Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750–1850 ed. by Joanna Innes, Mark Philp, and: Labour and the Caucus: Working-Class Radicalism and Organised Liberalism in England, 1868–1888 by James Owen, and: The Dignity of Chartism: Essays by Dorothy Thompson ed. by Stephen Roberts, and: Victorian Radicals and Italian Democrats by Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe, and: Liberty and Liberticide: The Role of America in Nineteenth-Century British Radicalism by Michael J. Turner (review)

The books under review all address the language and practice of modern democracy. Whether summoned to denounce political opponents or proudly embraced in liberty’s cause, during the nineteenth century “democracy” was a contested, endlessly complicated, and problematic term.

Literate reference to democracy was originally restricted to discussions of classical city-states or to England’s tripartite constitution of which it formed one element. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, democracy began to be reimagined. As Joanna Innes and Mark Philp note in their introduction to Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions, while neither revolution was launched in its name, the concept took on expanded meanings, generating both desires and fears. Their edited collection brings together leading historians of the United States, France, Britain, and Ireland, with the goal of offering survey-treatments, as well as advancing knowledge and setting an agenda for future research. Given their ambition and the relative brevity of the twelve chapters, one is impressed by the quality of each contribution and the success of the collection as a whole. Much attention is paid to usage. So, for example, in discussing Britain during the 1790s, Philp shows how infrequently radicals or advanced reformers—those whom Edmund Burke counted as “Jacobins”—used the term “democracy” or pursued it as their end. This is not surprising given traditional understandings of democracy as suitable only for small states and negative assessments of its role in the classical world. Philp finds the term “democrat” more frequently in use, and suggests a greater willingness to experiment with democratic terminology in private rather than public discourse. The descent of the French Revolution from fraternité to fratricide tainted the revolutionary cause and stalled the use of democratic language. As Ruth Scurr explains, by the time of Maximilien Robespierre’s death in June 1794, the idea of democracy, “previously a problematic term, had acquired new negative associations” (67). Nonetheless, the revolution opened the way for half a century of French debate over the related terms of equality, popular sovereignty, representation, republicanism, and socialism. In his excellent chapter on democracy and the self, Michael Drolet maintains that Alexis de Tocqueville’s work “can be understood as a prolonged engagement with the question of democracy’s implications for the self,” the restlessly acquisitive appetite of individuals making it impossible to achieve a general will (72).

While big data can prove helpful to chart the increased currency of democratic language—references to “democracy” (300–400) and “democratic” (over 700) peaked in the Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, in 1841 and 1842—at times literalness serves as a straight-jacket (122). In their reflections on the synergies among diverse understandings, the editors observe that before mid-century the “question of whether women should have the vote was nowhere central to public controversy...