This is a short history of the doctrine and practice of democracy, and of the usages and practices associated with it in the modern world. It argues that democracy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for good government, and that ideas of the rule of law, and of human rights, should in som[...]

Crick asserts that politics, with its compromises and power struggles, remains the only tested alternative to government by coercion, making both freedoma nd order possible in heterogeneous societies. For Crick, politics is necessarily imperfect, messy anmd complex, yet his book defends it against h[...]