James T. Kloppenberg presents the history of democracy from the perspective of those who established its principles, offering a fresh look at how ideas about representative government, suffrage, and the principles of self-rule and ideals have shifted over time and place.
With Toward Democracy, James T. Kloppenberg has undertaken nothing less than the story of democracy 'as it was imagined, understood, and practiced' from its origins in ancient Greece to its modern emergence in the 18th and 19th centuries. . . . In a series of finely crafted summaries of European thinkers and their American interpreters (including Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin), he shows how the genius of democracy took shape in the American mind and then asserted itself in independence and in the ratification of the Constitution." -The Wall Street Journal
