Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought

This Comprehensive, provocative, and authoritative, book traces the rise of democracy from its ancient origins through its consolidation in the late nineteenth-century North Atlantic. The ideas and practices of self-rule, long denounced as the failure of good government, fueled bloody revolutions in England, the United States, and France that culminated in disastrous civil wars. Toward Democracy shows how key figures in Western thought, ranging from Montaigne, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Madison to Tocqueville, Mill, Frederick Douglass, and Lincoln, shaped an understanding of democracy as an ethical ideal rather than merely a set of institutions-a goal toward which we continue to struggle.