Part II Ideas, Ch.11 Democracy

The conceptual histories of democracy span more than 2,500 years and refer to a variety of normative orders, institutional arrangements of political decision-making, social and economic structures, and basic values of a community. In bypassing pre-classical proto-democracies, as for instance in India and in Sumerian city-states, mainstream historiography generally traces the prehistory of popular (or self-) rule—very much like the development of other fundamental principles of modern limited, just, or lawful government—back to its initial circumstances in Greek...