Democracy today suffers from hermeneutic exhaustion in contemporary political contexts. It is regularly proclaimed as both a principle of war and a principle of peace, as a necessary component of free market capitalism and the name of resistance to economic globalization, as that which legitimates the power of the nation-state and that which perpetually threatens to undermine that power. As such, democracy risks becoming one of those worn-out coins that Friedrich Nietzsche invokes, “drained of sensuous force” (Philosophy and Truth, 1979, 84).

The stakes, however, are high, and perhaps this proliferation of meaning is not simply an indication of semantic entropy, but adheres to the etymology of democracy itself. After all, the people designates at once the common or the whole and that excluded remainder which falls outside of that designation: the poor, the rabble, the vulgar, the low. In The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era, Ralph Ketcham ignores both the paradoxical aspects of democracy's meaning and the historical struggles that speak its name, offering instead an account of how a number of great books have been used to “undergird and justify” the “idea of human self-government” over the past four centuries (p. 1). It is an ambitious task, and one that Ketcham pursues with an educated zeal. The modern “idea of human self-government,” he laments, has advanced “one kind of thinking of democracy (inclusive, equitable, rights protecting)” at the expense of “the active, qualitative life of the self-governing community” (p. 263). He therefore invokes the forgotten guidance of “good government” found in “the deep wisdom and value” of “traditional understandings of the nature of the polity” (p. 148). Not surprisingly, these “traditional understandings” are to be found in the work of “the ancients.” However, in addition to the usual invocation of Aristotle here, the author takes a comparative turn toward the work of Confucius and East Asian political thought.

Despite this turn, the broad outline of Ketcham's narrative of decline and potential restoration is reminiscent of the work of Leo Strauss. Not only does Ketcham recall the lost wisdom of the ancients and bemoan the lowered aspirations of modern political thought—from the good life to mere life, as it were—but modernity on his account also comes in distinct waves. Beginning with a pious return to the wisdom of the ancients and concluding with a screed against “postmodernism” (about which, more in a moment), the bulk of his study attempts to connect the thinkers of these different waves of “modernity thought” to corresponding stages of democratic development: Locke's empiricism and Newton's affirmation of a mechanistic universe corollate with the early history of the United States (modernity one); Bentham's utilitarianism, Dewey's pragmatism, and Darwin's theory of evolution justify the twentieth-century liberal corporate state (modernity two); the East Asian “appropriation” of these thinkers in writers like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Liang Qichao offers insights into the tutelary states of Singapore, Japan, China, and Korea (modernity three); and “postmodernism” signals the radical fragmentation of identities and a general crisis in democratic thought (modernity four). It does not seem to worry Ketcham that with very few exceptions, the thinkers he engages in this study cannot be easily characterized as democratic or that the “idea of democracy” has been passed on to us largely by its critics. Neither is there any indication that there might be anything but a happy synergy among capitalism, scientific and technological advance, and democracy. The book declares itself against the “decline of grand narratives” thesis in both its form and content.

Within these familiar narrative contours are some surprising exclusions and inclusions. Romanticism, for example, is strangely ignored. More productive, however, are the chapters dedicated to East Asian thought. This turn to non-Western sources is rich with potential. Ketcham's account of how thinkers like Mill, Montesquieu, and Smith were translated and interpreted in East Asian contexts is a compelling read, but it is unclear to me whether or not this particular turn to a non-Western uptake of Western sources in itself qualifies as an exercise in “comparative political theory.” In contrast to the “multiple modernities” thesis defended recently by Charles Taylor (Modern Social Imaginaries, 2004), for example, or the dialogue Roxanne L. Euben stages between Islamic and Western critiques of rationalism (Enemy in the Mirror, 1999), Ketcham's account of East Asian political thought emphasizes its appropriative character, and works hard to integrate it into a broader Western narrative. What we in the West have to “learn” from the East Asian example, it turns out, is how to better integrate (our) ancients with (our) moderns, that is, how to get better in touch with ourselves. There is no enemy in the mirror Ketcham constructs, but there is no real stranger either.

The author's bold narrative uniformity also results in occasionally superficial readings of individual thinkers. A danger attending any project of this scope, at times the oversimplification of complex thinkers comes close to caricature, as is the case with much of his lengthy discussion of postmodernism. Here, Ketcham relies on the vague repetition of a handful of postmodern phrases—“will to a system,” “presencing of otherness,” “grand metanarratives”—to paint a portrait of postmodernism at once all too familiar and unrecognizable. He lines up the usual foreign suspects—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard—adds some contemporary Americans—primarily Bonnie Honig and Iris Marion Young—and begins firing away with blanketing accusations. These postmodernists are “intent on parts more than the whole” (p. 183), are prophets of particularity who aspire to “voice” (p. 199), standpoint epistemologists who affirm that “the sense of justice remains specific to each group” (p. 204), proponents of a radical toleration that is akin to “uncompetitive Darwinism” (p. 204). Never mind that the thinkers named are all critical of identarian particularism, the self-sufficiency of voice, and the totalizing claims of “situated knowledge,” or that in contemporary political theory they are most closely associated with agonistic democracy. There is a pervading sense in these chapters that Ketcham is not in control of his material. Moreover, confidence in the reliability of his account is not restored by a look at the footnotes. In an ironic exemplification of the “postmodern” critique of the original or the authentic, he engages the work of these theorists almost entirely through pulled citations and summaries of (critical) secondary sources.

So if postmodernism leads to “subjectivity, reductionism, mere acceptance, meaninglessness, and cynicism—literally nihilism” (p. 263) [“literally nihilism?”], what are contemporary democrats to do? In the book's conclusion, Ketcham focuses his attention on the apparent neglect of virtue in the “festering crisis” of contemporary interest group politics, and calls for the state-led restoration of virtuous citizenship through four primary mechanisms: visionary leadership, occupations that encourage independence, a robust civil society, and civically oriented public education. That these mechanisms seem to correspond to central initiatives of the current administration—Bush's democratic messianism, encouraging small business ownership, funding faith-based initiatives, and assuring that there is “no child left behind”—is left unelaborated. Despite this book's central claims, there is no shortage of contemporary state projects to instill virtue in the polity. Moreover, Ketcham's stalking-horse oppositions between ancients and moderns, virtue and interest, self-government and good government, are too crude to achieve his wanted “criticism and explication of democratic theory” (p. 3). All of these oppositions veil much that is distinct about democratic politics, such as its capacity to enact a transformative politics reducible to neither the expression of shared values nor the clash of competing interests. A more truly comparative political theory might better engage the theoretical puzzles involved because the “idea of democracy” is not so easily at one with itself as this study suggests.