Quality not quantity

Paul Ginsborg begins his discussion of democracy with a fictitious but very believable meeting between John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx.

Both men are passionately interested in democracy and human rights. Mill is a firm believer in liberal values and the role of strong individuals in changing society.

He sympathises with socialism, but believes in only qualified suffrage, having little faith in the largely illiterate and ignorant proletarian masses and is convinced that leadership can only come from an unelected but educated elite.

Marx believes in universal suffrage and a dictatorship of the proletariat as the precursor of true democracy. Mill noted how progress could be achieved by "the power of combined action," but he didn't say how this could come about. Ginsborg attempts to take the valid parts of both philosophic positions and forge a new approach.

His book asks the questions why liberal democracy has failed to deliver more widespread citizen participation in both the political and economic spheres and why political apathy in the developed countries is so pervasive.

How can further progress be achieved today? he asks.

Democracy is now the global norm - by the year 2000, 120 of the 192 nation states of the UN could broadly be defined as "democratic" - but it is not simply a question of quantity, but rather of the quality of this democracy.

Modern democracy has been hollowed out and discontent in most countries is rising. Central to this and the accompanying increase of apathy or even cynicism is the power of multinationals over our elected bodies, as well as the increasingly retrogressive and consistently anti-democratic role of the US on the world stage.

Ginsborg rightly points out that neither Marx's proletarian revolution nor Mill's liberal hopes have borne fruit. He argues that new social forces, or "civil society" such as social movements, trade union organisations and other loosely constructed pressure groups offer more hope for progress today.

Civil society, he says, can foster a diffusion of power rather than its concentration and the use of peaceful rather than violent means can help to build horizontal solidarities rather than vertical loyalties and encourage tolerance and inclusion, stimulating debate and autonomy of judgement rather than conformity and obedience.

He argues that neither Marx nor Mill could have foreseen nor conceptualised the great expansion of participatory forms within our society today, at local, national and international level. But, at the same time, he also notes how the extraordinary growth of consumer capitalism has served in the developed countries as a great compensatory factor and soporific, promoting the feeling of powerlessness and precariousness that neoliberalism has done so much to create.

Ginsborg fully recognises the dangerous power of big multinationals today and notes that they have more economic clout than many a country and gives Marx his full due for recognising this well before it had reached its present culmination.

This book is a valuable and highly stimulating contribution to the debate about creating a more egalitarian and just society and should be read by everyone interested in social justice.