and national destiny, until the end of history was announced.

Keane is impatient with a central dogma of western democracy, which traces a direct, exclusive lineage from the Pnyx in Athens via Westminster to Capitol Hill, a lineage that makes democracy a western, not to say Graeco-Wasp gift. “The history of democracy must itself be democratised,” Keane writes, a precept he fulfils with energy and glee.

While he shows in abundance democracy’s openness to interpretation, he orders his unwieldy materials into three major historical forms: what he calls assembly democracy, representative democracy, and “monitory” democracy. He begins, obligatorily, with Athens. There, democracy was first full-bloodedly practised if not, Keane argues, first invented. Drawing on recent archaeological evidence, he paints a vivid picture of democratic life there, and delves into its routines and rituals.

As a writer, Keane is flamboyant, even arch: “The agora was their Viagra,” he says of the Athenians. But he is careful not to take Athens and its subsequent admirers at their word. Their assemblies relied on delegation, not direct self-rule. In this, they were alike – and not ahead of – many others. Rule by assembly existed around 2000 BC among the Mesopotamian settlements of the Tigris and Euphrates, and spread eastwards from there to the Indian subcontinent. Islam, too, had its assemblies that distributed power. “Democratic ideals and institutions were born, and first nurtured,” Keane tells us, “within the quadrangle of territory bounded by the cities of Athens and Rome in the west, Babylon and Mecca in the east”.

Democracy’s second, representative, identity spans roughly the last 1,000 years and its centre of gravity is, indeed, European. Here, good government came to be seen as one by chosen representatives – where representatives and those who chose them become an ever-widening group. New political possibilities arose from disparately motivated developments that included the Iberian Cortes, city republics, ecclesiastical notions of office-holding and conciliarism, juries and a free press, the creation of the territorial nation-state, and the invention of public debt financed by taxation, which spurred demands of representation.

These were realised in the upheavals of the late 18th century, in ways that set democracy on paradox-riddled paths. In America, a governmental form designed to resist claims of democracy was initially created, which went on to absorb popular forms of authorisation and to seal a bond between democracy and capitalism. In Britain, democracy’s extension at home was linked to imperial expansion. In France, democracy became the nation state’s pennant, waved abroad as it forced others to be free. In most of South America, constitutional revolutions delivered the continent to the mercies of elected despots and generals.

By the first half of the 20th century, European democracy in nationalist regalia had dug its own graveyard, as the continent imploded in fratricidal wars. By further paradox, many of representative democracy’s real advances originated in hinterlands: in Uruguay and Mexico, which pioneered universal suffrage and invented electoral courts; in Australia and New Zealand, which devised the secret ballot and experimented with proportional representation; above all, in India, which defied democratic theories that prescribed literacy, a middle class and cultural uniformity as essential for democracy’s success.

India’s democracy has flourished in what Keane terms the third era of his subject’s long career. Monitory democracy, born out of dissatisfaction with electoral democracy within national boundaries, seeks to supplement representative democracy with other ways of scrutinising power. It is interested in how ballots are counted, and how the bills and receipts of the elected add up. In a world where deference and trust are in short supply, monitory democracy relies on non-elected watchdogs, on public interest initiatives, on snooping journalists and 24-hour communications networks.

Keane successfully expands our sense of democracy’s origins, deftly traces its global reach, and rightly insists on the contingent, historical character of democracy, its emergence and evolution through unintended moves that have enabled its continual reinvention. So sweeping a study must necessarily stand on others’ shoulders but here Keane is slack. He fails to provide adequate footnotes for ideas, specific examples and phrases.

More troublesome is Keane’s avoidance of the matter of how well democracy can address the central question of all politics: what is to be done? Keane asserts that democracy is “an indispensable means of tackling problems (like climate change) for which there are no agreed definitions, let alone viable solutions”.

That seems unlikely: precisely because it is so solicitous of the particular and the immediate, democracy is disarmed when it comes to concentrating minds and action towards the distant and long-term. To find ways to do that, democracy will need more resources than lie in its own stirring history.

Sunil Khilnani is author of ‘The Idea of India’ (Penguin)