Mark I. Lichbach’s thoughtful monograph will be of interest to the social science community working on democratization. Springboarding off extended reviews of five old and new classic books, Democratic Theory and Causal Methodology in Comparative Politics makes a spirited argument that political scientists must embrace normative as well as theoretical and methodological debates on democracy. Moreover, it provides a set of instructions for how best to do so.

The book begins with a discussion of Barrington Moore’s (1966) seminal Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, identifying in it what Lichbach calls the “Barrington Moore Problem” (p.7). The problem is that Moore dreamed of “a free and rational society” (p. 8) at the same time that his social science led him to the conclusion “no bourgeoisie, no democracy” (p. 8), but it is not clear that his empirical finding is in fact compatible with his normative aspiration.

Lichbach takes Moore to task for appearing to believe that one can separate normative commitments from one’s choice of scholarly approach, including both the theoretical lens one uses to understand the world and the empirical methodology employed to test or develop one’s arguments. He points out that all approaches in fact privilege certain kinds of findings, resulting in different conceptions of what democracy is, where it comes from, and how it might best be achieved where it does not currently exist.

The bulk of Lichbach’s monograph consists of extended incisive critiques of four more recent books on democracy that, he argues, represent very different perspectives on the Barrington Moore Problem. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s (2005) Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy exemplifies a rational choice paradigm and comparative statics methodology that privileges a finding that democracy itself is “thin” (consisting mainly of certain procedural norms that can be easily identified) and results from deep structural conditions and developments that are largely impervious to any agency of individual leaders or activists (p. 12).

Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008) by Lisa Wedeen represents something very different to Lichbach, a constructivist paradigm and ethnographic methodology that favor a finding that democracy is something much deeper (“thicker”) than any particular procedure. Instead, according to the author’s rendering of Wedeen, democracy represents one pattern of interpersonal discourse that can give communities agency in influencing their own lives even in the absence of formal, competitive elections. Societies are thus highly free to generate their own democracy through discursive production of new understandings, largely free of the exogenously given constraints that loom so large for Acemoglu and Robinson.

Neither perspective satisfies Lichbach, who sees them as equally “bloodless,” shedding little light on the potential for creative democratizing endeavor by specific individuals, who feature hardly at all in either book, he says (p. 131). He then turns to a discussion of Atul Kohli’s (2004) State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery, which puts the theoretical emphasis on the state as an agential institution capable of generating precisely such purposive, democratizing (or de-democratizing) action.

Arguing that Kohli’s focus on the state is still too narrow, Lichbach ultimately concludes that Charles Tilly’s “contentious politics” approach, as exemplified in his concisely named 2007 book Democracy (p. 14), should be the starting point for comparative research on democratization. Evocative of Goldilocks, Lichbach finds in Tilly’s work an approach that is just right, one that considers a multiplicity of factors and is not too dismissive of individual or social agency while not ignoring the constraints supplied by historical and environmental factors.

Comparative political scientists, Lichbach concludes, should begin with Tilly’s approach, then test their arguments by stepping into the shoes of Acemoglu and Robinson, Wedeen, and Kohli. This approach, he argues, will enable researchers to improve both their understanding of democratization and their ideas for what can realistically be done to promote it, thereby solving the Barrington Moore problem. The book’s final three chapters then lay out a dozen recommendations as to how comparativists can realize this in practice.

Overall, the book is engaging to read, showing off Lichbach’s strengths as both a social scientist and political philosopher. It is full of nice turns of phrase and interesting ideas, and students of comparative politics will also likely enjoy his half tongue-in-cheek effort to identify the normative political views of Acemoglu and Robinson (“modern, liberal, and bourgeois”), Wedeen (“a postmodern communal activist with left-leaning, radical-democrat inclinations”), Kohli (“a postcolonial socialist”), and Tilly (“a democratic socialist concerned with social justice”) (pp. 149–54). This discussion serves to point out that none of these authors actually makes his or her own views plain for readers to see.

As with all good books, not everything is perfect. This one being replete with new coinages, not all are felicitous. The “ought/is” device, for example, seems to make the argument harder rather than easier to understand despite its cleverness. While the book is not long, some readers may also get the sense that many ideas are repeated too often and that the argument could have been made more concisely.

More substantively, I am not sure how useful in the end the 12 specific recommendations (“theses”) are likely to be for researchers in practical terms (p. 20). While I could see how they might frame a useful discussion with graduate students in a comparative politics field seminar, as guidelines they remain very general, are not worded in a straightforward way that will stick in one’s mind (to recite them here would have taken up a large share of the space dedicated to this review), and are too numerous for readers to easily retain how they cohere as a set.

In other words, I am left having a hard time conceptualizing what a work of comparative politics would look like that did all these things, and fear that it would wind up being either incoherent or a hyper-broad “theory of everything” that might in the end not get us very far. As a reader and comparativist myself, therefore, I would like to have seen Lichbach sketch out what a modest, normal good work of comparative political science would look like following his theses. Could a single article hope to do all this? And is it practical for a dissertation writer to follow this advice, trying to do everything? Surely Lichbach would not insist that all works must attempt to do everything. But if that is the case, then how are we not back to what the field is already doing, effectively employing a division of labor where normative theorists focus on normative theory, rational choice theorists focus on structural or institutional causes, constructivists focus on the social production of meaning, and so on, leaving it to others to piece them all together? I do not doubt that Lichbach has answers to these questions. The book simply left me wanting to know what these are.

The book is ultimately successful, though, in driving home the point that comparative political science cannot escape normative questions, and that whether we like it or not these are already embedded in the research we are doing. Each approach brings its own assumptions, and each author his or her own preferences, and we are better off being aware of this, making these as clear as possible to others in our own work, and doing what we can with our research to promote the betterment of the human condition. The ideas here are important and deserve consideration by all who are interested in comparative politics.