Democracy is invoked to support the vast majority of the world's governments. We have been talking about it for thousands of years, and attempting to put it into practice for hundreds, believing in it as the logical culmination of human affairs. But if both North Korea and the United States consider themselves democratic – and, indeed, both liberals and conservatives, capitalists and communists, bureaucrats and populists – isn't the idea meaningless?
This is the biography of one of the world's most powerful ideas, a belief in the value of the collective, a battle between abstract rights and passionate convictions. In the end, only its citizens can decide on its fate.
