SHORTEST HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY (PB)

The roots of democracy stretch back beyond Athens to Syria, Mesopotamia and the Indian subcontinent, where citizens’ assemblies held privilege and power to account over 3,000 years before the French Revolution. Is democracy past its sell-by date, as the current populist strongmen and their apologists would have us believe? Or is it time to embrace the true, radical potential of an ancient idea? This timely and illuminating new global history, by one of the world’s leading political thinkers and writers, gets to the heart of a complex, ever-evolving ideal.