At the turn of the century, the ineluctable march of democracy seemed assured. The Cold War extinguished and eastern Europe freed, a Whiggish history of the world continued to be written. A quarter of a century on, the great wave has broken and rolled back. Democracy is not what it was in Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, Russia and Afghanistan. It has not emerged in China. The future looks less democratic than the past.
Such concerns bother the big brain of the former Supreme Court judge and medieval historian Jonathan Sumption in his latest brilliant collection of essays. One might reasonably expect him, as one of the great legal minds of our age, to have acquired the high-minded disdain for politics and democracy commonly found in a particular type of contemporary KC. But Sumption has no such snootiness. His is a refreshingly traditional take on the constitution – one which understands, with arresting clarity, the mechanical interdependencies of democracy, politics, free speech, law and rights.
Democracy’s mechanism, he observes, is winding down: ‘I am a natural optimist, but I have to say that I am not optimistic about the future of democracy, in this country or elsewhere in the West.’ He sees it as besieged by economic insecurity, intolerance and fear – and endangered by ever-growing public expectations that the state will fix everything. So it is that democracy ‘needs a coherent defence, not just against those who would like to dispense with it in favour of more authoritarian models but against those who would like to redefine it out of existence’.
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