What might democracy look like detached from its conjoined twin, liberalism? In Demopolis, Josiah Ober turns his scalpel to the task of effecting a separation. The aim is to show how “basic democracy,” shorn of all hybridizing prefixes, might be a stable and attractive political regime in its own right. Even without liberalism’s guardrails, Ober maintains, democracy can avoid the pitfalls of “unstable, arbitrary, and casually brutish . . . majoritarian tyranny” (p. 18). The contours of basic democracy are instead given by recourse to the historical example of democratic Athens (Chap.1) and to a thought experiment: the founding of the imaginary basic democracy of “Demopolis” (Chap. 2).

In Ober’s view, Athenian democracy was not a majoritarian tyranny but an example of “collective self-governance by a socially diverse body of citizens, limited by constitutional laws that were also established by citizens” (p. 32). Such a regime would plausibly be chosen by Demopolis’s hypothetical group of founders with shared commitments to security, prosperity, and nontyranny (p. 40). Demopolis would be committed to the participation of all citizens (including efforts to ensure that the conditions for effective participation are met). Political equality, political freedoms (of speech, of association), and “civic dignity” would be recognized as “conditions essential for the preservation of nontyranny” (p. 52). These commitments would be entrenched in a constitutional order limiting the passage of future laws “that would threaten the three ends of prosperity, security, and nontyranny or that would threaten the conditions that make those ends achievable” (p. 52). All of this, Ober argues, was achieved historically before the advent of liberalism and can be robustly established independently of liberal values and arguments (thereby allowing nonliberals, such as those committed to a state religion, also to see democracy as a viable option).

If the author’s conceptual goal is a clean separation between democracy and liberalism, his method is deeply hybridized. Much of the book is dedicated to explicating why and how basic democracy would be stable, successful, and choiceworthy. Ober addresses the argument not only to the reader but also to skeptical citizens of Demopolis, who would learn in the course of their own civic education why basic democracy is valuable and worth the costs of participation. The tools that he deploys are “at once evaluative, explanatory, and historical” (p. 12), drawing widely on the social sciences. Part of the answer is democracies’ proven track record of providing security and prosperity for their citizens (Chap. 4). But Ober also sketches a naturalized anthropology of human capacities, arguing that democratic participation, far from being merely a cost to be borne, offers citizens the chance to develop and freely exercise the constitutive human capacities of sociability, rationality, and communication “at the highest level” (p. 93, Chap. 5). He develops simplified models and games that analyze how basic democracies might control and discipline citizens with desires to violate equal civic dignity or otherwise upset the democratic order (Chap. 6); how the demos can effectively delegate power to representatives while retaining “direct self-governing capability” (p. 133); and how nonexpert citizens might effectively make use of expert knowledge without ceding control to the experts themselves (Chap. 7).

Some political theorists might be wary of the range of tools employed. But Ober rightly argues that something like his hybrid method of normative argument, historical investigation, and strategic analysis is deployed throughout the canon, from Aristotle through Montesquieu and beyond (p. 12). Demopolis thus models an approach to political theory that seems both new and historically rooted; indeed, the book contains wonderful nods to the history of political thought. Inhabitants of the hypothetical city who do not share the founders’ preference for nontyranny are sent to “inhabit another territory” (p. 38), reenacting Socrates’ rustication of everyone over 10 years of age in founding Kallipolis (Republic 541b). And just as Hobbes thought that Leviathan could profitably be taught to subjects of a well-ordered commonwealth, Ober claims that “the pedagogic method of Demopolis’ civic education will be similar to the methodology of this book” (p. 74).

The canonical work that Demopolis most closely recalls is J. S. Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government (1861). Ober shares with Mill the goal of defending (certain) democracies against the charge of majoritarian tyranny and arguing that they can compete successfully with autocratic regimes in providing the products of good government. Like Mill, Ober recognizes that explicating the benefits of civic participation will be a central feature of that defense. Both also share concerns about the epistemic dimensions of democratic decision making. While Ober shares Mill’s interest in “ensuring fair and efficient inequality of influence,” he rejects Mill’s system of plural voting as a violation of political equality (p. 51, n. 29). But he also argues that citizens who do not complete Demopolis’s curriculum of civic education can lose their voting rights altogether, pushing his position closer to Mill’s (p. 170). Finally, Ober is at his most powerful and persuasive in articulating Demopolis’s commitment to civic dignity, “immunity from humiliation” (p. 20). In Ober’s view, only democratic regimes avoid making the paternalizing, “infantilizing” claim that some other agent (namely, the autocrat) knows better than ordinary citizens what is good for them: the autocrat’s claim to know better “is a constant affront, denigrating the very capacities that constitute [the citizen] as human” (p. 94). Civic dignity is ultimately cashed out in quasi-liberal antipaternalist and relational-egalitarian terms (e.g., pp. 122–24), positions that resonate with Mill’s own political philosophy.

These affinities raise the question, which many readers will have, whether Ober’s surgery to separate basic democracy from liberalism has been successful. It is not enough to insist, as the author rightly does, that the quasi-liberal features of basic democracy are not grounded in theories of “personal autonomy, rights, and justice” (p. 2)—one could say the same of Mill’s liberal utilitarianism. Ober also stresses that in a basic democracy (unlike a liberal regime), “citizenship might require religious conformity” (p. 174). But his central commitments share with liberalism an abiding belief that what ultimately matters is how individual lives go, as well as basic agreement on many (but not all) of the conditions and constituents of individual flourishing. For all the time spent on the operating table, Ober’s basic democracy may remain liberalism’s twin.

Inevitably, the author’s arguments reflect the contents of his toolbox. They are also inflected by what that toolbox lacks: a political economy or sociology. There is little in Demopolis about the specific threats posed to democracy by the unequal influence of the wealthy, and Ober takes no stance on whether contemporary democracies have been captured by wealthy elites (p. 132). He recognizes that in theory, elite capture is a perennial threat to democracies; the book’s response is to insist that basic democracy requires the cultivation of civic capacities and institutions enabling ordinary citizens, when necessary, to dispense with their representatives and govern “the state directly . . . by their own choices” (p. 155). But by and large, Ober seems sanguine that the wealthy will not use their advantages to undermine basic democracy, for example through political donations and campaign spending. Indeed, at times he seems to build the mechanisms for such usurpation into the very structure of basic democracy: “Democracy offers citizens unimpeded [emphasis mine] opportunity to exercise [their] fundamental capacities through participation in collective self-government”—including capacities for persuasion and communication (p. 17).

Ober’s is an avowedly optimistic argument (p. xvi), an account of democracy in which latent factions can be easily and predictably prevented from attempting to oppress one another or otherwise to undermine political equality and civic dignity. In his offering it, some readers might worry that Ober has lost sight of what made preliberal ancient democracy distinctive: the thought that ensuring the civic dignity of the many might require more robust accountability, control, and restrictions on the wealthy few. Yet even those who disagree with the book’s emphasis and argument will learn from a close engagement with it. In method and substance, Demopolis successfully builds on Ober’s previous work on Athens, the wider classical world, institutions, and the organization of knowledge, and he remains an indispensable guide to democracy—past, present, and future.