The argument in David Stasavage’s book, The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today, is both more provocative and less sanguine regarding democracy than the title suggests. Despite the title, Stasavage does not present a variant of Whig history where the world inevitably moves toward ever greater realizations of equality and liberal democracy. Democracy, in Stasavage’s telling, is only “a” possibility in human political evolution, and not a necessary one at that. This despite Stasavage making clear, de rigueur, that he of course prefers democracy and, at times, putting his scholarly thumb on the democratic side of the empirical evidence he presents.
Stasavage’s political world offers pretty much only two options, democracy and autocracy. (Unlike Aristotle who treats “oligarchies” as a constitutional form separate from democracy and autocracy, “oligarchies” in Stasavage’s book generally get wrapped into one category or the other, depending on the number of oligarchs relative to the population.)
Stasavage emphasizes early in the book that democracy—defined as systems of government in which rulers “seek consent from those they govern”—“occurs naturally among humans, even if this is far from inevitable.” By democracy being “natural” Stasavage seems to mean that humans have often (but not always) spontaneously formed themselves into democratic communities throughout history. Democracies in human history do not arise merely by “reflection and choice,” to quote Alexander Hamilton in a different context, but also arise naturally, that is “by accident and force.”
But democracies are not the only form of political organization that arise naturally among humans. While Stasavage avoids using parallel language regarding the naturalness of autocracy, he is nonetheless clear from start to finish that autocracy is as natural a human political form as democracy is. For instance: “The story of early democracy and early autocracy points away from a single evolutionary path: it instead shows two very different trajectories of political development . . .”
The signal aspect of Stasavage’s story of human political development is that there is not one trajectory. There are, as it were, multiple equilibria, autocracy as well as democracy. It is this dual focus in the substance of his argument that saves Stasavage’s book from presenting just another kind of Whiggery.
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