The study of democracy is usually left to political scientists, sociologists or contemporary historians, for whom its antique origins form little more than a picturesque backdrop to the story of its twentieth-century triumph. In their accounts, its heartlands tend to be North Atlantic: the United States, Britain and France. As for the term itself, ‘democracy’ is standardly defined as a set of electoral procedures and representative institutions, legitimating political rule. Within this field there is room for a variety of views: the liberal wing of orthodoxy pines for greater voter participation, while the hard-headed right rejoices at apathy; but both consider a regular electoral cycle to be a minimum condition. There is also a common historical narrative: from modest, property-owning beginnings, democracy was successfully extended to incorporate first working men, then women. Twinned with ‘freedom’, it defeated fascism in Europe and, after 1945, confronted its enemy, totalitarianism, in the Communist East. From the mid-1970s a third wave of democratization washed away the dictatorships of Europe’s southern fringe—Greece, Spain, Portugal—before sweeping most of the world after 1989.

Luciano Canfora’s Democracy in Europe: A History of an Ideology breaks with this tradition in nearly every respect—conceptual, geographic, historical.footnote¹ Canfora himself is not a political scientist but a classical philologist, trained at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in the 1960s; a fiercely independent intellectual, originally of the pci, and more recently of the pdci, one of the small groups to emerge from its collapse, for which he ran as candidate in the European parliamentary elections in 1999. In a prolific œuvre, his writings include studies of Demosthenes and Thucydides, a foundational analysis of the narrative principles of classical historiography, a striking biography of Julius Caesar, and three books on Togliatti, of whom he remains a great admirer; not to speak of many reflections on contemporary politics. Notable among his skills has been historical and textual detective work, yielding a set of remarkable demonstrations—among them, that Giovanni Gentile was, contrary to official legend, killed on orders of the pci leadership in 1944; that the celebrated papyrus attributed to the geographer Artemidoros of Ephesus (second to first centuries bc) is almost certainly a forgery, probably by a nineteenth-century Greek adventurer; that a letter sent in 1928—supposedly by Ruggiero Grieco, a member of the pci leadership in exile—to Gramsci, awaiting his trial in prison, was a provocation of the fascist police. Far from separating classical rigour from political commitment, he has directly theorized their connexion. His most recent work, Filologia e libertà, is devoted to the argument that, historically, a passion for precise textual truth has always required a rejection of canonized authority, and an independence of mind that freedom of thought alone can assure.

Democracy in Europe combines these backgrounds in an intriguing and highly original work. Conceptually, Canfora flatly rejects the standard view of democracy as a set of institutions and electoral procedures. Endorsing Norberto Bobbio’s view that ‘the essence of democracy is egalitarianism’, he argues—anathema to the mainstream perspective—that it ‘may reassert itself within the most diverse political-constitutional forms’.footnote² Following Aristotle, Canfora proceeds to define democracy as ‘the ascendancy of the demos’, that is, the rule of the poorer, non-property-owning classes.footnote³ On this basis he proposes a historical narrative of democracy’s fortunes in Europe radically at odds with conventional accounts. In place of a progressive widening and deepening, Canfora sees only brief moments of localized and immediately embattled democratic breakthrough, among them the early 1790s in France, the decade following 1917 in Germany and Russia—a high-water mark—and the late 1940s in France and Italy. For the most part, though, Canfora’s story is of the failure of democracy, in his sense, and of how ruling elites have managed the egalitarian threat of broadening suffrage to ensure their own freedom of action. The post-1950 period is represented as a grim political landscape, featuring the erosion of democratic-egalitarian aspirations in both eastern and western Europe, and the final triumph of what Canfora calls the ‘mixed system’—‘a little democracy and a great deal of oligarchy’, combining ‘the electoral principle’ with the reality of bourgeois class ascendancy—as the formula for contemporary political rule.footnote⁴

Geographically, too, Canfora reverses the standard argument. The people’s democratic republics of central and eastern Europe are given serious critical consideration as ‘experiments in democracy’.footnote⁵ Indeed, the western welfare-state system is seen as a pale imitation of the eastern model, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc as coterminous with the defeat of political egalitarianism. The United States is mentioned only for its role in stabilizing property systems on the European continent. Instead it is France that emerges as the political nation par excellence: birthplace of the idea of genuinely universal suffrage, and proving ground for the methods by which it would be neutered from 1850 on. French political history occupies the lion’s share of Canfora’s book.footnote⁶

Democracy in Europe is therefore a frontal attack on intellectual orthodoxy as well as continental self-esteem. Unsurprisingly, it has provoked strong reactions. The book was originally commissioned as part of a multi-national ‘Making of Europe’ series under the direction of the French historian, Jacques Le Goff, alongside Peter Burke’s European Renaissance, Jack Goody’s European Family, Charles Tilly’s European Revolutions and a string of other illustrious titles, all of which were to be produced across five languages by top-flight European publishers: Blackwell in Britain, Seuil in France, Crítica in Spain, Laterza in Italy and Beck in Germany. The editors at Beck, however, flatly refused to publish Canfora’s contribution, apparently on the basis of a scandalized reader’s report by the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, epitome of right-thinking, who declared it ‘nothing more than a Communist pamphlet, superseding in dogmatic stupidity even the products of the ddr’—an absurdity, given the book’s unremittingly heterodox approach.footnote⁷

Rather than a substantial engagement with his argument, however, Canfora’s German critics contented themselves with a series of misleading cavils designed to impugn the Italian’s intellectual integrity by tarring him with Stalinism. The most concrete charge is that Democracy in Europe provides an orthodox Soviet interpretation of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. But as Canfora convincingly demonstrates in his pamphlet, L’occhio di Zeus, replying to critics, this is based on a wilful misreading. In fact, after analysing the Pact in the context of France and England’s refusal to join a tripartite alliance with the ussr against Hitler, Canfora goes on to link it to the nationalist involution of the Soviet experiment and discusses at some length the ‘trauma’ that it caused. It may be that his comparison of the Hitler–Stalin agreement to Roosevelt’s recognition of Vichy France, and to the cynical East–West partitioning of Europe agreed at Yalta, also served to irritate his German critics. But what is most striking about the latter’s overheated reaction is their complete failure to interrogate the work’s conception of democracy, its comparative architecture or its overall structural coherence. Democracy in Europe has thus had a peculiarly unbalanced reception: though generating a mass of commentary, its central theses remain virtually unanalysed. This is unfortunate, for Canfora’s historically well-grounded interpretation of democracy is a useful corrective to the standard view. The problems with his argument, meanwhile, touch on issues of central intellectual and political importance, not least for the left.

Admittedly, one obstacle to a full understanding of Canfora’s book is the organization of the text itself. Democracy in Europe pans from fifth-century Athens to Berlusconi’s Italy over some 250 dense, lively and polemical pages, combining historical account with interpretation, in a way that defies conventional comparative schemes. Some places and periods are treated in minute detail, others barely touched upon. After a fascinating philological analysis of the meaning of democracy in ancient Greece, the account moves to France, charting the course of universal suffrage from 1789 to the second Napoleon. Backtracking to 1815, Canfora next discusses the emergence of liberalism across Europe as a whole. He then returns to France, to follow the political developments of the Third Republic from the Commune to 1914, and the consolidation of liberal parliamentary regimes across Europe prior to World War One.