In my In Defense of Politics 40 years ago I reified “this most promiscuous word” as if a Greek or Roman nymph — or say Democratia, an Athenian minor deity: “She is everybody’s mistress and yet somehow retains her magic even when a lover sees that her favors are being, in his light, illicitly shared by many another.”
Plato, of course, detested democracy. To him it was the rule of opinion over knowledge. His pupil Aristotle took a more tempered view. While democracy was for him a necessary condition for good government, it was far from a sufficient condition. If we are talking of justice and of good government then we are talking of a complexity of different concepts, values, and practices, and a complexity that never remains the same.
We need some skepticism about any claim that some concept of democracy must be the best for all seasons, as well as some irony about how we choose to wear any one suit of read-made democratic clothing rather than another; and choose we must, even if by default.
Nonsense, a school cannot be democratic; but by god many need to be more democratic and some, indeed, are admirably clear examples of autocracy.
What had been done before could be done again. And it is always necessary to remember that we are considering a term that has no meaning at all in most societies for most of human history, and that while most government in the modern world feel the need to call themselves democratic, many are at or beyond the outer limits of any of the main usages of the term historically.
But the unchanged sacred word “democracy” can cause troubles enough because it can mean all things to all men as it is translated into different cultures and its thread is spun for different purposes.
6 of the official titles with which leading military dictators have decorated their regimes:
- Nasser: Presidential democracy
- Ayub Khan: Basic democracy
- Sukarno: Guided democracy
- Franco: Organic democracy
- Stroessner: Selective democracy
- Trujillo: Neo-democracy
The Soviet Union, China, and their allies or puppet states all took very seriously their proud description of being “Peoples’ Democracies.” They believed that the working class should be emancipated, should rule over other classes in a time of revolutionary transition until a classless society was achieved, the rule of the people — democracy.
We all, of course, can mock those perversions of “democracy” by military regimes and others, because most of us are sure that we live in a democracy, using the term to mean almost everything we want — “all things bright and beautiful.”
Our media now muddle or mendaciously confuse what the public happens to be interested in with older concepts of “the public interest.”
As we consider them we must be aware of whether we are talking of an ideal or doctrine; or of a type of behavior towards others; or of certain institutional and legal arrangements. Democracy can refer to all of these together or to each separately.
Plato attacked this as being the rule of the poor and the ignorant over the educated and the knowledgeable. His fundamental distinction was between knowledge and opinion: democracy is the rule, or rather the anarchy, of mere opinion. Aristotle modified this view rather than rejecting it utterly: good government was a mixture of elements, the few ruling with the consent of the many. The few should have arete, excellence, the idealized concept of aristocracy. But many more can qualify for citizenship by virtue of some education and some property (both of which he thought necessary conditions for citizenship). Democracy as a doctrine or ideal unchecked by the aristocratic principle of excellence and knowledge was, however, a fallacy — the belief “that because men are equal in some things, they are equal in all.”
Good laws to protect all are not good enough unless subjects became active citizens making their own laws collectively. The argument was both moral and prudential. The moral argument is the more famous: both Roman paganism and later Protestantism had in common a view of man as an active individual, a maker and shaper of things, not just a law-abiding well-behaved accepter of and a subject to traditional order. But the prudential argument was always there: a state trusted by its people was a strong state; and a citizen army or militia was more motivated to defend their homeland than hired mercenaries or cautious professionals.
Everyone, regardless of education or property, has a right to make his or her will felt in matters of public concern; and indeed the general will or common good is better understood by any well-meaning, simple, unselfish, and natural ordinary person from their own experience and conscience than by the over-educated living amid the artificiality of high society.
All can participate if they care (and care they should), but they must then mutually respect the equal rights of fellow citizens within a regulatory legal order that defines, protects, and limits those rights.
Universal monotheistic religions arose from the Middle East and Asia; but modern science and democratic ideas and practices first arose in Europe. Science, religion, and democracy all, of course, taken on different modalities as they travel, and both influence and are influenced by different historical cultures.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
Tyranny originally simply meant rule by one man, not necessarily in our sense an oppressor, usually a usurper of kings; an individual tyrant could be good, bad, or not so bad. Nonetheless the tyrants were removed by a large number of the inhabitants of a polis or city state who were already beginning to think of themselves as polites, citizens of that state, that is with legal rights including the right to speak out and be heard and consulted on matters of common interest, the politeia or polity.
We still use the language of the polis, indeed almost the whole vocabulary of politics, ancient and modern, is Greek or Roman: autocracy, tyranny, despotism, politics and polity, republic, senate, city and citizen, representative… almost the lot except that one distinctively modern and terrible invention, terribly modern both as word and attempted deed, “totalitarian.” That was a concept unknown and unimaginable in a pre-industrial age and one that would have been impossible but for the invention and spread of democracy as majority power.
Plato in his dialogue venomously denounces democracy as being the rule of opinion over knowledge; only those with philosophical knowledge of the real nature of things were fit to rule — a view hardly popular, if we read him literally, except for tyrants or kings. Broadly speaking, he favored the idealized aristocratic virtues of excellence and personal perfection.
The most important liberty was freedom to speak out for the common good in the public assemblies and freedom to speak and to think as one chose in the privacy of the home or in the symposia, the male, social discussion clubs. Equality was prized, but it was legal and political equality, not economic in the least. The Greeks as a whole boasted that they were the eleutheroi, the free. Not merely they were collectively free (from domination by the Persian emperors), but they held themselves to be morally superior as individuals to those they called barbarians, precisely because the barbarian Persians, however sophisticated, did not enjoy free politics and democracy. It was a cultural distinction, not a racial one: the culture of free men contrasted with the subjects of despotism.
Aristocracy as an ideal too often degenerated into either oligarchy, the rule of the powerful, or plutocracy, the rule of the rich. Nonetheless the skill and wisdom were needed in politics and the business of good government. The best answer lay in finding some middle way: the few ruling with the consent of the many, or “ruling and being ruled in turn.”
We now call this “direct democracy,” as contrasted to our “representative democracy” when all most of us do is vote for representatives at, to the Greek mind, dangerously long intervals. Theirs was what has been called a “face-to-face society.” Indeed they did not believe that democracy was possible except in relatively small city states where everyone knew intimately what was going on.
Pericles was — the historians tell us — a kind of democratic dictator. The Greeks had a word for it, a demagogue. But consider what that shrewd statesman and clever demagogue felt he had to say to stir the people to support him. He gave them an ideal picture of themselves. He played on the Athenian popular mind, but that mind was democratic and had to be led or misled in such terms.
Monarchy was the rule of one, but the monarch had to be perfectly just otherwise the rule degenerated into tyranny. Aristocracy meant literally the rule of the best, but all too often that degenerated into oligarchy (rule of the few) or plutocracy (rule of the rich). Democracy meant the rule of many but all too often degenerated into anarchy.
Possession of modest property allowed leisure and leisure allowed education and the pursuit of knowledge, which was needed for government as much as for science and commerce. “Leisure is the mother of philosophy.”
Perhaps the best that modern democracies can hope for is not the avoidance of political elites but “the circulation of elites.”
There was no trace of modern notions that all people have inherent rights: rights were only earned by being an active citizen, certainly not a sit-back-and-beg modern consumer democracy. Harsh, however, to those who did not earn their civic keep or were, like women, judged incapable of the duties of citizenship.
Military technology and citizenship were closely related. The highly elaborate tactics and maneuvers developed by the Romans demanded both intense collective discipline and high individual skill.
Polybius described the Roman constitution as “the Senate proposing, the people resolving, and the magistrates executing the laws.”
The authority of the Senate and the patrician class, who alone composed the Senate, depended on their never forgetting that in the last analysis power lay with the people of the city of Rome. The people collectively could not govern, but they could tear the government down. The main constitutional device for enshrining this maxim was the institution of the tribunes who were magistrates elected by the plebeians, the common people.
Dictatorship was a constitutional office in republican Rome. One man (or 2 men in early practice) had the unfettered imperium surrendered to him for the duration of an emergency. If he attempted either to continue in office after an emergency was over or to prolong the emergency artificially in order to retain power, he was an outlaw. Any man had license to kill him, if they could.
The Romans broke from the severe limits of scale of political organization imposed by Greek culture and values. Loyalty was due not just to “our noble ancestors” but to perpetuating and propagating the idea of republic itself, a civic religion. It was thus a culture more dominated by law and politics than was even the Greek. Finally the republic was torn to pieces by rival power-hungry tribunes or dictators.
Democracies can act tyrannically towards individuals and minorities, but not if they act politically: that is, attempting to conciliate all the main interest groups within a state. Political rule is at least a precondition for just and stable democratic regimes.
The royal power, like the Roman imperium even in the republic, was needed for the defense of the realm and to enforce the laws; and the lawyers held that for these 2 functions the king’s power was absolute. Modern democracies cannot escape the need to have some provision for emergency powers. The 2 sides of the coin of government are always there, both power and consent.
The greatest single heroes of antiquity, he says, were men who created republics out of unlikely material but then left them to govern themselves.
Machiavelli half believes, with Plato, that history is cyclical: monarchy degenerates into tyranny, tyranny provokes democratic revolt, but democracy then proves so anarchic that a monarch or prince has to be found or restored, but then his rule degenerates and provokes democratic revolt… But he does believe that with political will and skill and some luck (there is always “Fortuna” in political life, never inevitability) the right balance of forces can be found to preserve a city through time.
Those who condemn the quarrels between the nobles and the plebs, seem to be condemning the very things that were the primary cause of Rome’s retaining her freedom.
Machiavelli can still remind us that “those republics which in time of danger cannot resort to a dictatorship will generally be ruined.” Even Rousseau was to say that “the people’s first intention is that the state shall not perish.”
Property is a creation of civil society: in the sate of nature there is no property, nor any foundation for any man to enjoy anything but his bare sustenance and survival. Truly, no man can take away from you your birthright, but in civil society there are laws and a constitution as well as birthright, and no man has a birthright to the property of another. If all men shall vote equally, many shall soon pass to take hold of the property of other men.
Even Locke a generation later could not break the assumed necessary link between property and citizenship, but he added a very bourgeois stipulation against aristocratic and hereditary claims: the possession of property, he said, was justified if it had been taken out of nature and mixed with “the labor of his body, and the work of his hands,” in other words improved.
For in nearly all the state assemblies the franchise was already wider than in all but an exceptional few English constituencies, wider not out of democratic sentiment but because of the wide availability of public land.
It was the very height of a kind of writing that had begun in the protest and independence movement that an American scholar, Perry Miller, once called “citizen literature”: reasoned debate about the fundamental aims and devices of government conducted on a level demanding critical intelligence, but in good plain English to reach the ordinary voter. The Federalist Papers was only the finest and most sustained example.
Lament the contrast with today in the dumbing down of great issues in the media or the internalizing of them into the arcane language of the academy.
In drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had turned Locke’s natural rights of all men from “life, liberty and estate” (commonly misquoted then and now as “life, liberty and property”) to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The Jeffersonian would have agreed with Rousseau and Kant that each of us has within himself a common reason and a moral sensibility, general will or conscience — call it what you will — and if we exercise it with humble simplicity, straightforwardly without fashionable or learned artifice, without selfishness but with empathy, we will reach conclusions very similar to those of our neighbors and fellow countrymen. The common man had common sense. A new democratic morality was being born — however much, in practice, honored in the breach rather than the observance.
Monarchy is like a splendid ship, with all sails set it moves majestically on, but then it hits a rock and sink forever. Democracy is like a raft. It never sinks but, damn it, your feet are always in the water.
Each of the successive factions in the French Revolution could then proclaim “the sovereignty of the people.” But the difficulty was, of course (and always is), that someone has to speak for the people.
With its proselytism and propaganda (he uses that word, hitherto just an office of the Catholic Church) it terrified its contemporaries, and “as Islam had done… poured its soldiers, its apostles and its martyrs over the face of the earth.”
Above all, Tocqueville sought a protection against democracy “degenerating into the only despotism of which, in the modern world, there is real danger — the absolute rule of the head of the executive over a congregation of isolated individuals, all equals but all slaves.”
That the actual revolution only speeded up a process of centralization long underway; that the time of maximum danger to an old order is when it tries to reform itself; and that the revolution occurred at a time of economic improvement not at a time of peculiar great hardship. He summed up the last 2 propositions by saying that men suffer hopelessly under despotism and poverty; they only stir when there are grounds for hope and signs of improvement.
He shrewdly saw the slave population as wanting to enjoy those rights rather than to destroy them as coming from a tainted source.
No laws work without will behind the; but mere goodwill is useless without institutions. So to Tocqueville, as to Aristotle, action and understanding must to hand in hand. Individuals are only themselves at their best when acting with others. The state is strong when its roots are deep and local, and allegiance is conditional. American federalism was not the antithesis of power. English Tory polemicists in the early 19th century constantly predicted the collapse of the US because, amid the checks and balances and divisions of power, there was no clear source of sovereignty. But federalism, Tocqueville implies, is a very strong source of power. Freedom is not the antithesis of authority; it is the only source of authority which can be accepted without force or deception. He seems to conclude that democracy can be lived with to advantage if the right balance can be struck between democratic majoritarianism and liberty.
By the 3rd quarter of the 19th century the example of the US, indeed its very existence, showed that democracy was possible, just this blend of individual liberty and popular power, even in a country of continental scale, no longer cities with extended hinterlands. When the civil war broke out conservative opinion all over Europe had said “told you so,” democracy would result in anarchy — as the study of the classics and the French Revolution had taught them.
At that time no one could sensibly describe the British system of parliamentary government as democratic. The cult of the gentleman ruled, not that of the common man.
Conservatives leaders repeated many of the old arguments about the dangers of democracy, but gradually qualifiers were slipped in front of that damned “D” word - the dangers of “unbridled,” “ill-informed,” “excessive,” or “uneducated” democracy.
The mass franchise in the USA (brushing aside, of course, women and the blacks) spread a style of politics which, if certainly not wholly new, broke from the manner of careful reasoned argument, as if actually trying to persuade, that had been the style of “citizen literature” of the early republic or, indeed, of the debates over slavery and secession; and the style of parliamentary debates in Great Britain. That older style had been appropriate to a smaller political class, often bound together by friendship, even family connection, at the least by social acquaintance and common codes of behavior. But to address a mass meeting or appeal to a mass franchise, the power to comprehend and stir common emotions was needed. The greatest art was plain speaking, to combine simple language with common sense and wisdom, as did Lincoln — much criticized at the time for the homely, undignified language of his most lasting and famous speeches. But the blackest art could be called, and was, “rabble-rousing.”
The common enemies were invariably “the government”, the bankers, the railroad companies, the capitalist system — and somehow all too often the Catholic Church, the Jews, and the blacks shared the blame for the sad lot of the poor farmer.
This could almost be Rousseau again: the artificial threatens the natural, and it is one incident in the perennial struggle between the values of the countryside and nature, those of the cities, and induced, artificial learning.
Working on the land was beginning to lose its attraction to immigrants and the native-born alike — except the “get rich quick” allure of the gold rush. The early Republican ideal of the yeoman farmer was giving way to the virtues of urban capitalism and concern for, or fear of, the urban masses.
Hannah Arendt in her Origins of Totalitarianism distinguished between “the people” and “the mob.” The people seek for effective representation politically, whereas the mob hates society from which it has been excluded. The mob are highly individualistic, all for number one, as it were; unless a charismatic leader emerges to legitimize their sense of being outside society, to bond their common hatreds for longer than spasmodic riots.
Well, we are a democracy, aren’t we? Why can’t the people have what they want? Even if a kind of democratic dictatorship, or what Tocqueville called the tyranny of the majority? No need for knowledge, reasoned discussion, recourse to authorities and experience. That is what populists call elitism.
Here were produced rubbishly newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational 5-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs. There was even a whole subsection; Pornosoc engaged in producing the lowest kinds of pornography.
Orwell was perfectly serious in arguing that capitalism, faced with an at least formally literate and free electorate, can only maintain a system of gross inequalities and inequities of wealth by means of cultural debasement, a deliberate underuse of the resources and potential of literacy.
Baldwin rebuked Beaverbrook in 1936 for exercising “power without responsibility; the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” Could one imagine a modern PM speaking like this to a Murdoch?
The populist mode of democracy is a politics of arousal more than of reason, but also a politics of diversion from serious concerns that need settling in either a liberal democratic or a civil republican manner.
The effective rallying cry, “no taxation without representation,” was really part of a more general claim, “no obedience without representation” or “no laws other than made by our elected representatives.” The last claim is what most people today would mean simply by democracy.
If this sounds like Aristotle again, that democracy is a necessary element in good government but neither the ideal nor the form of the whole, so it is. That little tale about “populism” should show that the democratic spirit can get out of hand. I have heard well-meaning people demand that schools should be democratic. That is, alas, Rousseau-like nonsense: that innocence is superior to knowledge, or is itself a form of knowledge.
My understanding of what most people mean by democracy is what the Greeks meant by “polity” or simply political rule, a system that allows for peaceable compromises to be made between ever-present conflicts of values and of interests.
Any academic worth his salt will have a different listing of factors set in a different “conceptual framework” with which to stimulate his students or torment them with neologisms. But I see something like these factors as important for all forms of government: the role of the inhabitants, official doctrines, typical social structure, the nature of the elite, typical institutions of government, type of economy, theories of property, attitudes to law, attitudes to knowledge, diffusion of information, attitudes to politics.
What is extreme is, however, always politically contestable. “Middle class” need not mean other clear classes. The post-Marxist idea of a classless society is that of a middle class or bourgeois classlessness. Autocracies have highly stratified class or caste systems. Totalitarian regimes aim to be egalitarian but in fact develop a class system based on political and bureaucratic office-holding.
Nature of the elite. Usually a fairly stable political class enjoying some prestige, but sharing status with business, intellectual, and social elites, and open and penetrable to varying extents by candidates from educational institutions partly designed to recruit talent and encourage mobility.
In autocracies the court or the palace comprise a visible, awe-inspiring, and usually militarily defensible society within a society. There may be internal politics within the palace walls, but not in public.
Most autocracies (and military governments) are in agrarian societies. Attempts to industrialize either lead to democratization as power is spread and criticism is needed, or to concentrations of power as if toward totalitarianism but usually resulting in chronic economic and political instability. The true totalitarian regimes were war economies, whether at war or not, rejecting “mere” economic criteria.
In autocracies knowledge is seen as a unified instrument of political power, part of the “mysteries of power” or the unpublished “reason of state” that is shared by the ruling elite but not to be questioned or debated publicly. Scientific and moral truths are confused and censorship is a necessary institution of state. In a modern democracy knowledge is seen as fragmented, related to problems not necessarily connected. Most moral truths are seen as relative in application, open to public debate, and distinct from scientific truths. There is official patronage of independent centers of learning and of the dissemination of knowledge. Knowledge has to be spread and remote from censorship if this kind of society is to work.
In modern democracies politics is always tolerated and usually actively encouraged. Politics is recognized as a conciliatory public activity aimed at or involving compromise. In autocracies the regime is either above mere politics or politics is limited to the privacy of the palace, the court, or the inner party.
In the 1930s opinion in the democracies was almost united that free societies paid a price in terms of efficiency compared to the modernizing autocracies like Japan and, still more so, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union. But the price had to be paid, said a hundred orators and editorials. But the actual conduct of WW2, however, showed that many of these claims were hollow. Mussolini’s claims to efficiency proved empty boasts. Strangely when Britain had its back to the wall and Japan attacked the US, both countries achieved a mobilization of the economies for war greater and more efficient than in Nazi Germany.
But why ban innocent symposia? Because it is in such non-political institutions that men first learn mutual trust. And without mutual trust there can be no overthrow of tyranny.
But if Rommel had done similarly and failed, instant and public death; and if he had succeeded he would have had a brief season of professional esteem before being quietly removed and purged, not so much for challenging the Fuhrer’s will as for exposing Hitler’s lack of omniscience. In democracies not merely can trust be greater because omniscience is not expected but also because the fruits of failure are less drastic; people will trust their arm, trust their own judgment, exercise initiative.
The UK in the post-war period of withdrawal from empire gave or left behind Westminster models of parliamentary government in nearly all her former colonies. None work as expected, some broke down entirely, and even where they didn’t (as most notably in India) a prior knowledge of Westminster ways could be a prejudicial obstacle rather than a help in understanding the new context, dynamics, problems, and possibilities.
Access to alternative, independent sources of information. Dahl is right to put this immediately after “freedom of expression,” which become useless if sources of evidence are not available to challenge government’s publications and their ability to massage, suppress, or even invent statistics, especially if the governments have undue influence, even control, over the press and broadcasting media.
However, perhaps Dahl takes for granted what is not to be taken for granted, especially in new or emerging democracies: the need for some real independence of the judiciary from government and some real constitutional support for an impartial and reasonably neutral civil service.
There are no final answers in the name of democracy. Lists, like definitions, settle nothing. There is only a continual process of compromise between different values and interests, politics itself.
In some ways “the Peace Commission” (no punishments for past violations of human rights in return for true confessions) could be seen as a denial of principles of justice and of majority rights; but again it was a compromise for the sake of peace and economic and political stability. Democracy returned to Spain and Chile with somewhat similar compromises.
Relatively few people outside the labor movements were active in political parties; most were content to leave public affairs to a relatively small group of people under the scrutiny of the press and, to some extent at least, under the control of the courts.
Business interests resented higher taxation for political and moral ends and often talk hysterically about the very system of private enterprise being near collapse, which was never so.
Among moral and political writers of the Renaissance, it was widely agreed that the only way to maximize the liberty of individual citizens must be to ensure that everyone plays an active role in political affairs. Only by such full participation, it was argued, can we hope to prevent the business of government being falling into the hands of a ruling class. Since the 17th century, however, the leading Western democracies have repudiated this view in favor of a strongly contrasting one. It has been an axiom of liberal theories about the relationship between government and the governed that the only way to maximize freedom must be to minimize the extent to which public demands can legitimately be made on our private lives.
The very scale of the political and legal institutions of modern democracies seems to demand the good citizen more than the active citizen: the relatively smooth working and security of democratic institutions can actually smother an active democratic spirit by appearing to diminish its need. Nearly all significant measures of public participation in political processes now show marked decline, not merely in election turn-outs.
Man’s inclination to justice makes democracy possible; but man’s capacity for injustice makes it necessary.