Society
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-021-00574-y
BOOK REVIEW
Adam Przeworski: Crises of Democracy
Cambridge University Press, 2019, 250 pp., ISBN: 978-1108498807
John Dunn 1
# The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021
This is a book by a remarkable man about a topic of immense
importance and great urgency which he has been studying
from one angle or another for most of his adult life. Its con-
clusions are careful, tentative and disconcerting. It is neither
partisan nor melodramatic, yet also resolutely undidactic—an
object lesson in how to think seriously about politics but leave
your readers better equipped to go on doing so coherently for
themselves.
Thirty years ago, champions of the regimes we continue to
call democracies were often confident in their power and quite
complacent about their superiority. Today, few still see them
as having performed with comparable efficacy over the last
decade and a half. Since 1991, they have of course had to face
a number of novel and challenging threats, none of which they
have handled with aplomb. The most formidable of these, the
depth of our collective ecological exposure, they are only just
beginning to recognize. Each of these on their own would
have tested the responsiveness and integrity of any political
regime. Some, like the menace of international or domestic
terrorism or the exigencies of struggling to protect a popula-
tion against a pandemic, might always have been easier for a
capable autocracy to handle effectively. It may yet prove true,
dismayingly, that such an autocracy proves better equipped to
handle the fiercest challenge of all, the threat to the world as a
continuing habitat for human beings on at all their present
scale. But even if this does turn out to be true, it is unlikely
to offer clear guidance on what the rest of the world’s popu-
lation would be wise to try to do. Capable autocracies do not
come to order. It is wholly unclear what prospect any of them
might have for longevity, and it would be especially unhelpful
to conclude that the most salient precondition for fashioning
* John Dunn
jmd24@cam.ac.uk
1
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
one is to have set out on the exercise of doing so a good two
millennia earlier.
A democracy in our current sense is a form of domestic
political order and it is the vicissitudes of this form across the
miscellany of settings in which it has come to make itself at
home which Adam Przeworski has devoted most of his aca-
demic lifetime to assessing. He has done so predominantly by
viewing it as a complex of institutions, operating within a
global economic and geopolitical environment, but doing so
in each of these settings within its own territorial perimeter,
and thriving or faltering principally through its handling of the
problems of domestic rule. As he turns in Crises of
Democracy to consider the prospects for the future viability
of this regime, his domestic focus might not always prove
ideal for gauging democracy’s capacity to handle a range of
challenges none of which emanates solely from within its own
borders. It could scarcely register directly the disruptive effect
of either America’s or Britain’s most aberrant response to the
earliest of these challenges, the assault of Salafist terrorism,
since this was deployed principally some distance beyond
their borders. Przeworski offsets this potential limitation of
his approach by the analytic clarity and weight of cumulative
comprehension which decades of sustained concentration
have given him and by the coolness and steadiness of judg-
ment which he brought to analysing its fate from the outset.
That quality of judgment was hard won and should not be
mistaken for disengagement from the subject matter. It issued
from many decades of political chagrin, from the Poland of his
youth and early manhood through a brief sojourn in Allende’s
Chile to a lengthy career in two of America’s great universities
in an epoch in which the politics of the USA itself has moved
relentlessly to the right and the majority of its citizens increas-
ingly lost their hopes for a better future for their children or
grandchildren.
It must be true by now that no one else in the world knows
quite as much about what has befallen democracy as a form of
regime across the globe over the last century. He has learnt it
directly through his own researches but at least as much

through those of the ample cohort of doctoral pupils from at
least five continents whom he has mentored over the course of
his career. The COVID pandemic has recently demonstrated
strikingly how intensively research in the natural sciences can
be carried through in collaboration across the globe if only the
incentives are strong enough, but the record of effective col-
laboration on the same scale in the social sciences is altogether
less impressive. This is partly because the incentives to col-
laborate could never be quite so strong, but to a larger degree
because the intrinsic obstacles to doing so are far more formi-
dable. What has qualified Przeworski especially to surmount
these obstacles so successfully is partly the cosmopolitan ele-
ments in his own life course, but to a greater extent, over and
above the idiosyncrasies of temperament, it has been the rec-
ognition and acceptance of the social character of knowledge
which he derived from his education in Poland. This has given
him a continuing concern with precision in method and valid-
ity in inference along with an unusually scrupulous acknowl-
edgement of the limitations of what has in fact been learnt
from their application in any particular instance. He views
research in the social sciences as a collective enterprise of
overwhelming importance and formidable difficulty, often vi-
tiated in practice by failures in any of these dimensions. This
concatenation of qualities has given his work a unique reach
and a global audience.
Przeworski himself is not at all a showy figure, though I
have seen him hold in rapt attention for a good hour’s length
many hundreds of Mexican political scientists, by no means a
habitually deferential or patient collectivity, and do so with
equal ease, in seminars of varying intimacy, demanding col-
leagues in New York, New Haven or Moscow. He has not
won the worldwide audience he now holds by a mixture of
rhetorical bravura with epistemic insouciance, still less by
blithe assurance in the quality of his personal political insight.
I would say, presumptuously and with no means to vindicate
the judgment decisively, that he has done so above all by his
combination of intense political seriousness, the pertinacity
and scale of his inquiries, and the resolute eschewal of any
trace of histrionics. When hundreds of Mexican political sci-
entists listen to him intently, what they know they are listening
to is the considered judgment of a lifetime.
What then can we learn from that judgment about
democracy’s prospects in face of the array of challenges
which now confront it? We certainly cannot learn either that
it is bound to fail or certain to pull through triumphantly. It
would always have been foolish to presume the second be-
cause of democracy’s overt and conspicuous opening to fail-
ure, the precommitment to fallibility which is merely the price
of the modest degree to which it ever contrives to become and
remain a structure of genuinely free choice. For the greater
part of Przeworski’s research career, there were grounds to be
sanguine about its prospects at least to persist after the point
that societies had reached a certain level of per capita income,
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even though all previous forms of regime throughout human
history have in fact failed sooner or later. But the possibility of
its failing in any relatively wealthy society where it had been
established for some time had come to seem far-fetched, or at
the very least comfortingly remote. That degree of comfort is
definitely now gone and it will scarcely return in a hurry.
The profession of political science has always found it hard
to distinguish the difficulty of knowing what is true about a
human setting at any point from the degree to which that
setting has been shaped stably and sustained through time
and both in turn from the stark limits to what can be known
about the human future. It is appreciably more proficient at
analysing routine politics than those of crisis and a clear pre-
ponderance of it, accordingly and prudently, has been devoted
to studying the former. The impediments to knowing about
politics are formidably deep. There is much that any human
being does not know reliably about themselves. Human pur-
poses are seldom open to direct inspection and some of the
most insistent and politically consequential of them are often
veiled with some care. All institutions are complexes of rules
and habits, but the rules are far easier to ascertain. They also
bear very varying relations to the habits, and relations which
can alter rapidly and surreptitiously in conditions of incipient
crisis. Even when they change quite abruptly and flagrantly, as
during the Trump Presidency, it is impossible in principle to
know quite how far or how durably they have done so.
As a set of rules, democracy, in almost all settings where it
purports to obtain, specifies a high degree of freedom in citi-
zen choice, but its habits never mirror those rules precisely and
can sometimes move away from them at a very brisk pace.
Once gone far enough, only the shell and nomenclature of the
institution may well remain. Something of the kind has clearly
happened in several major democracies over the last decade
(Turkey, Hungary) and is perhaps beginning to in India. At
least one once relatively wealthy counterpart, Venezuela, pre-
ceded all of them quite brazenly. Plenty threaten to follow.
Przeworski’s explanation of what precipitated this move-
ment holds no surprises. In the first place, it has been the
experience of an economic model which has unmistakably
failed a large proportion of their populations to varying de-
grees for at least two decades, whilst dizzyingly enhancing the
wealth of a very small proportion indeed. In the second, it has
been the impact of a relatively high level of immigration
which, even if its economic effect on the overall wealth of
their recipient countries has substantially increased, has failed
to flow through discernibly in any way to a substantial minor-
ity of their members. In the third, it has been the collapse in
many of long-established party systems and a rising distrust
and distaste for the politicians who make their careers through
the relics.
On Przeworski’s severe account, the cumulative insight
which political science can offer on the relative weight of
these factors is fairly paltry. But it does help to distinguish
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crises in democracy—processes of institutional failure with
legitimatory consequences—from crises for democracy—
menaces to its capacity to keep its citizens safely alive over
time. Every regime faces threats to its safety from the outside
sooner or later. Both call on the courage and loyalty of its
citizens to defend it and neither can be sufficient on their
own. Political science has yet to identify how much courage
and loyalty any regime can call upon. Hence, it has little or
nothing of its own to contribute so far to judging their capacity
to resist external attack or ecological collapse. What its limi-
tations reinforce in the end are quite archaic perceptions. You
cannot defend democracy as an individual citizen, though you
may perhaps still be able to betray it. To preserve it against
internal attack, you need, alongside many of your fellow cit-
izens, to be vigilant in face of whatever threatens it, organize
effectively together with them, and have the nerve to fight
hard when that becomes necessary. You can never know that
you will win.
Beyond such crises in and of democracy, there looms ever
larger and more imminent a single immense crisis for democ-
racy or any other form of human regime, the unforeseen and
unchosen outcome of the lives which humans before us have
lived across the world and which now pervades all our lives.
Unlike the great extra-human threats of the past, earthquakes,
tsunamis, volcanoes, asteroid strikes, we have brought this
one on ourselves and show every sign of intending to go on
doing so. On a conservative view, we have always been too
stupid and too selfish to face that scale of threat with honour or
composure, let alone much prospect of success.
It may well be too late to avert a global catastrophe for our
species as a whole. It will certainly be the clearest and fairest
test of democracy’s merits as a regime how well it learns from
now on to meet the devastation we have made together. So far,
its record is grim.
Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdic-
tional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
John Dunn Emeritus Professor of Political Theory, University of
Cambridge and author of The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of
Politics (2000), Setting the People Free: The story of democracy (second
edition 2018) and Breaking Democracy’s Spell (2014).