Democracy

Democracy, from Greek demokratia (literally, “rule by the people”), is a very old word commonly used in ancient political typologies in which three modes of rulership, by the one, the few, and the many, were cross-classified with good and bad variants, the “bad” being those in which selfish rulers enhanced their own wealth and power at the expense of the common good. Ancient authors collectively were taxonomically ambiguous, some using democracy to denote the good and some the bad variant of rule by the many. Ancient authors also advanced various ideas about what made democracy more or less workable. Some argued that all political arrangements were dependent on the virtue of the rulers and that democracy therefore depended on virtue-inculcating civic education for the many who ruled. Aristotle advanced a more structural thesis: that democracy was workable if wealth were distributed fairly evenly so that the moderation of a numerous middle strata would out-weigh the twin tendencies of the vengeful poor to aim at expropriation of the rich and of the fearful rich to take drastic action in self-protection.

Educated Europeans over more than two millennia were likely to know not only the term and its frequently negative flavor but also have a general idea of the governing institutions of its leading exemplar, Athens: much decision making by an assembly of the citizenry, most official positions chosen by lot for sharply limited terms and subject to recall by aggrieved citizens, and a few particularly sensitive or skill-demanding positions chosen by election. They would also have been broadly aware that political rights were for Athenians, not foreigners (including resident foreigners); adults, not children; men, not women; and the free, rather than the slaves. In the 1700s, those who studied political systems would have learned that democracy was impractical on a scale larger than a single city and, even where practical, had so many negative consequences (the poorer majority could easily plunder the better off; mob rule interlaced with demagogic tyranny was likely to be commonplace) that it was just as well there was little democracy to speak of in modern times and none at all on the scale of early modern Europe's emerging national states.

In the 1780s, nonetheless, in the course of political struggles, some people in the Low Countries began to call themselves and to be called “democrats,” and the question of democracy was reopened as people considered anew the government of national states in a revolutionary age. By the early 1790s, new constitutions had been written in the United States, Poland, and France. Many would soon follow along French lines as France's armies dominated Europe. By the time conservative forces had defeated the French in Europe, they too found themselves attempting to stabilize political systems by writing their own constitutions. [Page 192]Still other attempts were made to organize the newly independent states of Latin America. All this turbulence generated much new thought on democracy: on how to bring it about, on how to make it work well, on how to keep it within bounds, on how to avoid it.

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