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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 4977590" data-attributes="member: 3448">That would probably be the most valuable thing you could bring back, but I think it would be very hard.  I'm inclined to think that the viability of modern representative democracy as a political system is significantly dependent on technology.  Among the key features are the existence of relatively low-skill yet effective weapons (starting with guns) that make the support of masses of people more powerful than the support of a small class of military elites, communication systems that allow for the integration (culturally, politically, and economically) of wide areas, and sufficient technology to get the people above subsistence level so they have the time and interest to get involved in self-governance.As far as I can tell, most pre-modern democratic/republican societies had such a vastly limited franchise that they were in many ways more comparable to aristocracy than we tend to assume (say, Athenian democracy, where only male citizens could participate and a large portion of the society was noncitizens and slaves).  They also rarely produced the peace dividends that are a key part of the value of democracies, assuming that we accept democratic peace theory-- democratic (as opposed to democratizing) countries relatively rarely go to war with each other, although there are exceptional cases.  In the absence of the dominance of democracy as a political system, its value is reduced although not extinguished.  Rome itself was at times meaningfully a republic, but generally only in a tiny portion of the area that it controlled, and then not surrounded by other friendly democracies.So yeah... if you were trying to benefit a pre-modern society, about the best thing you could do would be to make it into a democracy, but I don't really know how you would go about trying to achieve that.  I also fear that some of the standard tropes of D&D style worlds, including relatively rare individuals with vast personal power, are simply incompatible with democracy.</blockquote>

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