That explains his piety. It may even explain his inability to place himself in the age he surveys, which he resolutely judges by modern standards and finds wanting. For starters, he sees democracy as Leviathan’s worthiest guise; that eighteenth-century Britons (and Americans) disdained democracy as mob-rule earns his censure, however excellent their reasons against it. Not that Hochschild considers or even seems aware of those reasons. Instead, he assumes that a universal British franchise would have demolished the slave trade years before Parliament did and that the lack of said franchise is almost as tragic as slavery itself.