Democracy Today: Ancient Lessons, Modern Challenges-Introduction 1

When former APS Member James Madison wrote his famous 10th Federalist essay in November 1787, he tried to purge the word democracy from the American political vocabulary. By a pure democracy, Madison wrote, I mean a small society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person. That description could work well for the city-states of ancient Greece or early modern Italy--for the Athens of Thucydides or the Florence of Machiavelli. But it would never apply to the extended republic of the United States, or even to its original member states. When Alexis de Tocqueville conducted his famous tour of the United States half a century after Madison wrote Federalist 10, his mission was not merely to describe a set of political practices and institutions, but also to make sense of an entire culture that was becoming pervasively democratic. That is why his two volumes discussing Democracy in America remain a landmark work of modern social science.