Liberal Democracy.

The archons of 'Western democracy' have long professed the belief that liberal democratic ideals are universal and must therefore be spread across the world at any cost. Where they have not promoted the so-called Western democratic ideal, they have at least believed that it will eventually take hold due to its intrinsic merits. When this happens, Francis Fukuyama argued, it would be the 'end of history' and the final sublime conclusion of civilisation. However, more often than not, Western powers have orchestrated regime changes overtly and covertly, knowing that a good nudge (with a pinch of violence) might speed things along.

Today, an emergent Cold War 2 is cocooned from the Western side in the garb of 'democratic values' pitted against 'autocratic regimes' such as Russia, North Korea and China. This rhetoric is incessantly repeated to domestic Western audiences to build a sense of animosity based on an incompatibility of autocratic systems at the deep-set level of 'values.' This leads to strange bedfellows, of course, since the US President prances about fist-bumping despots in the Gulf, while also bankrolling the arming of fascists and fascist-sympathisers in India; not the best embodiments of liberal Western values, to say the least.

Nevertheless, the liberal concept of democracy, Western dogma alleges, stems from a long tradition of civilised government in the West that began in the ancient democracies of Greece and reached their ideological summit in the Enlightenment era, with white men wearing grey wigs penning wonderful treatises by candlelight, including those of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Locke among many others. It is through their well-informed and enlightened view of a transformed society, based on the conditions of Europe that they sought to improve, that the enlightenment thinkers came up with liberal concepts that must be taught to the coloured savages of the world to better their miserable lives, one is told.

This dogma is so deeply entrenched among the reading public in the West that to question it would be tantamount to medieval heresy, and the self-congratulatory pseudo-intellectuals of the West would rather die than relinquish credit for the Western genesis of liberal democracy.

This dogma is, however, precisely what was challenged in a recent tour de force by Davud Wengrowe and (the now departed) David Graeber, two eminent anthropologists who have mustered a torrent of...