Democracy: A Life, by Paul Cartledge

Paul Cartledge, an Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University, has written a very engaging and detailed, but not forbiddingly technical, description of “people power” from Ancient Greece to the present. In keeping with the author’s expertise, if biography is the narrative trope of Democracy: A Life, then it is most definitely a Bildungsroman: more than two-thirds of the book cover events in Greece up to 322/1 BC; contemporary events since the “first wave” of democratization are merely alluded to in the epilogue. The “modern” version of democracy Cartledge juxtaposes to his Ancient models is thus still that of Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill.