Introduction / Xavier Márquez -- 1. Herodotus’s Political Ecologies / Joel Alden Schlosser -- 2. Protagoras’s Cooperative Know-how / James Kierstead -- 3. Aristotle on Democracy and Democracies / Kevin M. Cherry -- 4. Cicero, On the Republic / W. Jeffrey Tatum -- 5. Democracy without Elections: Popular Rule according to Alfarabi / Alexander Orwin -- 6. Consent and Popular Sovereignty in Medieval Political Thought: Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor pacis / Takashi Shogimen -- 7. Machiavelli’s Democratic Turn / Catherine H. Zuckert -- 8. James Harrington and the Rule of King People / J. C. Davis -- 9. Baruch Spinoza: Radical Republican / Nathan Cooper -- 10. Thomas Paine and Democratic Contempt / Mario Feit -- 11. Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow: The Defence of Natural Rights and the Right to Self-defence / Andrew Kahn -- 12. Of Postmen and Democracy: Sieyès’s Theory of Representation / Lucia Rubinelli -- 13. ‘Morals and Enlightenment’: Bolívar’s Virtuous Democracy in the Angostura Address / Guillermo Aveledo -- 14. The Puzzle of Political Leadership in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America / Zhichao Tong --
15. ‘Family Selfishness’ and the Corruption of Public Virtue: Harriet Taylor Mill’s Enfranchisement of Women / Katherine Smits --
16. Lenin: Soviet Democracy in 1917 / Paul Blackledge -- 17. Democracy in the Revolutionary Thought of Rosa Luxemburg /
Rosemary H. T. O’Kane -- 18. Max Weber’s Charismatic Democracy / Xavier Márquez -- 19. An Alternative Democracy: Dissent in Gandhi’s Great Trial of 1922 / Anuradha Veeravalli -- 20. Sun Yat-sen: People’s Democracy and Chinese Democracy / Theresa Man Ling Lee -- 21. Hobson on Democracy and the Humanized Economy / Colin Tyler -- 22. A New Reading on Authority and Guardianship (wilayah): Ayatollah Muhammad Mahdi Shamsuddin / Hamid Mavani --Conclusion.

This collection of short essays on texts in the history of democracy shows the diversity of ideas that contributed to the making of our present democratic moment.

The selection of texts goes beyond the standard, Western-centric canonical history of democracy, with its beginnings in ancient Athens and its climax in the French and American revolutions, recovering some of the significant body of democratic and anti-democratic thought in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. It includes discussions of well-known philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, but also of a variety of thinkers much less well known in English as writers on democracy: Al Farabi, Bolívar, Gandhi, Radishchev, Lenin, Sun Yat-sen, and many others. The essays thus de-centre our understanding of the moments where the idea of democracy was articulated, rejected and appropriated.
Spanning antiquity to the present and global in scope, with contributions by key scholars of democracy from around the world, Democratic Moments is the ideal text for all students wishing to expand their understanding of the ways in which this contested concept has been understood.