A Hornbook of Democracy Book Reviews

It is regularly said that “populism” is a vague, perhaps even useless, term because there are both right- and left-wing populists. Perhaps the idea is that there can only be one political continuum, and as Trotsky and Trump certainly don’t belong in the same spot on this line, it can’t be helpful to claim that they are both populists. In his biography of Willmoore Kendall, Christopher Owen nevertheless takes the position that his subject’s famous move from youthful democratic socialist to WWII isolationist, National Review co-founder, and intractable supporter of Joe McCarthy is explicable by the fact that Kendall was motivated throughout his short but explosive lifetime by his consistent advocacy for populism–at least if that term is taken to require an insistence on majority rule. Walter Horn reviews.

Thomas More’s 16th Century Utopia was hardly the first book on the “Ideal City.” I mean, even Plato wrote one. To give just a couple of U.S. examples, we have been blessed with wonderful works by Edward Bellamy, Tom Paine and Henry George. Indeed, around the time of the Constitutional Convention, Federalists and Anti-Federalists were producing aspirational pamphlets by the dozens. And after a bit of time, political theorists and other observers started turning out numerous books and essays, often lambasting the Electoral College, the Senate, single-member districts, “first-past-the-post” voting schemes, the power of lawyers and the courts, the “imperial presidency,” the two-party system, and on and on. I’ve actually written such a book myself, and though it was undeniably pie-in-the-sky, the work being reviewed here seems to me even more quixotic. Walter Horn reviews.

Like nearly every political scientist in the known universe, Princeton’s Professor Charles Beitz has no doubt that the (I would say “what little”) democracy there was in the United States prior to the turn of the millennium is on the verge of disappearing entirely. The difference is that Beitz is not entirely satisfied with the measures that can be used to verify this nearly universal impression among political scientists. So, in the Tanner Lectures reproduced in this slim, lucid volume, he makes an impressive attempt to understand both what would make for a clearly democratic jurisdiction, and the precise measurements that can be used to determine whether anyone’s intuitions about the level of democracy–or its current course–are appropriate. Walter Horn reviews.

An advantage of having a long-time expert like Matthew Kramer write an overview of a towering 20th-century intellectual like H.L.A. Hart is that he’s fully at ease with the many intricate debates surrounding Hart’s work. A concern, however, is that if this overview is intended to be an introductory text, the abundance of expertise at hand may also turn out to be a disadvantage, because some of the topics covered may seem marginal to the casual or student reader. That seems to me to be the case here. Walter Horn Reviews.

There is surely a good deal of truth in the old saw that one should not try to determine the nature or value of a book from its cover. But what about its title…or its subtitle? Can we tell much from that? Not here. Despite its title, Seabrook’s book is less an analysis of democratic equality than a sprawling, anecdote-rich chronicle of electoral manipulation in American history. In fact, the exact topic of what equality consists in for purposes of majoritarianism is almost never touched on, let alone discussed in detail. Walter Horn reviews.

Imagine a federal country in which the head of state has decided that the government of one or more of its subsidiary provinces should be suspended or entirely removed for incompetence or malfeasance. Suppose, as well, that national troops have been sent to those areas based on the claim that there is a danger to the public there that cannot be controlled by local law enforcement personnel. Walter Horn reviews.

To be honest, I am somewhat discomfited writing a review of On Truth in Politics. There is a lot I agree with in the book, and I am sympathetic with the general attitude of disgust expressed by its author toward the willful expressions of mistruth by politicians and their supporters–particularly by certain ones currently in power in the U.S. I also entirely concur with the author, a Professor and Administrator at UCONN, that anything like an attitude of indifference toward whether political statements are true can be deeply, even irreparably, harmful to a populace. Walter Horn reviews.

The story of Socrates’ death has been famous for millenia. The denouement is that the Greek sage could have escaped the punishment planned for him for his alleged corruption of the youth of his community, but he declined to run because he thought the right thing to do was to submit to his death penalty. Van der Vossen’s book considers this matter at some length, eventually (and tentatively) concluding that maybe Socrates wasn’t really obligated to drink the hemlock prescribed by his government for his sins. Socrates may seem to have landed himself in a very unusual dilemma. Walter Horn Reviews

It may seem that twenty years ago was a calmer, more peaceful time than it is now, at least in the (possibly post-pandemic, but arguably authoritarian) USA. But recalling the names of a few heads of state around the world in 2005 may remind us that there has never really been what ought to be called a placid year for human beings–even if the climate has surely gotten worse. Walter Horn reviews

One of the big things that either Trump or Musk or both have got up to since the recent Presidential inauguration in the U.S. has been the defunding and destaffing of USAID, the Federal agency responsible for dissemination of foreign aid around the world. According to the New York Times, the results of that initiative have already been quite dramatic. Walter Horn reviews.

In a useful 2003 primer for those thinking about voting rules, Daniel Horowitz writes, “To evaluate an electoral system or to choose a new one, it is necessary to ask first what one wants the electoral system to do.” No doubt, the goal of electoral systems is to aggregate preferences and produce policy choices from such tallies. But Horowitz insists that no system functions as “a passivetranslation of individual wishes into a collective choice.” Thus, he quite reasonably proclaims (though without producing anything resembling an argument for it) that “our voting rules will always bias the results in one way or another” Voter preferences, he says, “are shaped by the electoral system [and] cannot exist independently of it.” Walter Horn reviews.

In what might be reasonably surmised to be a response to the recent Congressional and Presidential elections in the U.S., I have been hunting around for a book to review that is focussed on the interrelationships between democracy and intelligence. Walter Horn reviews.