Stephen Jones in Person

Join us on Thursday, May 7 at 7 PM as Stephen Jones presents his new book, The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918-1921.

The enthralling, forgotten story of how the world's first social democracy took shape in the wake of the Russian Revolution.

Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the small nation of Georgia established its independence in May 1918. Its leaders surprised the world by creating the first social democratic state. Based on a combination of parliamentarianism and direct democracy, it was a representative government of the peasants and workers themselves, with ballots in their hands.

The First Social Democracy is the definitive history of a government that should inspire social democrats today. Stephen F. Jones chronicles how the founders of the new state navigated myriad challenges, including territorial threats from abroad, internal ethnic conflicts, and geopolitical rivalries between the imperial Ottomans, the British, and the Germans. In the midst of these existential challenges, Georgia's social democrats set about writing a constitution to put the country on a distinctive path of genuine self-government--protecting democratic rights, promoting political pluralism, and championing equality. Jones brings to life the passionate debates that shaped Georgia's democracy during a moment of acute global instability.

The Democratic Republic of Georgia was strangled in its crib. Just four days after the constitution was ratified, the capital fell to the Red Army. Under Soviet rule, the republic was lost to history. Soviet scholars were forbidden to research this Georgian story, and Western scholars had little interest in a small and peripheral state that was independent for only three years. Recovering a forgotten experiment in democratic citizenship and statecraft, Jones reminds us of those audacious times when Georgians created and defended political freedom against the rise of Soviet communism.

Professor Stephen Jones received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science and taught in the Russian and Eurasian Studies Department at Mount Holyoke College for over three decades. His books include Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883-1917 (Harvard University, 2005,) and Georgia: A Political History Since Independence (I.B. Tauris, 2012). Most recently he edited with Neil MacFarlane, Georgia from Autocracy to Democracy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). Professor Jones became a Foreign Member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences in 2011 and received an honorary doctorate from Tbilisi State University in 2012, and from Ilia State University in 2018. He is the Founder of the Program on Georgian Studies at the Davis Center, Harvard, and its former Director. Currently, he is a professor of Modern Georgian History at Ilia State University in
Georgia.

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