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Comment by enaaem | Hacker News Reader

I believe most successful democracies have became this way. Most European nations went from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one.

The natural process of democracy seems to be: Dictatorship -> industrialisation -> democracy. Does any one knows any books talking about this?

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I think you're missing the critical step of "widespread rule of law". It leads to both democracy (because once people have rights, they exercise those rights to organize and demand more) and industrialization (because people will only build factories if they have confidence that their investments won't be stolen).

England had a head start thanks to the Magna Carta (which established the Parliament) and the Civil War (which gave it teeth); by the time the steam engine was invented, the rule of law was well established and industrialists didn't need to worry about having their work confiscated.

> The natural process of democracy seems to be: Dictatorship -> industrialisation -> democracy. Does any one knows any books talking about this?

Watch this video ("The Rules for Rulers" from CGP Grey)[0], it's a summary of a book from de Mesquita ("The Dictator's Handbook")[1]. The video explains this process very well, imo.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-...

Usually the monarchy/dictatorship was overthrown to be replaced by a somewhat more democratic government (both peacefully or violently). Autocrats rarely were willing to give up any of their power voluntarily and paradoxically in the rare cases where they did it only hastened their downfall

e.g. I’m pretty sure Loui didn’t expect in his worst nightmares that his head will be chopped of a couple of years later).

The only successful exceptions I can think are is Spain after Franco died, Taiwan and South Korea but these are all rather modern.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38521576

Probably not exactly what you’re looking for, but it tackles the somewhat bumpy transition from industrialization to democracy (or rather why it didn’t exactly work out that way)

Killing Louis didn't lead to less authoritarianism it led to Robespierre and eventually Napoleon. Most of today's liberal democracies didn't come from revolution or civil war but from foreign forces deposing tyrant or peaceful transition. This includes France which only became democratic after Prussia ended Napoleon III

Yes, the transition wasn’t very smooth though. In cases with little foreign interference, it was more like:

Absolutist monarchy -> violent jacobin style revolution -> ??? (a lot of war and dead people)-> reactionaries come back to power -> a more moderate revolution/coup which brings a more balanced regime which establishes some kind of a rule of law based constitutional order.

Britain only had a single cycle of this, while France needed 2/3.

It not like the goal of Prussia was to establish a democratic regime in France, that was just side effect and arguably Napolean brought that war on himself (just like his uncle did with Russia)

>Autocrats rarely were willing to give up any of their power voluntarily and paradoxically in the rare cases where they did it only hastened their downfall

Read this section:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_revolutions_of_1848%E2%...

Summary: The King gave half the population what they wanted and then he used good old military force to struck the rest down and then he regained all of his powers.

Louis gave up his power voluntarily (to an extent, the kingdom was bankrupt and he had to make concessions) by accepting a constitutional monarchy. He bumbled his way to the scaffold afterwards, and he only got there because he had already accepted sharing authority with an elected legislature.

Many other monarchs gave up their "divine" rights under pressure, but without being really overthrown.

> The only successful exceptions I can think are is Spain after Franco died, Taiwan and South Korea but these are all rather modern.

What about the UK?

Mexico is another modern example; it became democratic gradually and peacefully in the late 90s or early 2000s. There was no sudden regime change, and the formerly ruling PRI is still a major political party that runs in the (now fair) elections.

It hasn't ceased to amaze me to see how many people from the US think of their ideology as the end result of a process. As their ideology is the logical conclusion of it, and some countries are more mature than others along this line of development.

What really brought it home to me, was a podcast of two boardgame designers working on the "tech" trees of a Civilization type game. One was for religion, which had to start with mysticism, to move on to theology. When my offense about this line of thinking passed I had to wonder: since Judaism -> Christianity -> Islam, are they going to stop the monotheistic track at Christianity or Islam?

Didn't work for China though. Even though everybody seemed to hope it would.

See the "Historical Materialism" of Marx and Engels:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism#Traje...

>The natural process of democracy seems to be: Dictatorship -> industrialisation -> democracy. Does any one knows any books talking about this?

"Capitalism, Alone" by Branko Milanovic discusses that, amongst other things.

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