Summary

Roy opens her introduction by asking if there is “life after democracy” (1) and defining democracy as the “working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants” (1). Roy suggests that the world needs to make some structural adjustments to democracy, not return older authoritarian models. She asks whether democracy may be the end of the human race.

Roy explains that the essays in Field Notes on Democracy were written earlier in the years before and have not been edited. She explains that all the essays are about the “consequences of and corollaries to democracy; they’re about fire in the ducts” (3). She also confesses her fear that her ideas would be better expressed with a “feral howl” (3) or through poetry rather than prose. The collection’s subtitle, “Listening to Grasshoppers,” comes from a talk Roy gave in Istanbul, honoring the life of...