Why does democracy, both as a word and an idea, loom so large in the political imagination today? It holds sway over the political rhetoric of the modern world and has come to define a system of government that marks a huge moral and political advance from any structure before it. Democracy has become the political core of the civilization that the West offers to the rest of the world.
Setting the People Free traces the roots of democracy from an improvised remedy for a local Greek difficulty two and a half thousand years ago, through its near extinction, to its rebirth amid the struggles of the French Revolution. John Dunn then charts its slow but insistent metamorphosis over the one hundred and fifty years, and its overwhelming triumph in the years since 1945.
