Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics.

For the fourth talk in our series, History of Ideas, David looks at Alexis to Tockville's great book about American democracy,

written nearly 200 years ago.

But when you hear where he thought it was heading, some of it feels as though it could have been

written yesterday.

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me forward slash ideas.

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dot me forward slash ideas.

In these talks so far, I haven't said much about democracy.

I touched on it briefly with Wilsoncraft. But you might think, isn't that the

central idea of modern politics? How can you have a series about modern politics that doesn't

begin by talking about democracy.

Well I'm going to talk about democracy today, but it isn't the central idea of

modern politics. Democracy is an ancient idea. In its ancient form it means something quite

specific or at least it means a couple of quite specific things. For many ancients it meant ruled by the poor because democracy empowers the majority in any political society and it was always understood that in any political society most people would be poor.

But democracy also meant direct involvement by the body of the citizens, not everyone by any means,

...