MAKING PEOPLE WISER

What we can learn from the world’s first democrats to resolve today’s crisis of democracy and ensure its future.

Around the world, democracy is fighting a defensive war against populism. But might it not be that democracy is failing, but that we have too little of it? Is our model of self-government – political parties and bureaucrats who govern, citizens who spectate – too weak for an age of partisanship, doomscrolling and AI?

In 508 BCE, a leaderless crowd of Athenian workers and farmers outfoxed an invading army intent on regime change and launched a radical experiment, defeating oligarchs through institutions that developed citizen competence, bridged social and political divisions, and tapped knowledge across society.

Drawing on Paulson’s long experience of political organization and classical scholarship, inspired by the political creativity of the ancients and comparably inventive democratic experiments in ours, Making People Wiser proposes new strategies for democracy to readers of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc. who are looking for understanding of the present and hope for the future.