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Book Review: The History Of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation By Brian S. Roper, John Passant
Book Review: The History Of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation By Brian S. Roper, John Passant
John Passant
Brian Roper's book on the history of democracy from a Marxist perspective is an ambitious one. Roper starts with Athens and Rome and then, as capitalism rises, examines the revolutions in England, America and France and after that the 1848 revolutions across Europe. He then looks at the Paris Commune and The Russian Revolution. In doing this, Roper describes three distinct but related forms of democracy - Athenian democracy which was a form of participatory democracy limited to sections of society; liberal representative democracy which, while nominally open to all, is actually limited to operating within narrow propertied confines; and …