The Magazine

Democracy at Home

The promise and peril of universal suffrage.

Oct 22, 2007, Vol. 13, No. 06 • By PETER BERKOWITZ
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Democracy's Good Name

The Rise and Risks of the World's Most Popular Form of Government

by Michael Mandelbaum

PublicAffairs, 336 pp., $27.95

Until recently, at least by historical standards, democracy had a bad name.

In 1787, when state representatives gathered in Philadelphia to craft a constitution to replace the ineffective Articles of Confederation, democracy was identified with direct rule by the people and was considered a recipe for instability and injustice. In Federalist 10, James Madison rehearsed the conventional wisdom, which maintained that in a democracy "a common passion or interest will, in almost every case" seize a majority and impel it to tyrannize the minority.

"Hence it is," Madison observed, "that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

But also in The Federalist, on the basis of a new "science of politics," Madison defended the unconventional conviction, embodied in the recently drafted Constitution, that the proper organization of government institutions could capitalize on democracy's virtues, contain its disadvantages, and thereby render it an ally of liberty.

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