The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World

"If it’s okay with you, I put two of Larry’s books on the list. I think they do need to be read in conjunction with one another because they’re written perhaps ten years apart. The Spirit of Democracy still reflected the optimism of what Samuel Huntington labeled ‘the third wave of democratization’. This is the wave that began with Spain and Portugal in the early 1970s. It peaked with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the transition of a lot of former communist countries to democracy. In the book Larry Diamond is an advocate of what is called ‘modernization theory’. It’s a theory that a lot of social scientists have held that as countries become richer, more educated, more open to a global, cosmopolitan, liberal order they are going to be more democratic—there’ll be a spontaneous shift towards democratic institutions. At the time he wrote it, he would look at a country like South Korea or Taiwan, both of which had been military dictatorships in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s but then, as they hit a certain level of income, became pretty good liberal democracies. The hope at that time was that there was this connection between economic modernization and liberal values that would eventually lead a country like China to democracy. But he wrote the book right at the moment when things were beginning to shift towards what he labeled a ‘democratic recession’ in his second book and is now, I think he might say, even heading towards a democratic depression."