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Drawing on the genealogical tradition developed by Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, Democracy and Domination: Technologies of Integration and the Rise of Collective Power argues that from the time of Ancient Greece to the present, the collective and centralizing aspects of power have been expanding in the Western world. This expansion can be located within institutional structures that coordinate human activity, requiring populations to have some technology by which the act of communication takes place. This work examines the rise of phonetic writing and the formalization of teaching as preconditions for the expansion of collective power. Speech and writing provide populations a common language and history, thus providing the cultural integration necessary for the synchronization of action. However, for this coordination of activities on a mass scale there must also be institutional structures for the formal training of system managers and officials. Large polities require infrastructure, some formal economic arrangements, and a system of production to meet the material needs of the population. Each of these institutional arrangements is treated as a mechanism that expands the scope and depth of power.

Finally, there must be some social technology that sets the direction that collective action takes. Since the seventeenth century, this role has been taken by the practice of democracy. The authors reject the idea that democracy expanded because it was the most consistent with the human being's ontological quest for freedom, asserting instead that the expansion of democracy takes place in the modern period because of its ability to legitimate the expansion and centralization of power itself. Thus, the systemic needs for greater coordination of human activity on a national and global scale have pushed democracy to the forefront as a system for legitimating the collectivization and coordination of human behavior.