The sense that mature Western democracies are in crisis has led many scholars to search back through history for effective solutions to present-day constitutional impasses and dysfunctional institutions. P.'s short book identifies the conflation of elements of Greek democracy and the Roman republic as a conceptual problem for modern democracy, and focuses on elements of each which might, when applied separately, offer some remedy to the challenges of legitimation, participation and the undue influence of interest groups in contemporary democracy. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a scholar with expertise in Roman law, he argues that modern democracies would benefit from the ‘negative power’ of an office similar to that of the tribunes of the people of the Roman republic. While P.'s enthusiasm for ancient solutions to modern problems might not fully persuade, he provides an interesting overview of the arguments, many insights grounded in detailed knowledge of ancient legal and constitutional arrangements, and useful comparative examples from beyond the Anglosphere.

The introduction sets out the problems of present-day democracy in its role as a ‘counter-power’ aiming to ‘curb the hegemony’ of the elite, while looking to the past to provide ‘inspiration for the future’. P. briefly surveys specific challenges to democracy, the sense exploited by populists that current arrangements are oligarchic, and demands for epistocratic political arrangements, favouring the participation of a knowledgeable or educated elite, which would in a sense formalise oligarchy.

The first chapter moves steadily back in time to identify one cause of the confusion evident in contemporary democracy, the assemblage of the English (or ‘Gothic’) model of democracy from a mixture of potentially incompatible practices and ideas drawing from the different institutions and practices of Athenian democracy and the Roman republic. The starting point is the present moment, characterised as both a crisis in democracy and as ‘post-democracy’, drawing on C. Crouch's model, although not his recent update to it (Post-democracy [2004]; Post-democracy after the Crises [2020]). However, P. looks further back to an earlier point in the history of political thought, the growth of the doctrine of the separation of powers, as identified by Montesquieu in the arrangements of England, and as further explored in developing what became the constitution of the United States of America. This reverse chronology is a refreshing perspective and opens up some of the complications of the classical influences on democracy, although not all can be fully explored in a slim volume.

P. surveys the legacy of Athenian democracy as one of direct participation by citizens in governance and decision-making. While acknowledging the various limitations to that participation – from the exclusion of women, migrant workers and the enslaved, to the physical limitations on attendance by those male citizens entitled to participate but excluded by distance, poverty or lack of space –, he supports the claim of contemporary proponents of direct democracy that it offers a remedy to the deficiencies of modern representative democracy. While those deficiencies are well known, P.'s proposal of technological solutions to enable mass participation seem naïve in the light of recent history. Contrary to his claims about e-democracy, mass participation may be more vulnerable to manipulation, the promotion of minority interests and even corruption, than representative democracy has been. While P. sets out a positive case for mass participation in online governance, current research into the subversion of democracy through online influence campaigns and the actions of disruptive actors as well as owners of traditional and new media paint a less positive picture of the prospects for e-democracy. While cyber-utopianism has enabled many interesting thought experiments and theories, the research of, for example, the Oxford Internet Institute offers a sobering assessment of the impact of new communications technologies on democracy (see https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/digital-politics-and-government/).

The historic and potential contribution of the Roman republic and its institutions to modern democracies is the subject of the final chapter. Here P.'s focus is on the operation of the tribunate as a check on the power of the elite, a favoured model since the dawn of modern democratic thought (see P. Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust [2008], pp. 133–7). He sets out a model of the Roman republic that emphasises class conflict rather than the balance between sectors of society identified by Polybius, seeing the plebs and patricians as operating within almost distinct societies and regimes, rather than as cooperative parts of a unified whole. He concludes that the positive contribution that the Roman republic can make to modern democracies is the institution of the tribunate as a ‘negative power’. P.'s exploration of the role is largely theoretical; a detailed case study of the role in practice would have been useful, given that the best-known instance of the exercise of tribunician power, that of the Gracchi brothers, was not an unmixed success.

P. is not averse to rhetorical flourish, passionate digressions and to unwieldy sentence structures. Occasionally this makes it harder to extract the argument. Much of the detail of supporting evidence from ancient texts and contemporary scholars is retained in the copious and scholarly endnotes to each chapter; a more substantive engagement in the main text with some of the key scholars whose work is cited, especially Rosanvallon and Crouch, would have been interesting. The book also lacks a formal conclusion, so the question of how a tribunician counter-power could work with a novel participatory structure remains unsettled. Both notes and text contain untranslated quotes from both ancient and modern authors, which seems at odds with the aim to appeal to an interdisciplinary readership. But P.'s expertise and perspective make this an interesting addition to scholarship on the predicaments of democracy.