David Stasavage's argument that early democracy declined only to rise again in the late Middle Ages may be treated as a development of his prior, shorter book for the Princeton Economic History of the Western World series in which he argued for the significance of representative assemblies in the emergence of a system of public credit. Whereas States of Credit (2011) was limited to Western European city-states, The Decline and Rise of Democracy expands and extends the scope of Stasavage's argument. The title of the book has a touch of paradox, but only a touch, since the referent of democracy is double and time-bound—elaborated, it would read “The Decline of Early Democracy and Rise of Modern Democracy” (see 4, 7, 258–259). The book is divided into three roughly equal parts of one hundred pages, titled “Early Democracy,” “The Divergence,” and “Modern Democracy,” each comprised of four chapters, complete with an extensive scholarly apparatus of endnotes and bibliography. Democracy is defined as a mixed constitution (8, 24) founded on “the idea of constraining rulers to obtain consent from their people” (102). It comes in two variants: the direct form Stasavage calls early democracy, which boasted constant if restricted political participation, and the indirect, representative government without mandates, dubbed modern democracy, with broad if episodic political participation.

The author sets out to argue for two, connected hypotheses: (1) democracy is, historically speaking, a natural mode of political development for human beings; and (2) the current distribution of democratic and autocratic regimes across the globe is explained by the deep history of the respective regions. Specifically, autocracies result where the state or the bureaucracy preceded democracy, whereas wherever rulers had to seek consent for their coercive and extractive purposes, democracies developed. If (1) and (2) are true, Stasavage infers, then we should reject the view that democracy was invented in the West and hold instead that democracy is natural to human beings; this could soothe us “in our current age of democratic anxiety” (xi).

It is Europe's lack of science and civilization that explains the political divergence between it and China or the Middle East (13; this is one of several ironies peppering Stasavage's history, see also 11, 18, 44, 46, 84, 217, 305). The deep history of early democracy and early autocracy shows that China is “simply an alternative route for governance and a very stable one” (26); in the Middle East, early democracy “died out under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates” (166) because rulers inherited a state bureaucracy, allowing them to pursue the autocratic alternative. Autocrats rule and dominate a population through “elements of civilization” such as writing, geometry, and intensive agriculture (9–10). By contrast, “Europe's backwardness” (4) in terms of science and civilization underwrote its democratic present and future. Europe and its progeny, the United States, are different to China and the Middle East, then, because “by the time [states developed strong bureaucracies] democratic practices had become very firmly anchored, and they had also been scaled up to operate in large polities” (12).

The language of “rise” and “fall” refers to the temporal theory of sequencing that Stasavage employs in his explanation, treating historical moments as critical junctures that create path dependencies and/or lasting legacies. For example, the US Constitution of 1787 “would complete the transition” (243) of that country from the early democracy of the colonial assemblies in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Maryland (228–233) to its modern variant. According to the theory, in places where bureaucracy came first, autocracy followed; where democratic practices came first, bureaucracies could be run by rulers and ruled jointly. To the danger that a strong state can cause a democracy to slide into autocracy, “history [responds] that what matters above all here is how political development is sequenced” (27). The theory of sequencing permits Stasavage to infer there is reason “not to fear, despite indications, for the future of democracy in the United States and Western Europe” (305). This narrative redoubles the hallowed opinion that Anglo-Americans are indeed exceptional; from Stasavage's talk of historical “peculiarities” (17, 208) and “difference” (197, 307) exceptionalism is easy to infer—in one instance, “exceptional” and “different” are synonymous (206). To be sure, sequencing is not predetermination, and in Stasavage's capable hands it does not turn teleological. The author grants a full-blooded role to contingency in his narrative: had Muslims conquered the Middle East before the Sasanians built a bureaucracy in Iraq, the “subsequent history of democracy in the Middle East might have been very different” (16); similarly, had William of Orange and his supporters failed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, representative democracy without mandates might have never taken root in Britain (212). Nonetheless, an explanation that cedes such “a large role” (16) to contingency may compound the view that modern democracy is an Anglo-American privilege. For it seems that the Middle East simply cannot be democratic in the manner of England and the United States: the “peculiarities of Anglo-American history provide much of the explanation” for the characteristics Stasavage attributes to modern democracy (17)—the “Anglo-Saxon Exception” (113) is just that. We may infer that, like the protesters at Tahir Square in 2011, today's democratic activists in Hong Kong are playing a fool's game, for China's political development “has its own logic and may well stay that way” (307). Deep history can remain deep and bequeath legacies from which it seems impossible to escape.

One of Stasavage's major claims is that “we will learn that the story of democracy has not only been one of great thinkers writing great books” (xii). This may disabuse anyone who thinks the rediscovery of Aristotle led to city republics (as Stasavage titles his graph at 122). It will also surprise political theorists who know full well that the voices we hear in the sources are overwhelmingly antidemocratic—Aristotle included. It is by way of response to this fact that English-language scholarship in the past 30 or so years has dedicated itself to motivating a democratic theory from the extant texts (see Reference FarrarFarrar 1988; Reference FrankFrank 2005; Reference KasimisKasimis 2018). Stasavage's claim about the story of democracy also poses some difficulty with respect to what he categorizes as “European,” namely, the very same republics and city-states that identified with these traditions. The author excludes from this category the Byzantines, a multiethnic people who identified as Roman, no less inheritors of the once-unified Roman Empire than their counterparts in the West (Reference KaldellisKaldellis 2019). If the Byzantines are Europeans who belong on the bureaucratic path of political development during the millennium-long history of their empire (105, 174–175), then the deep history of Europe may contain more multitudes than the book allows.

The Decline and Rise of Democracy succeeds in talking to scholars across disciplines, its author's wide-ranging curiosity honed to make it an accessible read. It should prove useful for anyone who wants a bird's eye view, across time and space, of the development of democracy and autocracy as Stasavage defines these regimes. Yet, one cannot shake off the impression that the argument of the book is informed by the author's unexamined conviction that “modern democracy is an ongoing experiment” (296). Consistent with other flashpoints in US history—not least a civil war that Stasavage bypasses—the insurrection of 6 January 2021 in Washington, DC is par for the course in the checkered history of modern democracy, and a sobering reminder that to conceptualize a regime as an experiment is to acknowledge the likelihood that it may fail.