Introduction

Both democracy and information literacy are, in an intertwined way, severely challenged now (see Taylor et al., 2022; Jaeger and Taylor, 2021), calling for some reflection and analysis. The well-established connection between them serves as a political and civic reason for information literacy in democratic societies: a ‘theory in the form of the dominant paradigm’ (Wolin, 1968, 151). Information literacy so construed is a building block of one theoretical construction of citizenship. Establishing the dominant paradigm and its persistence will generate a reflection and unpacking of the IL–democratic theory relationship that will be theoretically richer. To accomplish this, the first section identifies a work in library and information science (LIS) that captured and axiomatically stated the information literacy paradigm. That theory-in-the-form-of-a-dominant-paradigm is then briefly traced back and through its persistence in LIS thinking about democracy and libraries. In the second section a democratic theory is identified as the rootstock of the dominant IL–democracy paradigm. It is interrogated to unpack its assumptions and empirical lacunae of particular relevance. The third section will produce a more complex theoretical understanding of the evidence, the normative values of information literacy in democratic societies and the actual role of libraries and information literacy in them and then will offer a conclusion.

Information literacy and democracy: the dominant LIS paradigm

It is important to state clearly a working assumption: the gigantic changes from 1776 to 1914 – the American, French and Industrial Revolutions, colonialism, socialism, the British Empire and the rise of secularism to name a few – demand a focus on Britain to adequately understand them. It is the same for the USA from World War 1 to the fall of the Soviet Union, and is arguably still core to knowing the state of democracy and the world (Buschman, 2022, 11). Political science and political theory (from which this chapter draws) follows this pattern (Katznelson and Milner, 2002, 3–5), as does LIS, broadly. Libraries and Democracy: the cornerstones of liberty (Kranich, 2001), a volume described as ‘prophetic’ (Waters, 2001, 61) in its contemporaneity with the ‘recent tragic events in New York and Washington’ on 9/11 (Cope, 2001, 383), was recognised at the time as a capstone to the IL–democracy paradigm for its ‘aggressive advocacy’ (Moon, 2001, 183) for ‘the relationship of libraries and democracies’ (Dugan, 2001, 486), earning a recommended place in all professional and LIS collections (Waters, 2001, 61).