Jan-Werner Müller’s Street, Palace, Square is a thoughtful reflection on how the practice of democracy shapes, and is shaped by, the built environment in which it takes place.
The practice of democracy here refers not only to lawmaking but, importantly, how citizens engage with each other and with their political representatives, in both formal and informal settings. Even with the advent of the online “town square”, much of this engagement takes places in real, physical locations: squares where people gather, streets where they march and buildings where decisions are made.
*** A version of this book review was first published in The Irish Times on 18 July 2026 ***
Müller, a Princeton-based political philosopher, organises the book around these three archetypes: the square, the palace and the street. This simple structure allows for a broad historical and geographic sweep while remaining focused on the primary physical “theatres” of democracy.
At times, however, the distinctions between the “square” and the “street” seem somewhat forced. Dublin currently lacks, for example, a true “square” for democratic engagement, but the junction of Kildare Street and Molesworth Street outside Leinster House at times performs some of the same functions as a venue for facilitated protest.
College Green in Dublin city centre has been the site of events of national importance, such as addresses by visiting US presidents and the homecoming of the Irish football team after the 1990 World Cup. It is also the site of Parliament House, the world’s first purpose-built bicameral legislature. The “Grow College Green” pedestrianisation plan will create a civic space and focal point that the city has been crying out for. It can be a space with many of the features that Müller ascribes to the ancient Athenian agora, his archetypical “square”.
The “palace” refers to the buildings in which formal democratic decision-making takes place. Our own Leinster House is not atypical in being a repurposed building. The Palace of Westminster and France’s National Assembly were both originally royal households, to cite just the closest examples. Architecturally speaking, Leinster House does not open itself to the rest of the city. It is neither accessible nor visible in the same way as the Reichstag in Berlin, for example, or even the aforementioned Parliament House.
Speaking of the Reichstag, and its famous glass dome in particular, Müller is sceptical of claims that glass and transparency in architecture automatically produce better democracy. He points out that while such designs can be symbolically powerful, they hardly eliminate secrecy or guarantee accountability.
Street, Palace, Square is at times difficult to engage with. It is often conceptual rather than concrete, philosophical more than practical. The relative paucity of visual aids, photographs or diagrams to bring the text to life feels like a missed opportunity for a subject so interwoven with aesthetics. The book concludes with a series of relatively abstract invocations, noting that “political problems do not have architectural solutions”.
vicduggan 