A Bigger, Science-Based Vision of Self-Government
The Sciences of the Democracies (Edited by Benjamin Abrams and Jean-Paul Gagnon, UCL Press, 2025)
The field of contemporary political theory finds itself trapped in a paradox. As the editors of The Sciences of the Democracies observe, we live in an era where democracy is on the ropes globally, yet the fundamental demand for democratic self-determination has perhaps never been higher in human history. This collaborative volume—co-edited by Benjamin Abrams and Jean-Paul Gagnon—stands as an ambitious, intellectually defiant intervention to break democracy out of its rigid, epistemological cage.
Organized around four core themes—philosophy, institutions, education, and methods—the book serves as a manifesto for mapping, collecting, and reviving the vast, multi-millennial record of global human (and, in a few cases, non-human) governance. It’s reminiscent, in a peculiar way, of Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, “Nine Billion Names of God,” about an attempt to catalogue all monikers for the divine.
To understand the core mission of this book, one must understand the history it seeks to exhume. The framework of Gagnon, social and political philosopher at the University of Canberra. has been built on a years-long research journey on the question "What is democracy?". This book expands upon his 2021 essay, “Words of democracy: Rescuing an abandoned science,” which urged political theorists to resume a forgotten mid-century scientific project championed by Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss.
In 1947 in Mexico City, UNESCO's then-Director-General Julian Huxley commissioned a plan for a deep inquiry into the fundamental global concepts of liberty, law, equality—and democracy. Arne Næss was chosen to lead the philosophical evaluation of a qualitative survey sent out to 500 thinkers around the globe, yielding over 80 detailed responses. Edited into a 500-page report in 1951 by Richard McKeon and Stein Rokkan, the study was a high-stakes attempt to find scientific clarity that might ease Cold War ideological tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union—both of whom were aggressively claiming to be the sole proprietors of "true democracy".
Næss and his colleagues quickly realized that scientific declarations would not alter superpower propaganda. Instead, they argued that a painstaking, ideologically detached empirical categorization of the world's definitions of democracy could establish a terminus technicus (a universal technical term). This global terminology was meant to weaponize public understanding against political oversimplification, allowing everyday citizens to see through state propaganda and judge their own political circumstances clearly.
Despite its immense promise, the project was abruptly abandoned due to a lack of funding from UNESCO member states and a general academic lack of interest. Concurrently, the field of political science underwent a massive behavioralist pivot toward numbers, modeling, and statistical social sciences, kicked off by David Easton’s highly influential 1953 book, The Political System. Philosophy lost the battle to empirical social sciences.
Næss famously lamented that Rokkan was "lost to serious scholarship when he exchanged philosophical concepts for numbers and statistics". Consequently, foundational, cross-cultural works like Næss's Democracy, Ideology and Objectivity and McKeon and Rokkan's Democracy in a World of Tensions completely fell into obscurity.
In the absence of Næss's expansive global registry, the twentieth-century academic canon became dominated by Robert Dahl and similar figures. Dahl’s landmark 1956 text, A Preface to Democratic Theory, exerted a normalizing, highly restrictive influence on the discipline by theorizing democracy almost exclusively from a few familiar, notably American examples. Dahl explicitly confessed that he “made no effort to survey all or most of the traditional theories about democracy” and completely omitted the work of Næss and McKeon from his influential texts. Academic gatekeepers like Arnold Lien even claimed that compiling a comprehensive global history of democracy was an unnecessary burden because existing, localized histories were already available..
The Sciences of the Democracies aggressively exposes the danger of this ignorance. By limiting democracy to mean so little, Western scholars pushed a culturally specific model that is weak structurally and seems irrelevant or worse in Africa, Asia, and local communities. The book invokes the brilliant, century-old insight of Indian social scientist Benoy Sarkar, who warned that every political concept is merely the residuum of one or more cultures. The authors ask, poignantly, whether it is fair or scientifically sound for a tiny handful of Western notions to dominate and erase all other global expressions of popular will
Today, even mainstream political empiricists are finding themselves forced to return to theory to explain aberrant data, desperately seeking new variables by looking at non-Western historical models. They are grappling with concepts they lack the vocabulary to define—such as the subtle influence of dasa raja dharma among Rakhine governors, governance rooted in Theravadan principles, or the systemic impacts of "post-colonial stress disorder".
To challenge this narrow view, the book details an expansive "ethno-quantic domain" of democratic knowledge. John Plamenatz wrote in 1949 that democracy has always meant different things to different people across different times , while C.S. Lewis famously noted that without an agreed-upon, pluralistic understanding of the term, any single definition put forth merely exhibits the personal preference or prejudice of the person stating it.
Abrams and Gagnon expand the search for democracy far beyond traditional written texts, arguing that vital democratic knowledge is also generated by non-textual media, individual lives, human groups, and even non-human species.
Artifacts such as the glass dome of the German Reichstag or instrumental music can embody democratic principles of transparency and non-hierarchical collaboration. The text highlights long-standing historical practices like the Aymaran ayllu in South America, the Balinese banjar, and the ancient sabha and samiti assemblies of India’s Vedic period. It looks at the contemporary women-only village politics of Umoja, Kenya; medieval Ireland’s óenaig assemblies; and the enduring practices of the calpullin in Mexico.
The authors point to the kurultai (collective decision-making councils common across historical Central Asia), which explicitly paired serious governance with communal games and feasting. There are reviews of the inclusive, consensus-building ethic of Hózhó that guides the Diné/Navajo Nation ; the sophisticated participatory governance and administrative decentralization of Greater Ashanti; the Songhai Empire’s success in building consensus by treating all citizens as "shareholders" of the polity They wonder if incorporating elements of enjoyment and community care into modern Western elections might combat rampant voter apathy.
Strikingly, the book extends collective action problem-solving to the natural world, analyzing the non-hierarchical, democratic decision-making structures found among bees, ants, wild dogs, dolphins, and meerkats.
The volume does not shy away from the intense theoretical pushback sparked by Gagnon's linguistic approach. The editors actively catalog and confront the primary criticisms raised by conventional political scientists:
One such criticism is that it is dangerous to dilute the core meanings of democracy (conventionally understood as liberal, representative, and electoral) at a moment when those exact systems are facing grave, immediate global threats.
Another criticism is that trying to map every single meaning of democracy across space, time, and species is an endless, naive errand—like Jorge Luis Borges’s famous allegory of the imperial mapmakers, who created a map so staggeringly detailed that its scale matched the exact dimensions of the empire itself, rendering the map entirely useless.
The contributors offer a robust defense against these critiques, asserting that "we can only deduce for democracy from that which can be deducted".
If our vocabulary is artificially limited to our immediate modern context, our political imagination will remain permanently stunted. Painstaking empirical studies free from ideological entanglements remain our only real defense against oversimplification —a danger vividly illustrated by modern political parties (such as those in the 2024 US elections) who oversimplify democratic concepts to falsely present themselves as the exclusive keepers of "true democracy".
In its most compelling chapter, The Sciences of the Democracies directly confronts the Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki's infamous 1975 report to the Trilateral Commission, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies.
The book sets up a stark, irreconcilable contrast between these two texts. The 1975 Trilateral report defended an elitist, top-down Western European and American model of democracy. Shockingly, its authors concluded that the effective operation of a democratic political system requires "some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups," explicitly warning that bringing historically marginal populations (such as Black citizens) into full political participation risked "overloading" the state.
Abrams and Gagnon flag the Trilateral report as an act of infamy that has cast a long, toxic shadow over global pro-democratization politics for fifty years. Where the 1975 theorists advised governments to strengthen themselves by pushing the people away, The Sciences of the Democracies presents a complete alternative. It seeks an expansive reality where an individual's political, economic, legal, and social circumstances are thoroughly democratic
Ultimately, the book looks forward to the emergence of a brand-new lineage of political thinker: The Fourth Theorist. This yet-to-exist theoretician will build entirely new democratic frameworks from thousands of distinct textual and non-textual artifacts—including essays, paintings, songs, and films.
As a tantalizing example of what this alternative political imagination can offer, the book highlights a governing technique invented by the pre-Columbian Tlaxcallan Nation of Mexico. In their polity, aspiring politicians had to undergo one to two years of intense civic training, strict examinations, and even ritual public torture administered by priests. This grueling process was designed to deeply impress upon the candidate the absolute, inviolable holiness of the everyday people they wished to serve in the assembly.
The Sciences of the Democracies demonstrates that the antidote to democracy's modern crisis is not less participation, but a vastly larger collective imagination, Abrams, Gagnon, and their contributors have delivered an indispensable guide for the next century of democratic coexistence.
