Loren Samons's book is a nuanced and perceptive history of classical Athenian democracy. Well organized and lucidly and convincingly written, the chapters of this book, devoted to elections and voting (Chapter 2), public finance (Chapter 3), foreign policy before and during the Peloponnesian War (Chapters 4–5), and national defense (Chapter 6), bring to light underappreciated aspects of Athens's democratic development. To offer only a few examples: Samons traces the roots of Athens's fifth- and fourth-century democracy to its sixth-century tyrannies, underscoring the important respects in which Athenian democracy came to resemble more egregious forms of tyranny. He tracks the emergence of a public treasury at Athens during the fifth century and shows how this shift in the practices and institution of property expanded both Athens's citizenry and its imperialistic tendencies over the course of the Peloponnesian War. He explores the effects of Athens's quest for empire on its domestic policies and, by way of a sustained but largely implicit contrast with Athenian militarism and foreign policy, he offers an unconventional and persuasive picture of fifth-century Sparta as less pathologically warlike than Athens.

What's Wrong with Democracy? aims to offer more than a history of Athenian democracy, however. Samons subjects to scrutiny fifth- and fourth-century Athenian institutions and policies—domestic and foreign—in order to bring to light “the dangers of democratic practices” and “the perils of democratic faith” (p. xiv) for modern America. In the author's view, contemporary Americans, like classical Athenians, have fallen prey to their democratic practices. The Athenians largely avoided the perils of democratic faith, however, because of what Samons describes as the subordination of Greek politics to society and religion (pp. 168–75). Undergirded by the “innate desire” of human beings to live in communities “in which religious practices, politics, social activities, and even economic affairs all relate to one another through their connection or subordination to a set of fundamental beliefs or principles” (p. 166), the Athenians' fifth-century self-understanding was, he maintains, largely independent of their democratic practices and institutions (pp. 92–95). Modern democracy, by contrast, is itself “a new American religion.” And what is wrong with modern democracy in America is that it enshrines “ideals like freedom, choice, and diversity as values or establishes them as goals without any other social framework of moral obligation” (p. 181).

If, as Samons writes, his overarching purposes are to foster criticism of and change individuals' minds about modern American democracy (pp. 1, xiv), then What's Wrong with Democracy? fails. In the 20 pages he devotes to the perils of democracy in the contemporary United States, Samons offers not sustained argument and constructive criticism but rather a polemic, punctuated by irate italics (pp. 178, 180, 181, 186) and disturbing stories from the news (p. 181), and anticipated but not justified by three “Digressions” interpolated into earlier sections (pp. 92–95, 119–24, and 166–67). The book also suffers, both theoretically and methodologically, as an account of classical Athens. Although the author makes a convincing case that Athens exploited its allies before and during the Peloponnesian War, was excessively punitive toward its citizens and rivals, and experienced crises of leadership in the aftermath of the war, and although these practices were, to be sure, coincidental with Athens's democratization, his claim that democracy was the cause of these practices and of Athens's defeat at the hands of the Macedonians is insufficiently demonstrated. This claim is, moreover, in conflict with another position he takes, namely, that democracy is best seen as an effect or “a product of Athenian society, the Athenian character, and the actions of certain Athenians at particular historical moments, rather than as a fundamental or defining principle of that society” (p. 171, italics in the original). While the case can be made that collective political institutions and individual ethical practices mutually affect, produce, and reproduce one another (and that this was true at Athens), this is not a position taken by Samons. Committed to a fundamental divide between politics and morality and insistent on subordinating the former to the latter, he cannot attribute to democratic politics the dual role of cause and effect of individual morality without falling into a contradiction.

A second flaw lies in the author's method. Samons writes what he calls “practical history” (pp. xvi, 9–10), which focuses on “important events and practices in the history of Athens” to ask “what happened” (p. 9, italics in the original). Insisting that only a “direct confrontation with these events will cause us to question the popular view that democratic practices tend to result in good government” (p. 10), Samons uses this method to criticize and correct the “history of ideologies” (p. 8, also pp. 119–24) that he maintains has produced an unwarranted and misleading bias in contemporary classics scholarship celebrating Athenian democracy. Unlike that scholarship that examines opinions, rhetoric, and interpretation, practical history requires relegating “ancient and modern opinions about the Athenian regime and rhetorical stances employed within the regime to secondary status” (p. 10).

Historical events and practices do not, of course, speak for themselves. As Samons notes: “Our best sources of information about Athenian history and government derive from contemporary historians (especially Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon), Athenian orators and intellectuals (especially Andocides, Plato, Isocrates, Demosthenes, and the anonymous author known as Pseudo-Xenophon), and Aristotle's works analyzing Athenian and Greek political life (especially the Politics and the Constitution of the Athenians, the latter possibly but not certainly written by Aristotle)” (p. 19). These historians, orators, and philosophers, as they themselves explicitly acknowledge, confront what happened not by cataloging “brute” facts, however, but by providing their own accounts and interpretations of events and practices via speeches (Thucydides and the orators), dialogues (Plato, Xenophon), and opinion (Aristotle). Samons's source materials thus belie his method.

Finally, while Samons is to be applauded for exposing in perceptive detail the undersides of democracy and for taking seriously concerns about that mode of governance set forth by classical authors, he would have done well to have taken equally seriously a further concern expressed by many of these same critics. For all of Athenian democracy's flaws, many of the classical authors treat democracy, especially in view of its realistic and possible alternatives, as the least bad regime. From this perspective, they wrote with a view not only to criticizing the democracy Athens had become but to helping Athens become a better democracy. To these authors, improving democracy required not subordinating politics to ethics or separating fact from value and institutions from character, but seeing and elaborating the ways in which these aspects of human life can and should work together.