Identity and Democracy

Democracy and issues of identity have been linked throughout history. Since ancient Greece, questions of citizenship, participation, rights, and duties have been tied to understandings of race, ethnicity, sex, and class. In later attempts to universalize democratic principles and connect them with human nature, identity and difference became subordinate to theories of universal human nature and shared identity found in Enlightenment reason and Romantic humanism. As criticisms of those periods and particularly of universal notions of human essence rose in the 20th and 21st centuries, identity and difference again became focal points for democracy.

While ancient Athens is often idealized as the wellspring of democracy in Western civilization, identity was also important to Athenians. As Robert Dahl has noted, to participate in the democratic system of Athens, one had to prove that one was a true Athenian citizen by right of birth. That required not only that one be male but also that one be both free (not a slave) and born of parents who were both themselves Athenians. Immigrants, even after many generations, could not be citizens except by special decree of the assembly. Although statistical estimates are difficult to find, it may be that at some points in time, as few as 10% of the total population of Athens was eligible to vote, and an even smaller portion actually participated. The reasons for these restrictions were both about notions of identity in Greece and about notions of democracy. For the Greeks, democracy was not about universal human rights or about basic human dignity but a system of governance particularly well-suited to Greek citizens and the Greek state. The fit between ancient Greece and democracy was successful not only because of tight restrictions on who was allowed to participate but also because the value of democracy was found in its participants’ capacity to negotiate differences [Page 355]within a relatively homogenous group. Among Greek citizens, one would find a great deal of continuity in religion, traditions, history, and culture. For the Greeks, it was those commonalities that made democracy an ideal system of governance. Thus, when someone violated those foundational norms, it was quite consistent with the Athenian understanding of both identity and democracy to simply remove them from the citizenry, by enslavement, banishment, or even death.

Of course, the difficulty for contemporary democratic theory and democracies is that few of them can take for granted that kind of similitude among persons, even in relatively homogeneous countries. While some nations maintain high degrees of cultural continuity among their population, the exclusion of even a small minority of persons from a democratic process has become anathema to contemporary understandings of democracy. Part of the reason for that shift is a distinctly modern articulation of universal human rights and human dignity that connected democracy to a notion of what it means to be a human being and how one can realize one's full humanity. Thus, democracy became the promise of cooperation, or at least negotiation, among radically divergent persons who share a political and social space. Although the full culmination of that new humanism did not manifest until the early 20th century, the grounds for it can be found in 17th- and 18th-century thinkers’ articulation of innate human reason, the duty to publicly use that reason, and the explicit connection of such reasoning to democratic governance. Two of the most widely recognized foundational thinkers for modern democracy are John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, much of the implementation of the modern democratic state looks more like the republican aristocracy advocated by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay, Perpetual Peace. Nonetheless, what binds all three thinkers together is the central importance of the innate human capacity for reason and the moral duties or rights that might be derived from that capacity. Bridging the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment in Western thought, the development of a modern democratic theory was deeply wedded to, if not always clearly grounded upon, a notion of a shared human essence, a nature, which could lie behind or beneath all the questions of difference and identity. Thus, where the Athenians had placed the uniquely Greek cultural and ethnic identity at the core of their democratic theory, Enlightenment thinkers placed a universal human nature. In this way, they could vacate questions of identity and difference by always appealing to that which was taken as the same among all persons.

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