Democracy

By Deva Woodly 

An Obama supporter holds up a “Yes We Can” sign as President-elect Barack Obama gives his victory speech during a 2008 election night gathering in Grant Park. Courtesy of Getty Images.

I was in my final year of graduate school, writing a dissertation on the place of persuasion in the success of contemporary American social movements, when the nearly two-year-long campaign for the American president who would succeed George W. Bush began. As a student of politics, it was impossible not to be transfixed by the epic discursive battle being waged, first in the hard- fought democratic primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and finally during the general election campaign in which, Obama, having won against his formidable Democratic rival, entered a political contest with veteran politician John McCain. For the American public, this contest was the most closely followed election in decades. A Gallup poll taken in June 2008, early summer, when political attention is usually at its nadir, found that nearly two-thirds of Americans described the 2008 campaign as “exciting.” By September, Gallup found that a record 87 percent, almost nine in ten Americans, reported that they were following national politics closely. The astonished poll takers wrote, in the summary of their results, “This significantly exceeds anything Gallup has measured since it began asking this question in 1995.”*

By Israel Gershoni 

Ruz al-Yusuf reacting to the outbreak of the Second World War. “History repeats itself: The end of Hitler at the hands of democracy.” Britain, France, and Egypt portrayed as Allied Forces against Nazi Germany. September 9, 1939.

“Freedom is the ultimate virtue of mankind”; “Democracy is the only political system of modern man and modern society”; “Therefore, Egypt must be committed to freedom and democracy.” These are the words of ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad in his book Hitlar fi al-Mizan (Hitler in the Balance), which aroused sharp public interest in Egypt and the Arab world when it was published in Cairo in early June 1940. The book was written when Hitler was at the height of his military successes, and it was widely assumed that nothing would thwart his advances. ‘Aqqad’s book leveled a harsh attack on Hitler and Nazism. Through his analysis of Hitler’s complex and deranged personality, ‘Aqqad deconstructed Nazi racism, dictatorship, and imperialism. He portrayed Hitler and Nazism as the ultimate danger not only for freedom and democracy, but also for modernity, the very existence of modern man and enlightened culture. In ‘Aqqad’s view, the merits of a liberal democracy were rooted in: individual freedoms and civil liberties, constitutionalism, a parliamentary and multiparty system, the separation of powers, equality for all citizens, cultural pluralism, and the unquestionable legitimacy of political opposition.

When ‘Aqqad (1889–1964) expressed these views in the early years of the Second World War, his liberal democratic worldview had fully coalesced. Already in his early fifties, he was an established and well-known intellectual active for more than three decades. In hundreds of articles published in the Egyptian press, and particularly in his book The Absolute Rule of the 20th Century (al-Hukm al-Mutlaq fi al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin), published in 1929, ‘Aqqad reaffirmed his commitment to democracy and his rejection of any form of absolutism, oligarchy, aristocracy, and autocratic monarchial rule, and in particular Fascism, Nazism, and, in a different way, Communism. As a representative of the Wafd party in the Egyptian parliament, and later as the intellectual leader of the Sa‘adist Party and its representative in the Chamber of Deputies, ‘Aqqad was one of the most consistently democratic activists in Egyptian politics and culture.

By Mohamed Nachi 

Protests in Tunisia culminated when Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled for twenty-three years, fled on January 14, 2011.

The Tunisian revolution of 2011 (al-thawra al-tunisiya) was the result of a series of protests and insurrectional demonstrations, which started in December 2010 and reached culmination on January 14, 2011, with the flight of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the dictator who had held power for twenty-three years. It did not occur in a manner com­parable to other revolutions. The army, for instance, did not intervene, nor were there actions of an organized rebellious faction. The demonstrations were peaceful, although the police used live ammunition, bringing the death toll to more than one hundred.

The demonstrations began in the town of Sidi Bouzid, west of the country’s geographical center. On December 17, 2010, a young street vendor set himself on fire following the confiscation of his wares (fruits and vegetables) by the police. Mohamed Bouazizi was twenty-six, and he succumbed to his burns on January 4. The next day, five thousand people attended his funeral. He became the symbol of the liberation of the Tunisian people from the despotic rule of the Ben Ali regime. The population, and predominantly the youth, began to demonstrate with calm determination, in order to demand the right to work and the right to free expression.

By Jeremy Adelman 

Jeremy Adelman, Member (2001–02) in the School of Historical Studies, explores the complex nature of Albert O. Hirschman’s (above) optimism during his early years at the Institute.

Albert O. Hirschman became a permanent Faculty member of the Institute in 1974, moving from Harvard’s economics department to join Clifford Geertz in the creation of the School of Social Science. By then, Hirschman was not just famous for his writings about economic development and his analyses of Latin American political economies. His Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Harvard University Press, 1970) had made him one of the country’s renowned social scientists.

Behind the scenes, however, his concerns were shifting; he was, he said, “retreating” into history and the study of the intellectual foundations of political economy. Retreat did not sever his interest in the present. If anything, it was the present that gnawed at him, especially in Latin America. In late summer 1973, Hirschman became the Chair of the Social Science Research Council Joint Committee for Latin American Studies. Ten days later, he learned of the violent overthrow of Chile’s socialist President, Salvador Allende, whom Hirschman had met and admired as an example of a “reform-monger,” a type he celebrated in Journeys Toward Progress (Twentieth Century Fund, 1963), his epic of Latin America’s hopeful 1960s. Allende’s death and the disappearance of friends and former students, indeed the wave of authoritarian regimes sweeping the region, shattered the optimism that had buoyed his thinking.