Reviews

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The Sunday Times Published 7 June, 2009 (original link here) Democracy: 1,000 Years in Pursuit of British Liberty by Peter Kellner and The Life and Death of Democracy by John Keane - The Sunday Times review by Dominic Sandbrook: With public faith in our democratic representatives at an all-time-low, it is good to be reminded that things were once an awful lot worse. In 1831, the rotten borough of Old Sarum in Wiltshire sent two MPs to parliament despite having just 11 voters, all of them landowners who did not even live in the constituency. By contrast, Manchester, the emblematic industrial city of the age, did not have any representatives at all — although, these days, some voters might consider that a blessing. “Bribery, corruption and intimidation were endemic,” writes Peter Kellner in his fascinating chronicle of British democracy; indeed, the disturbing thing is that to many of our predecessors, Michael Martin and Margaret Moran would have seemed paragons of virtue. Essentially a vast compilation of constitutional and political documents, Kellner’s survey of our democratic history from Athelstan to Brown works better as a kind of lucky dip than as a continuous narrative. Some of his choices are a bit odd: I defy anyone to read Roy Jenkins’s report on proportional representation without nodding off, while Gordon Brown’s speech on liberty in 2007 is merely a litany of tedious pieties. But there are some glorious nuggets here: extracts from Shakespeare and Shelley; blazing rhetoric from Bright, Gladstone, Churchill and Bevan; and perhaps most memorably, Sir Edward Coke’s judgment in the Gunpowder Plot trial, which instruc-ted that each conspirator “have his privy parts cut off and burnt before his face…his bowels and inlaid parts taken out and burnt”, and so on, until his quartered body was “set up in some high and eminent place, to the view and detestation of men”. Surely not even the greediest modern MP would deserve such a punishment. In his elegant and thoughtful introduction, Kellner debunks the myth that Britain was a unique cradle of liberty. Iceland’s parliament, he points out, met three centuries before our own, while the phrase “the mother of parliaments” was actually coined by John Bright in an angry speech lamenting that the British franchise was so limited. But “most of today’s tenets of liberty and democracy”, Kellner argues, can be traced back to ideas and arguments that first raged in Britain. Our gift to the world, he suggests, is not democracy itself so much as our unbroken tradition of arguing about it — based, among other things, on our long history of empirical thought. In John Keane’s global history of democracy, however, Britain plays only a supporting role, with an index entry far smaller than India’s and hardly bigger than Brazil’s. What this gigantic book does is effectively to globalise the story of democracy, downplaying at almost every turn its Anglo-Saxon roots, and showing how deeply our notions of its history are rooted in nationalist assumptions. So, for instance, he sees the future of democracy not in the great circus of American presidential elections, but in the extra-ordinary example of modern India, where a huge society “brimming with different language and cultures” required a new kind of democracy. “Monitory ­democracy”, Keane calls it, a system in which power is diffused across a society in courts, commissions and assemblies, and spread across borders, too, thanks to international forums, summits and NGOs. As a bracing intellectual exercise, Keane’s book is highly impressive. He points out, for example, that democracy was not invented in Athens, as we often think: since there is evidence of Phoenician and even Sumerian assemblies, it was probably a Near Eastern creation rather than a western one. He argues that the world’s first parliamentary assembly was the Spanish Cortes in 1188, forged in the crucible of the Reconquista. And he demolishes the myth that Islam is inherently hostile to democracy or civil society, pointing out that through the development of self-governing mosques and associations, early Islam acted as a “covered bridge” from “assembly-based democracy to the world of representative government”. He even introduces us to the first Islamic theorist of democracy, Abu Nasr al-Farabi, who lived in the 9th century, subsisted on a meagre diet of water and basil juice, and was reputed to speak more than 70 languages, which seems a bit unlikely. For all its learning, though, Keane’s is an easier book to admire than to like. For one thing, it is far too long: he spends 90 pages, for example, telling us about the intricacies of Athenian democracy, ­complete with diagrams of jury-selection machines, before pulling the rug from under our feet with the news that Athens’s role in the history of democracy has been greatly overrated. In the long sections on, say, the history of the Uruguayan constitution, it is hard to resist the suspicion that he is merely showing off his erudition. And there is something distinctly off-putting about a book that is always patting itself on the back: in the introduction alone, Keane congratulates himself on his “careful attention” to detail, “spirited case” and “even hand”, while a conclusion praising himself for “reading widely in several languages” should certainly have been deleted. Despite its vanity, though, Keane’s book is an awesome scholarly feat, so I hesitate to recommend Coke’s penalty for the Gunpowder plotters. An evening locked up alone with Roy Jenkins’s report on PR should be punishment enough. Democracy: 1,000 Years in Pursuit of British Liberty by Peter Kellner Mainstream £25 pp544 The Life and Death of Democracy by John Keane Simon & Schuster £30 pp960

 

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