Setting the People Free

Why does democracy, as a word and as an idea, loom so large in the political imagination today? It holds sway over the political rhetoric of the modern world and has come to define a system of government that marks a huge moral and political advance from any structure before it. Democracy has become the political core of the civilisation that the West offers to the rest of the world. Setting the People Free traces the roots of democracy from an improvised remedy for the local Greek difficulty two-and-a-half thousand years ago, through its near extinction, to its rebirth amid the struggles of the French Revolution. John Dunn charts its slow but insistent metamorphosis over the next one hundred and fifty years, and its overwhelming triumph since 1945. He examines the differences and the extraordinary continuities that modern democratic states share with their Greek antecedents and explains why democracy evokes intellectual and moral scorn for some, and vital allegiance from others. Setting the People Free is a unique and brilliant account of this extraordinary idea and it’s evolution.