I opened The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today, by David Stasavage (Princeton, 2020), hoping to find insights on the prospects for democracy in Russia, and China. And so I did. I closed the book with a better understanding of American democracy as well.

Along the way I encountered Lewis H, Morgan (1818-1881), a nineteenth-century railroad-lawyer-turned-social-theorist remarkable enough to have been cited by Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud. Here I want to tell two stories, one about Decline and Rise, the other about recent developments from which the book emerged.

To be continued and presumably concluded, after various interruptions and inconveniences,  next week.