Lummis, who has taught in Japan for years, has unfortunately not been much heard from in the U.S. and the West generally until the publication of Radical Democracy. I'm no fan of political science normally -- too often the author has a theory to push or a political stance to defend at some cost, usually including common sense -- but I re-read Lummis's book at least once a year to unstuff my head of Newspeak and doubletalk and cynicism. He cuts through sloppy and wishful thinking with clear and approachable prose, and I'm grateful to be able to recommend this book to anyone who values honest thinking about what power in the hands of the people means and has meant historically. Lummis does not trot out new solutions for real problems so much as return us to the roots -- hence his title. "How to democratize any particular antidemocratic organization -- a kingdom in south Asia, a communist country in eastern Europe, a banana plantation in the Third World, a multinational corporation in a capitalist country -- is a question that can be answered in concrete form only through the process of democratic struggle with each such organization. In this sense, radical democracy is different from utopianism. It does not seek to impose a preconceived model; such impositions always turn out to be antidemocratic, however `democratic' the model itself may be. It means a struggle carried out on democratic principles, a process from which new forms of organization emerge. Such a struggle can be begun in any organization, at any economic or technological level."
Lummis's critique of economic development as a process often carried on in highly undemocratic and ultimately destructive ways is perhaps the heart of his book. Yet he is no reactionary or Luddite. "How and when a people prospers depends on what they hope, and prosperity becomes a strictly economic term only when we abandon all hopes but the economic one." Too many polities get driven by economies, rather than by people and their actual needs, as opposed to their manufactured ones. His discussion of power in the hands of the peoples is international in scope, and American in its immediacy to current problems, crossing ideological lines. No doubt he can see democracy all the better for living and working in a foreign country, where one's most basic assumptions get challenged as a matter of course.
I teach in a high school, and this is one of the few books I wish I could get all my students -- and colleagues -- to read. As Lummis says near his conclusion, "Democracy is essential politics: the art of the possible."