DEMOCRATIC VISTAS

• Published in: Modern Intellectual History
• Main Author: WINTERER, CAROLINE
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 2017
• Subjects: Sociology and Political Science; Philosophy; History; Cultural Studies; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1479244317000439; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1479244317000439

After a generation of grand stories about the rise of modern republican thought (the so-called “republican-synthesis” school epitomized by the works of Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock), James Kloppenberg's new book, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought , offers a history of democratic thought: what Kloppenberg calls “the idea of self-government.” In the course of nearly a thousand pages of text and notes, Kloppenberg traces democracy's emergence “as a widely shared, albeit still controversial, model of government” over the last four centuries in the North Atlantic world (1). The book is deeply learned and intellectually capacious, covering thinkers from the ancient Greeks, through the sixteenth-century wars of religion, through the American and French Revolutions, ending abruptly at the Civil War. Few intellectual historians writing today could have managed a book of such sweep. The number of authors, texts, and themes discussed is vast—so much so that at times it seems that the book could double as a history of thought in the West.