24 March, 2012

On Intellectuals and Democracy by Tony Judt | The New York Review of Books

On Intellectuals and Democracy by Tony Judt | The New York Review of Books: Timothy Snyder: It’s not that one ought to be speaking about democracy or that one ought to be spreading it but rather that it’s precisely a very tender thing that is made up of a lot of small and fragile mechanisms and practices. One of which is making sure that votes are counted.

If you look at the history of nations that maximized the virtues that we associate with democracy, you notice that what came first was constitutionality, rule of law, and the separation of powers. Democracy almost always came last. If by democracy we mean the right of all adults to take part in the choice of government that’s going to rule over them, that came very late—in my lifetime in some countries that we now think of as great democracies, like Switzerland, and certainly in my father’s lifetime for other European countries like France. So we should not tell ourselves that democracy is the starting point.