Presentation drawing of “The Statue of Liberty Illuminating the World,” by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, 1875. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harry G. Sperling Fund, 2014.

Democracy

Volume XIII, Number 4 | fall 2020

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“A republican state based upon universal suffrage,” wrote the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in 1869, “could be exceedingly despotic, even more despotic than a monarchic state when, under the pretext of representing the will of everyone, it bears down upon the will and the free movement of every one of its members.”

I have often been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire.

—Thucydides, c. 404 BC
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