Seymour Martin Lipset famously claimed that the more well-to-do a nation is, the greater the chance that it will sustain democracy.  This "law" fits the experience of several countries in Northeast and Southeast Asia.  Formerly authoritarian South Korea and Taiwan grew rich and became stable democracies with active civil societies, as Lipset would have expected.  His "law" fits the Philippines and Thailand as well- -poor countries with tenuous holds on democracy where uncivil societies have mobilized to defend elite hegemony against mass-based electoral challenges.

The case of Indonesia, in contrast, limits Lipset's Law.  Poor yet stably democratic, Indonesia is free of regime-threatening social conflicts.  Arguably, despite its poverty, its democracy is already consolidated.  India's record of sustaining democracy is another case in point.  These poor yet successfully democratic polities amount to large stakes in the heart of modernization theory.

Prof. Thompson will contend that Indonesia's democracy is neither middle-class-based nor dominated by big business, but is instead still characterized by traditional cross-cutting ethno-religious cleavages that limit the impact of money politics, reduce the risk of populism, foster elite consensus, and thereby encourage democratic stability. He will link his argument not only to Lipset's Law but to the intellectual legacies of Alexis de Tocqueville, Antonio Gramsci, and Barrington Moore among other students of democracy and modernity.

Mark R. Thompson is a professor of political science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.  A Chicago native, he took his first degree in religious studies at Brown University followed by postgraduate work at Cambridge University and the University of the Philippines.  Fascinated by Philippine people power, he wrote his dissertation at Yale University on the anti-Marcos struggle (Yale University Press, 1996).  After moving to Germany, he witnessed popular uprisings in East Germany and Eastern Europe, inspiring him to conceptualize democratic revolutions in essays later published as a book (Routledge, 2004).  He is in residence at Stanford from February through April 2009.

Currently teaching at the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, Swedish writer and scholar Aris Fioretos is editing a three-volume edition of the works of Nelly Sachs for Suhrkamp Verlag, scheduled to appear simultaneously with the opening of an exhibition about Sachs's life and work at the Jewish Museum in Berlin in May 2010.

Aris Fioretos studied at Stockholm, Paris, and Yale universities. Since 1991, he has published over a dozen books - novels, prose poetry, and essays. He has also edited several academic volumes and translated the works of Paul Auster, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Vladimir Nabokov into Swedish. A past counsellor of culture at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin, he is the recipient of several prizes and awards, most recently from the Swedish Academy, the American Academy in Berlin, and All Souls College, Oxford. His most recent publication is the essay collection Das Maß eines Fußes (Hanser Verlag, 2008). In the fall, a new novel will appear.

Jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporay Europe, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Department of German Studies, and Stanford Humanities Center.