Nearly 30 years ago, the idea of “the end of history” gained great currency; its adherents claimed that human civilization was about to reach its final form, built on a firm foundation of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy. The events since 1989 have cast doubt on such thoughts. In our time, by contrast, we confront the troubling question of whether democracy has a future, or whether it is so besieged in so many different ways and to such a degree that it will fail.

In response to such concerns, recent literature teems with books seeking to analyze democracy, to trace its origins, development, and likely future. Toward Democracy is one of the latest and most detailed and illuminating examinations of the subject. Its author, James T. Kloppenberg, the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University, is a leading scholar of the interaction between ideas and action in the history of politics. His first book, the prize-winning Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (1986), offers a sophisticated analysis of the contrasts and parallels between the intellectual and political worlds on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, from the aftermath of the Civil War to that of the First World War. Kloppenberg's collection of essays The Virtues of Liberalism (1988) and his recent monograph Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (2012) supplement and extend his analysis of American political thought within a variety of intellectual, social, and historical contexts. In his Preface, Kloppenberg tells us that, as he contemplated launching his next major work, he faced a choice: shifting his focus forward to the present, or directing his attention backward into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and even before. He chose to move backward in time, concentrating on the period between the seventeenth century and the end of Reconstruction in the United States in the 1870s, arguing that those early struggles still resonated with the concerns and needs of the present.

Kloppenberg explicitly identifies his goal as seeking to tell a story of ideas in history, not as elevating ideas beyond the historical context that gave rise to them, or stressing the events and accidents of history over the ideas, but as seeing them in fruitful and illuminating interaction. Unlike so many earlier studies of the origins and development of democracy, Kloppenberg is too sensible and gifted a historian to fall prey to writing yet another Whiggish account of inevitable upward progress. Instead, he emphasizes the contingent and unforeseen, showing how we cannot truly speak of an inevitable march of democratic progress, but must instead recognize the fits and starts, the retrogression and diversions that make it difficult if not impossible to retain a Whiggish account of the gradual but inevitable progress of democracy.

Kloppenberg adds a new element to the mix of factors that, he argues, gave rise to and fostered the development of democracy. That new element is Christianity, particularly as it morphed and developed during the era of the Reformation. Kloppenberg sees the pluralism necessary for the ethical dimension of democracy as a product of, among other things, the profusion of religious sects under the umbrella of Protestant Christianity. Although not neglecting the classical roots of democracy in the ancient world, Kloppenberg is especially enlightening when he traces the consequences of the explosion of religious sectarianism for the development of democratic ideas of politics, governance, and society and their growing acceptance in the Old World and the New. Refusing to engage in a celebratory mapping of the high points of the evolution of political institutions and systems along democratic lines, Kloppenberg insists that we must see democracy as an “ethical ideal” and a “way of life,” both of which shaped—and were shaped by—the creation of new political systems and institutions and the adaptation of older systems and institutions.

Central to Kloppenberg's understanding is the inevitable turbulence of democracy, roiled by the clashes among the central ideas of democracy, which Kloppenberg identifies as “popular sovereignty,” “autonomy,” and “equality” (6). These ideas coexist with and collide with one another, as democracy itself changes over time and across geography; the turbulence he notes has to do not only with the nature of democratic life but also with the changing meanings and implications of democracy itself. For example, tacit assumptions about which persons and groups do and do not get to take part in public life, whether in the conventional realm of electoral politics or in the realm of political discourse surrounding and undergirding electoral politics, end up either undermining or bolstering democracy; so, too, those who are excluded by such tacit assumptions—for example, African Americans in the period 1789–1865—often mount cogent and powerful critiques not just of those assumptions excluding them from the civic realm, but also of that realm itself and its pretensions to being considered as democratic. One such example is the much-vaunted omission from the Constitution of racial or gender tests for office holding, which perhaps were not foresighted anticipations of the future but simply an instance in which there was a tacit assumption about excluding given categories of people, which, therefore, did not necessitate an explicit exclusionary provision in the nation's fundamental law.

In insisting on contingency, unpredictability, and difference, Toward Democracy differs from such classic studies of democracy as R. R. Palmer's The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959–64) and John Keane's more recent The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). Whereas Palmer and Keane approached the history and development of democracy from a secular perspective, Kloppenberg recognizes how the factionalized sectarianism of Protestant Christianity helped to generate a consciousness of the legitimacy and indeed desirability of democracy and democratic politics. In these and many other ways, Kloppenberg's rich account of the development of democracy will repay close and attentive study by readers in a wide range of fields and academic specialties, including those of constitutional and legal history. Kloppenberg's conception of democracy as an ethical ideal and a way of life will require constitutional and legal historians to consider how that conception of the subject would affect the exploration of the history of legal institutions and doctrines.

Democracy, Kloppenberg rightly argues, requires more than the presence of certain kinds of legal institutions and structures; history has shown us what happens to constitutional systems in which seemingly democratic institutions are but shells of their former selves, without the animating values that give democracy life. Cynical readers may well conclude that, in our strange political time, we need to reconnect with the core of democracy more than ever; if so, then reading Kloppenberg's book might well constitute an act of political resistance as well as one of intellectual illumination and discovery.