By Charles Kurzman
In the last decade earlier than global struggle I, a wave of democratic revolutions swept the globe, eating greater than 1 / 4 of the world’s inhabitants. Revolution reworked Russia, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Mexico, and China. In each one case, a pro-democracy move unseated a long-standing autocracy with startling velocity. The nascent democratic regime held elections, convened parliament, and allowed freedom of the click and freedom of organization. however the new governments failed mostly to uphold the rights and freedoms that they proclaimed. Coups d’état quickly undermined the democratic experiments.
How will we account for those unforeseen democracies, and for his or her speedy extinction? In Democracy Denied, Charles Kurzman proposes that the collective agent such a lot without delay accountable for democratization used to be the rising type of recent intellectuals, a gaggle that had received a world identification and a near-messianic experience of challenge following the Dreyfus Affair of 1898.
Each bankruptcy of Democracy Denied makes a speciality of a unmarried attitude of this tale, protecting all six instances by way of studying newspaper debts, memoirs, and govt stories. This completely interdisciplinary remedy of the early-twentieth-century upheavals delivers to reshape debates concerning the social origins of democracy, the explanations of democratic cave in, the political roles of intellectuals, and the foreign movement of ideas.