Hello, it's Catherine Carr here, producer of Talking Politics. In a moment it's just going

to be David, with a follow-up to the lecture we put out this time last year on how democracy

ends. Today he asks whether a few profound changes in our society could spell the end

of representative democracy as we know it, and he proposes some pretty radical ideas about

how to save it. Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review

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just one pound an issue. This is the short version of a very long story,

the story of democracy and it goes right back to the beginning. I am going to go back to

ancient Athens to start this story, but not because I want to argue that there's some continuity

between them and now. The thing that I'm interested in have been slightly obsessed with for

the past few years is what's different about now, and this is part of that argument. I want

to try and show something has changed in our democracy, and that's the way to make sense

of the crisis we're going through. It's a story in three parts, the beginning is the ancient world.

So if you go back to Athens where democracy more or less started and where it was the system

of government for about 200 years, it had very very determined critics who said it could never work,

and they said it could never work for three basic reasons, actually one reason times three.

The trouble with democracy they said is that by definition it's always going to give power to

the wrong people, because in any human society there would always be more of three categories.

And those three categories were first of all the poor, because the critics of democracy said

...