Lars Behrisch’s Democracy’s Double Helix narrates the development of modern democracy as a composite of two elements with very different origins. On the one hand, there is the norm of equality, which emerged from a constellation of social and ideological developments in the early modern period. In this account, the most significant of these are the elaboration of natural law theories, the reformation, and the sociologically levelling influence of commerce. While the emergence of equality has disparate origins, Behrisch attributes the proliferation of this norm to the influence of the American and French Revolutions, each of which receives a chapter-length treatment. It is difficult to explore the passage from status to contract with great originality, but the book renders this history with style and concision.

Participation, the second strand of the double helix, is less familiar and more disquieting; surveying the history of premodern representative institutions forces us to confront the undemocratic origins of modern democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau contended that representative government came from feudal government,Footnote ¹ and Behrisch concurs: “equality is modern, participation is medieval” (299). This brings us to the central paradox of the book: modern revolutions are revolutions against an unequal, corporate society dominated by the estates, but the representative institutions of the estates (or something modelled on them) are our primary organs of participation. Behrisch’s approach to chronicling their transformation charts a middle course between typological analysis and description. Although sensitive to the fact that “Early modern Europe consisted of nothing but exceptional states” (97), his overview of early modern participatory institutions identifies how patterns of urbanization, commercialization, and involvement in military rivalry influenced states’ relative degrees of “infrastructural” and “despotic” power.

The book draws its historical method from two main sources. The first of these is the comparative historical sociology of Max Weber, Theda Skocpol, Thomas Ertman, and especially Michael Mann, who explored how European polities developed modern forms of fiscal and administrative capacity as they were drawn into military competition with their neighbours. Behrisch favours this type of explanation throughout, attributing a wide variety of unintended—yet always modernizing—consequences to fiscal-military competition. But while historical sociologists have typically confined themselves to the nexus between war and state-formation, Behrisch shows how military competition likewise served as a catalyst for democratization and the unfolding of equality.

The second source for the work’s method is the political sociology of Alexis de Tocqueville, whom Behrisch credits with discovering the double helix structure of modern democracy and perceiving the fraught relationship between its two strands. For Tocqueville, the expansion of social equality in the modern age was politically ambiguous. Although the liquidation of the estates had an equalizing and democratizing influence, it was also a force of sociological levelling and atomization. Unprotected by the elite yet participatory “intermediary institutions” of the estates system, a polity becomes vulnerable to dictatorial rule and the “tyranny of the majority” (18–19). In this respect, equality and participation are not necessarily a complementary pairing.

Because it is so central to the thesis of Democracy’s Double Helix, Tocqueville's argument deserves special attention. His emphasis on the liberty-preserving function of intermediate powers recalls Montesquieu’s theory that a regime is “monarchical” (meaning free) rather than “despotic” only if it possesses a nobility. Without these prerogatives, a state will be either popular or despotic.Footnote ² Tocqueville’s take on this thèse nobiliare draws on the historical writings of the French Doctrinaires, a group of statesmen and intellectuals who attempted to guide postrevolutionary France down a moderate path, evading both democracy and reaction. The Doctrinaires’ innovations vis-à-vis Montesquieu were (1) The theory that democracy is a social (as opposed to political) order, (2) A philosophy of history that viewed the unfolding of democratic equality as a providential inevitability, and (3) An attempt to draw equivalences between democracy and absolutism on the grounds that each was based on conditions of sociological atomization and the levelling of status distinctions.Footnote ³

From a certain point of view, Behrisch’s study is an iteration of the thèse nobiliare. In addition to embracing the basic version, he adopts the Doctrinaires’ innovations almost wholesale. He views the development of equality as a “likely, or even unavoidable, consequence of historical evolution” (300), and places a different accent on the sociological argument; rather than speak of “levelling,” he prefers to stress that the norm of equality has a potential to veer into a politics of “homogeneity” inhospitable to pluralistic participation. There is a kind of dialectic of Enlightenment at work here. Behrisch dedicates careful attention to how the introduction of formal, legal equality facilitated the governability of subjects as taxable, draftable, and administrable beings. In this way, the Enlightenment invented discipline at the same moment that it discovered liberty.

Each strand of the double helix is a cause for concern: participation is worrisome because it is archaic and elitist, while equality is dangerous because of its affinity with despotism and despotic arts of government. Both of these claims are problematic in their own way. The equation of equality with sociological atomization and the spectre of a “tyranny of the majority” were the contrivances of a liberalism that sought to oppose democracy and absolutism by equating them. Reviewing the second volume of Democracy in America, J. S. Mill observed that Tocqueville “has bound up in one abstract idea the whole of the tendencies of modern commercial society, and given them one name—Democracy.”Footnote ⁴ Similarly, the “tyranny of the majority” is not a genuine hazard of the democratic disposition, but rather a projection that Tocqueville inherited from the Federalist’s fear of “factional” class warfare and economic redistribution.Footnote ⁵ Does Behrisch make the same errors? Not exactly. Granted, he attributes the properties of commercial society to democracy and highlights the affinity between democracy and despotism. But his view of equality is broader than that of the Doctrinaires, encompassing both the sociological “equality of conditions” and the normative, legalistic, and political expressions of equality, which he considers to have a genuine emancipatory potential.

Behrisch avoids directly assessing the democratic nature of representative government, stipulating in the introduction that “the term ‘democracy’ without further qualification always refers to modern representative democracy” (xi). It is easy to see why he would not want to burden his study with the stakes of every work of democratic theory produced in the wake of Bernard Manin’s The Principles of Representative Government. But the evasion does not come without a cost. In the overall narrative of Democracy’s Double Helix, modern polities are undemocratic to the extent that they fall victim to the hazards of equalitarian homogeneity or preserve premodern forms of participation. Had Behrisch been more willing to entertain questions about the democratic credentials of representative government, he might have taken a more systematic view of how these polities remain unequal not only because they are in some respects still medieval but also because of their very modernity. Rather than dispense with titles, representative government invented new ones: education and the possession of mobile wealth delineated a “natural aristocracy” of civil society, the “true shareholders” entitled to participate as “active citizens” (181, 234–235, 271–272). Likewise, second chambers, two-stage electoral procedures, and extensive nation states are counter-majoritarian institutions. Representative government secures a maximum of popular legitimation while permitting a minimum degree of popular participation. This project is reflected in the set of divisions established by the intellectuals and statesmen who articulated the new science of politics: that between sovereignty and government, between active and passive citizens, and between republic and democracy. Behrisch is not unaware of this—the wealth of historical detail featured in Democracy’s Double Helix compensates for the shortcoming in the larger argument. But the overall effect of the study is to demonstrate that it is still possible to breathe new life into an old political sociology.