The worry that emerges from these three lively and thoughtful books is not that democracy faces extinction but that the kind of democracy that now envelops us – with its billionaires and its unemployed millions, its surveillance state and its unelected technocrats, its individual gratification and its ever-narrowing visions of the collective good – is one that previous generations would have regarded as a nightmare. Coggan wants to rouse us, and in different ways so do his fellow authors. But, as de Tocqueville warned, this is the kind of nightmare from which democracy may never awake.
Mark Mazower is professor of history at Columbia University and author of ‘Governing the World: The History of an Idea’ (Penguin)
