John Keane writes:
JOHN DUNN'S assessment of my book The Life and Death of Democracy ("Democracy & Its Discontents," March/April 2010) pointedly notes that Francis Fukuyama's celebrated but flawed account of the global triumph of American-style "liberal democracy" is among my prime targets. Dunn refrains from saying that I also take aim at the mistakes and silences of his Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (Atlantic Books, 2005). The telling reserve likely explains why his review is more a spoiling exercise than anything else-an effort to obscure the details of the new history of the language and institutions of present-day democracy that I offer.
Recycling themes from his book, Dunn makes many fascinating points; most come wrapped in sardonic tropes and confused silences. Bitterness is of course a matter of personal taste, but willful elisions have consequences. Dunn repeats the discredited nineteenth-century myth of democracy's Athenian beginnings, despite solid new evidence of the existence of scores of ancient Greek democracies, some of them much older than Athens; he bowdlerizes my account of the pre-Greek (Mycenaean, Linear B) roots of the language of democracy (which have been traced by others to "the rulers of Babylon"); and Dunn says nothing of the citizen assemblies that first sprang up in ancient Syria-Mesopotamia and were later imported via the Phoenicians into the Greek world. The survival of the spirit of assembly democracy after Athens, for instance within the early Muslim world, is ignored, as are the medieval origins of democratic government in representative form. Dunn's remark in his book that after Athens, democracy "faded away almost everywhere for all but two thousand years" is erroneous. In his review, Dunn meanwhile censors my description of the first efforts to democratize representative government in the Low Countries, the rise of the American empire and the spread of representative democracy throughout Spanish America during the nineteenth century.
Such silences feed upon Dunn's presumption (derived from his teacher, the late Cambridge University classics scholar Moses Finley) that Athenian democracy should count as the golden standard when thinking about all prior and subsequent types of democracy. My book is a sustained attack on that bias, whose lamentable effects include Dunn's inability to explain or appreciate democracy's more recent advances. For him, modern democracy is all a messy mystery, even an unwelcome development. Dunn denies that this system of self-government is today morphing into a new and improved historical subtype, one that differs from the assembly and state-bound representative democracies of the past. So he cannot see that the imaginary homelands of democracy are changing, or that his bad habit of applying Athenian yardsticks simply cannot make sense of the transformations taking place, say, in southern Africa, Taiwan, Indonesia, India and China. Their remarkable life-and-death experiences with democracy are greeted-undemocratically-with silence.
Democratization in these new settings (India and Taiwan are fine examples) is catapulting us into the age of monitory democracy. By this I mean that democracy is coming to be defined by free periodic elections and the ongoing rough-and-tumble public scrutiny of the behavior of governments, businesses and other bodies by thick networks of extraparliamentary organizations equipped with the power of publicly monitoring-chastening and humbling-the excesses of the mighty, even across borders. There are many American examples of monitory democracy in action, ranging from the freedom rides, sit-ins and naacp initiatives of the civil-rights movement to Human Rights Watch, policy think tanks, pbs and the agencies operating under the Inspector General Act (1978), which institutionalized oversight of the U.S. federal government. In his review, Dunn predictably misinterprets and dismisses such watchdog bodies; for him, they are "surveillance" mechanisms, a mere "motley assemblage" of "nebulous" and "bewildering" principles and practices.
Dunn says he favors theoretical "coherence," "sane judgment" and "effective authority." The plain truth is that he is a spoiler in a second sense-weighed down by his ancient Athenian prejudice and Thucydides-inspired conviction that the human condition is scarred by the "deep, endless and ultimately impenetrable fogs of politics and war," Dunn snubs my argument that in the twenty-first-century monitory democracy is the best means of guarding against folly and hubris, of welcoming diversity, handling complexity and coping, effectively and efficiently, with what public-policy people call wicked problems. Dunn doesn't like such talk. He doesn't much like anything of our age. Hence his spoiling conclusion: since Athens, democracy has become a silly wish, an impractical diversion, an elaborate lie based on a big muddle.
John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB).
John Dunn responds:
ONLY THE terminally paranoid would take an eight-hundred-page book which at no point mentions them and covers much of world history as personally targeted at them, so John Keane is quite mistaken to suppose that I am responding in my review to any implicit criticisms he meant to offer of my own work, character or political taste. (Always safer to criticize explicitly.)
I draw careful attention to his own determined expansion of democracy's spatial and temporal odyssey and the reasons why he views this as important. The key structural disparity between our books (beyond his being over three times as long) is that mine was attempting to answer a single, relatively restricted question which may have a clear answer: how and why has the word democracy become such a prize in contemporary political conflict? I defy anyone to extract a clearer answer to that question from his own book.
I also applaud (rather than revile) the central purpose of his tome: seeing democracy's passage through time and space as a single global story. The two matters over which we seriously disagree are the work of Moses Finley, an altogether more demotic and lucid writer and a far more potent thinker than either of us, and the determinacy and promise of monitory democracy as a category. Finley, a victim of Senator McCarthy before he became a professor of ancient history, made no attempt to instruct anyone in how to view democracy's passage across the world. He merely asserted the democratic credentials of Athenian democracy within the ranks of citizens over the oligarchic interpretation of American politics then commended by America's leading political scientists. Like Keane (unadventurously enough), I regard the spread of electorally accountable governments across the world as a clear civilizational advance; but like him too, I see them as a pretty blunt and feeble instrument for rendering power effectively accountable. Where we differ is in our assessment of how coherently and democratically the range of practices he christens "monitory" contrives to supplement electoral democracy. The point is not to applaud or sneer at these practices but to think harder about how it might be possible to change the world for the better.
John Dunn is a fellow of King's College and an emeritus professor in the department of Politics & International Studies at the University of Cambridge.
