After Democracy

The heart of the book is a story about literacy, told the way a demographer tells things: in curves that rise and then flatten. For roughly a century and a half, across the West, the level of education climbed steadily. Primary schooling became universal, then secondary, and by the postwar decades a genuinely mass phenomenon appeared — whole generations reaching the baccalauréat, or its equivalent, in numbers their grandparents couldn't have imagined. Todd sees this rising tide as the real, material engine of democratic life. As people became literate together, they became, politically, more alike — and more confident that their judgment counted.

Then, he argues, something changed. Not that people stopped being educated — the opposite. Higher education kept expanding at the top. A growing minority pushed on into universities, master's degrees, the credentialed professions. But the movement stopped being a tide that lifted everyone toward a common level. It became a ladder that a fraction climbed while the rest stayed on the lower rungs. The society no longer converged toward a shared floor of instruction; it stretched into layers.

From this stratification Todd draws his sharpest and most contested claim: the emergence of a new dominant class, defined not by capital or by birth but by education. He gives it a deliberately unlovely label — the educated, the higher tier, a group that occupies the top of the credential ladder and, through that position, most of the influence in politics, media, administration and business. What makes this class distinctive, in his reading, is that it doesn't experience itself as a class at all.

The old aristocracy knew it was an aristocracy. The bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century knew it owned the factories. But the educated stratum, Todd argues, mistakes its own advantages for merit. Having earned its diplomas through effort, it believes its position is simply the reward for being right, or capable, or informed. It looks at the rest of the population not as fellow citizens with different lives but, subtly, as people who understand less — who need to be guided, corrected, protected from their own mistaken judgments.

Step back from the schooling and the strata, and Todd's larger point comes into focus. Democracy, in his view, was never a pure idea floating free of society. It rested on a material condition — a rough equality of instruction among citizens — and that condition was historically produced, then historically undone. Which means the danger he describes is not a betrayal by bad actors but a structural drift: the form of democracy outliving the social equality that once gave it meaning. The institutions endure precisely because they are hollow enough to endure. An empty shell keeps its shape well.

This is why the book's title lands the way it does. "After democracy" is not a prediction of tanks in the street. It's the name for a condition already arriving quietly — a regime that votes without deciding, that consults without obeying, where the educated stratum steers and the majority ratifies. Todd's fear, stated plainly, is that such a hollowed democracy is vulnerable, that a frustrated majority stripped of real influence eventually looks elsewhere, and that the space "after" the vote is not obviously kinder than the vote.

Todd's book asks us to look at a familiar machine and notice what has changed inside it. The elections still run. The count is still honest. But the equality that once gave the vote its weight — the sense that citizens shared a common floor of knowledge and could meet as political equals — has, in his reading, drained away through the widening gap in education, leaving a procedure that performs democracy without quite being one. The shell holds; the substance thins.