Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

So democracy seems to have survived for another day here in the United States, no matter which side you're on.

Hopefully you're pro-democracy, one way or the other. Of course we had a fun conversation with Cornell West the day before election day, but

that was more about the spirit of democracy. Today we're going to be talking about the history of democracy.

You know again, as I said in the previous podcast, democracy is something we take for granted. We're just taught that it's good. It's a positive valence word that you can throw out there when you're talking to other people.

But it's not obvious, right? It's not self-evident that democracy is the best kind of government.

And certainly through history, places have been democratic and places have not been democratic. So how did it come to be democracy?

And why did it sometimes go away? How did it both get invented? And why did it sometimes get overturned?

Today's guest is David Stassavage, who is dean for the social sciences as well as a professor of politics at NYU.

And he has a book out on the decline and rise of democracy, where it's a wonderful book, you know, very readable, big picture history kind of book.

But he makes a couple of very interesting points that weren't obvious. One is that we think of in our Western focused viewpoint, democracy has coming to be in Greece and then spreading to Rome and then kind of fading away before being rediscovered, which is a very inaccurate history of early democracy in David Stassavage's point of view.

He thinks that early democracy was all over and I shouldn't say he thinks he points out correctly and obviously to any historian early democracy was all over the place. There are many societies, groups, tribes, including here in the Western hemisphere, where democracy was the form of government that was accepted in all sorts of different ways, sort of more or less direct democracy, more or less republican versions, etc.

And then the Athenians really sort of theorized it in a special way and of course Rome helped really establish the republican way of doing things.

But then we do know that in Europe anyway, democracy kind of faded away for a while.

And so one interesting question is what was the original democracy and David makes the good point it was long before Athens.

The other interesting point is how did it come back into Vogue because today if you're a modern grown up nation state, you want to be thought of as a democracy, whether or not you are, how did that happen.

And again, we tend to look at Europe and the rise of democracy back the recovery of democracy if you want to put it that way in Europe.

But then that raises a question, why was it in Europe rather than anywhere else?

And so if you look at the world a thousand years ago and you look at sort of the major power centers, you would have picked out the Islamic world and you would have picked out China.

Maybe India, but Europe would not have been in the top two. Europe was a relatively weak low income, low gross domestic product kind of place.

And so David makes the argument that interestingly one of the reasons why democracy sort of refluished in Europe is exactly because of its backwardness because the states that existed in Europe were less good at controlling their populace.

And so the rulers had less information about what was going on, therefore they could tax them less efficiently. The bureaucracy was not as good and therefore they could punish and control and raise armies less efficiently than in China or the Islamic world.

...