Democracy

Jack Lively, who died in 1998, published Democracy in 1975. Tackling a broad, controversial topic in a brief, clear and definite way, it exemplifies the art of producing a short book on a vast subject. Lively's work is richly informed by historical study, and Democracy is written with a quiet authority that inspires the reader's confidence in the author's judgements. The central thesis is that the meaning of democracy is political equality. Less explicitly but importantly, there are two related sub-themes: the relationship between political equality and social equality, and the need (as Lively saw it) to consider political equality as one of a number of desirable social values which might need to be weighed in the balance. This thesis, and these themes, are in one way timeless; and the book may justly be regarded as a classic exposition of the political equality characterisation of democracy. In another way, the book is a classic because it deals with a particular period in the academic debate about democracy: when the value (and even the possibility) of normative enquiry was widely doubted; when the status of 'political theory' was challenged in the discipline of politics and by the claims of other 'modes of theorising' (Lively's term); and, above all, when the value (and even possibility) of democracy itself was strenuously contested. Jack Lively's central concerns in political theory were the study of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, in particular the study of democracy, and the defence of liberal values of rational political engagement and ameliorative social policy. Political theory was to be pursued by combining political realism with moral seriousness. He wished to resist (once?) fashionable ideas about the death of liberalism, the impossibility of rational political discourse, and the allegedly crippling relativity of morality.