Democracy has reshaped politics, economics, and culture around the world. This provocative book asks, can you have too much of a good thing?
To the popular mind -- and most politicians -- more democracy means more freedom. Not so, argues Fareed Zakaria in The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. In fact, the American form of democracy -- considered the model for the rest of the world -- is among the least "democratic" in use today. Members of the Supreme Court, for instance, are appointed, not elected; and the Bill of Rights enumerates a set of privileges to which citizens are entitled no matter what the majority says. In other words -- and as our Founders understood -- it is by restricting our democracy that we enhance our freedom.
Zakaria is right, and why shouldn't he be? He is only repeating what Montesquieu, Madison, and Toqueville knew: Democracy unaccompanied by the social restraints of institutionalized liberalism (in the proper sense of that word) can lead to the tyranny of the majority, to populist demagogy, and to the relatively quick, and ugly, collapse of democracy itself.
"Zakaria, one of the most brilliant young writers, has produced a fascinating and thought-provoking book on the impact of Western constitutional principles on the global order. "—Henry Kissinger |
# posted by SV @ 9/26/2003 06:30:00 AM