Has Democracy a Future?
Article Summary and Author Biography
At this triumphant moment for democracy, we must look back on what has been the most terrible century in Western history. Ascendant as the century began, liberal democracy then foundered, and totalitarianism seemed the answer. It could happen again. Today's democratic societies are pressure cookers: technology destabilizes as it revolutionizes them, capitalism undermines as it enriches them, and race could cause the explosion. Only public leadership and affirmative government can manage the postmodern populist age.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., is a writer, historian, and former Special Assistant to President Kennedy. This article is based on the James Bryce Lecture on the American Commonwealth, to be delivered at the Institute of United States Studies of the University of London in September.
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
The twentieth century has no doubt been, as Isaiah Berlin has said, "the most terrible century in Western history." But this terrible century has -- or appears to be having -- a happy ending. As in melodramas of old, the maiden democracy, bound by villains to the railroad track, is rescued in the nick of time from the onrushing train. As the century draws to a close, both major villains have perished, fascism with a bang, communism with a whimper.
A season of triumphalism has followed. Two centuries ago Kant argued in his Idea for a Universal History that the republican form of government was destined to supersede all others. At last the prophecy seemed on the way to fulfillment. Savants hailed "the end of history." "For the first time in all history," President Clinton declared in his second inaugural address, "more people on this planet live under democracy than dictatorship." The New York Times, after careful checking, approved: 3.1 billion people live in democracies, 2.66 billion do not. According to end-of-history doctrine as expounded by its prophet, the minority can look forward to "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
For historians, this euphoria rang a bell of memory. Did not the same radiant hope accompany the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century? This most terrible hundred years in Western history started out in an atmosphere of optimism and high expectations. People of good will in 1900 believed in the inevitability of democracy, the invincibility of progress, the decency of human nature, and the coming reign of reason and peace. David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, expressed the mood in his turn-of-the-century book The Call of the Twentieth Century. "The man of the Twentieth Century," Jordan predicted, "will be a hopeful man. He will love the world and the world will love him."
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