The Case Against the Democratic State.

AuthorOtteson, James R.
PositionBook Review

* The Case Against the Democratic State

By Gordon Graham

Charlottesville, Va.: Imprint Academic, 2002. Pp. 96. $17.90.

This slim volume is part of a publishing program called "Societas: Essays in Moral and Cultural Criticism," which is advertised as an attempt to revive the tradition of thoughtful political pamphleteering that reached its zenith in seventeenth-century England. Its purpose is for scholars to discuss important "moral" and "cultural" topics by communicating with the educated lay public, not just with other scholars. The editorial advisory board of the series includes figures such as John Gray of the London School of Economics, and the five volumes already published include two by Gordon Graham, one by Anthony Freeman, one by Tibor Machan, and one by Graham Allen. Although the advertisement's claim that "each book should take no more than an evening to read" is a bit optimistic for Graham's Case Against the Democratic State, certainly the book can be read over a weekend, and in any event the series generally and this book in particular are welcome additions to academic publishing on political and cultural thought.

As befits the intention of this series, Graham's thesis can be put simply: the arguments typically thought to justify democracy as the best form of government in fact fail to justify it, and indeed some of the central conceptual commitments that people assume support democracy turn out to support far different sorts of government.

The book begins impressively: "The history of the last two hundred years, at least in Europe, is a story of the immense and relentless growth of one social institution at the expense of the others. I mean the State" (p. 1). This declaration is a promising start for a several reasons. First, it draws attention to a spectacular feature of human social life in recent history, a feature that has been unaccountably underinvestigated and even ignored by most political theorists. Second, it asks the reader to pay attention to empirical matters, with which many contemporary political theorists are too little concerned. And third, it capitalizes the S in state. Graham retains his practice of capitalizing that's throughout the book, subtly suggesting to the reader that the state might be a single phenomenon with a single central nature that, despite superficial variations, can itself be investigated, analyzed, and understood.

Beginning the discussion in this way also introduces an ongoing theme of Graham's book, which is that people's beliefs about political matters...

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