Democracy Ancient and Modern

M. I. Finley

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press Classics
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781978802346
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Western democracy is now at a critical juncture. Some worry that power has been wrested from the people and placed in the hands of a small political elite. Others argue that the democratic system gives too much power to a populace that is largely ill-informed and easily swayed by demagogues.This classic study of democratic principles is thus now more relevant than ever. A renowned historian of antiquity and political philosophy, Sir M.I. Finley offers a comparative analysis of Greek and modern conceptions of democracy. As he puts the ancient Greeks in dialogue with their contemporary counterparts, Finley tackles some of the most pressing issues of our day, including public apathy, partisanship, consensus politics, distrust of professional politicians, and the limits of free speech.Including three lectures that Finley delivered at Rutgers University, plus two additional essays that further illuminate his thinking, Democracy Ancient and Modern explores the dramatic differences between the close-knit civil society of the ancient Greeks and our own atomized mass societies. By mapping out democracy's past and its present manifestations, this book helps us plot a course for democracy's future.

CHAPTER 1

Leaders and Followers

Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, “discovery” of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies.a They cannot state the issues, about most of which they do not care anyway; many do not know what the Common Market is, or even the United Nations; many cannot name their representatives or who is running for which office. Appeals for a public lobbying campaign, if they are sensible, always carry some such notice as the following: “Your public library can tell you the names of your Senators and Representatives if you aren’t sure of them.”1 In some countries, a majority do not even bother to exercise their treasured right to vote.

At issue is not only the descriptive question of how democracy functions but also the prescriptive or normative one of what, if anything, ought to be done about it. There is a large and growing body of learned discussion on the subject, some of which has a slight echo effect to the historian of antiquity. When Seymour Martin Lipset writes that extremist movements “appeal to the disgruntled and the psychologically homeless, to the personal failures, the socially isolated, the economically insecure, the uneducated, unsophisticated, and authoritarian persons at every level of society,”2 the stress on the uneducated and the unsophisticated awakens echoes of Plato’s persistent objection to the role of shoemakers and shopkeepers in political decision-making. Or when Aristotle (Politics, 1319a19-38) argued that the best democracy will be in a state with a large rural hinterland and a relatively numerous population of farmers and herdsmen, who “are scattered over the country, do not meet together so often or feel the need of assembling,” one feels a kinship with a contemporary political scientist, W. H. Morris Jones, who wrote, in an article with the revealing title, “In Defence of Apathy,” that “many of the ideas connected with the general theme of a Duty to Vote belong properly to the totalitarian camp and are out of place in the vocabulary of liberal democracy”; that political apathy is a “sign of understanding and tolerance of human variety” and has a “beneficial effect on the tone of political life” because it is a “more or less effective counter-force to the fanatics who constitute the real danger to liberal democracy.”3

I am not, I hasten to add, about to embark on the banal theme, there is nothing new under the sun. Professor Lipset would be astonished, and probably horrified, to be called a Platonist, and I doubt that Professor Morris Jones thinks of himself as an Aristotelian. To begin with, Plato and Aristotle both disapproved of democracy in principle, whereas the two modern critics are democrats. Furthermore, whereas all ancient political theorists examined the different forms of government normatively, that is to say, by their ability to help man achieve a moral goal in society, justice and the good life, modern writers who share the orientation of Lipset and Morris Jones are less ambitious: they avoid ideal goals, concepts such as the good life, and they stress the means, the efficiency of the political system, its peacefulness and openness.

A powerful impetus to the new view was provided by the publication in 1942 of Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, in which one of the critical steps is “that he defines democracy as a method which is well designed to produce a strong, authoritative government. No ideals are attached to the definition of a democracy itself. It does not in itself imply any notions of civic responsibility or of widespread political participation, or any ideas of the ends of man.… Liberty and equality which have been part and parcel of past definitions of democracy are regarded by Schumpeter as not being integral parts of such a definition, however worthy they may be as ideals.”4

Plato’s kind of goal is therefore rejected not only as the wrong goal but, more radically, because it is a goal. Ideal goals are a menace in themselves, as much in more modern philosophies as in Plato. Sir Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies is perhaps the best known expression of such a view, but it is equally present (though he would probably deny the association) in Sir Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between the “negative” and “positive” concepts of liberty, between freedom from interference and coercion, which is a good thing, and freedom to achieve self-realization which, history shows, according to Sir Isaiah, easily slides into a justification of “the coercion of some men by others in order to raise them to a ‘higher’ level of freedom,” a “sleight of hand” performed once it was decided that “freedom as rational self-direction … applied not merely to a man’s inner life, but to his relations with other members of his society.”5

There is another way to appreciate the fundamental difference in point of view. Both Plato and Lipset would leave politics to experts, the former to rigorously trained philosophers who, having apprehended the Truth, will thereafter be guided by the Truth absolutely; the latter to professional politicians (or to politicians in consort with the bureaucracy), who will be guided by their expertise in the art of the possible and be periodically checked by an election, the democratic device that gives the people a choice between competing groups of experts, and, to that extent, a measure of control. Although both agree that popular initiative in political decisions is disastrous—that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” is naive ideology—the divergence reflected in the distinction between the two different kinds of expert expresses two fundamentally different views of the goal of politics, different views of the ends that the state should serve. Plato was totally opposed to popular government; Lipset favours it provided there is more “government” (as distinct from tyranny or anarchy) in the mixture than “popular,” in particular provided that there is no popular participation in the classic sense. Hence “apathy” is transformed into a political good, a virtue, one which, in some mysterious way overcomes itself (and the underlying political ignorance) in those occasional moments when the people are invited to choose among competing groups of experts.6

I might have said “an elite” rather than experts. Elitist theories of politics and of democracy have become familiar on the academic scene, though less so, for obvious public relations reasons, among practising politicians, ever since the conservative Mosca and Pareto introduced them in Italy at the turn of the present century, followed by the even more influential work of Robert Michels, Political Parties, published shortly before the first world war.7 The latter, then a German Social Democrat (though later an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini, at whose personal invitation he took a chair at the University of Perugia in 1928), was politically and psychologically hostile to elites, and preferred the word “oligarchy”: the subtitle of his book is “A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy.”

There are semantic difficulties with the word “elite.” It has always had, and still retains, too wide a range of meanings, many of them irrelevant or misleading in the present context, the traditional aristocratic sense, for example.8 Some of the most influential political scientists for whom Lipset has been my symbol find the elitist label offensive (though not Lipset himself).9 Despite these objections—and I confess to being unmoved by the indignation—“elitist theory of democracy” identifies the view more aptly than any other proposed label, and I shall use it henceforth.

Labels apart, there is clearly a major historical problem to be examined, a problem in both the history of ideas and the history of politics at one and the same time. In antiquity, intellectuals in the overwhelming majority disapproved of popular government, and they produced a variety of explanations for their attitude and a variety of alternative proposals. Today their counterparts, especially but not only in the west, are agreed, in probably the same overwhelming majority, that democracy is the best form of government, the best known and the best imaginable; yet many are also agreed that the principles on which democracy had traditionally been justified are not operating in practice; furthermore, that they cannot be allowed to operate if democracy is to survive. Ironically, the elitist theory is being pressed with particular vigour in Britain and the United States, empirically the two most successful democracies of modern times. How did we reach this curious, paradoxical position?

That there is a semantic confusion in the position is obvious. “Democracy” and “democratic,” one analyst has recently observed, “have become in the twentieth century words which imply approval of the society or institution so described. This has necessarily meant that the words have become debased in that they have almost ceased without further definition to be of any use in distinguishing one particular form of government from another.”10 However, semantic change is never accidental or socially indifferent. It has not often been the case in the past that use of the word “democracy” automatically “implied approval of the society or institution so described.” In antiquity it was equally a word whose use by many writers implied strong disapproval. Then the word disappeared from the popular vocabulary until the eighteenth century, when it crept back as a pejorative term. “It is rare, even among the philosophes of France before the Revolution, to find anyone using the word ‘democracy’ in a favourable sense in any practical connection.”11 When Wordsworth wrote in a private letter in 1794, “I am of that odious class of men called ‘democrats,’ ”12 he was being defiant, not satirical.

The American and French revolutions then initiated the great nineteenth-century debate, which ultimately ended with total victory for one side. In the United States in the thirties of the present century, to be sure, there were still voices who proclaimed that the Founding Fathers never intended a democracy, but a republic; however, they were, and are, fairly insignificant. Huey Long caught the correct tone when he said that, if fascism came to the United States, it would arrive in the name of antifascism. Popular support for McCarthy “represented less a conscious rejection of American democratic ideals than a misguided effort to defend them.”13

From one point of view, this consensus amounts to a debasement of the concept to the point of analytical uselessness, as we have seen. However, it would be a mistake to leave the matter at that. If such bitter opponents as the academic advocates of the elitist theory and the student advocates of the demonstration and the continuous mass meeting both claim to be defending real or genuine democracy, we are witnessing a new phenomenon in human history, the novelty and significance of which deserve underscoring. We must consider not only why the classical theory of democracy appears to be in contradiction with the observed practice, but also why the many different responses to this observation, though mutually incompatible, all share the belief that democracy is the best form of political organization.

The historical aspect of this situation is receiving less attention than it merits. It is not self-evident, I submit, that there should now be such near unanimity about the virtue of democracy when during most of history the reverse was the case. To dismiss this unanimity as a debasement of the currency, or to dismiss the other side of the debate as ideologists who misuse the term, is to evade the need for explanation. The history of ideas is never just the history of ideas; it is also the history of institutions, of society itself. Michels thought he had discovered an “iron law of oligarchy”—“Democracy leads to oligarchy, and necessarily contains an oligarchical nucleus.… The law that is an essential characteristic of all human aggregates to constitute cliques and sub-cliques is, like every other sociological law, beyond good and evil.”14 The conclusion left him with a deep pessimism (until his conversion to Mussolini).15

More recent “elitists” have tried to remove the stigma. There is a fault in Michels’ “definition,” they say, when he characterizes “any separation between leaders and followers as ipso facto a negation of democracy.”16 Empirical observation, they continue, reveals that this separation between leaders and followers is operationally universal in democracies, and, since everyone agrees that democracy is the best form of government, it follows that the empirically observed “separation” is a quality, not a negation, of democracy, and therefore a virtue. “The distinctive and most valuable element of democracy is the formation of a political elite in the competitive struggle for the votes of a mainly passive electorate” (my italics).17 This apparent syllogism entails “one false and ideological move,” an attempt to redescribe a given and prima facie untoward state of affairs in such a way as to legitimate it.18 No argument is offered, other than the warm glow evoked by the word “democracy,” to justify current procedures in western democracies. They are simply approved by definition, as a counter to Michels’ “oligarchic” definition.

It is precisely at this point that an historical consideration may be useful, specifically a consideration of the ancient Greek experience. “Democracy” is of course a Greek word. The second half of the word means “power” or “rule,” hence autocracy is rule by one man; aristocracy, rule by the aristoi, the best people, the elite; democracy, rule by the demos, the people. Demos was a Protean word with several meanings, among them “the people as a whole” (or the citizen-body to be more precise) and “the common people” (the lower classes), and the ancient theoretical debates often played with this central ambiguity. As usual, it was Aristotle who produced the most penetrating sociological formulation (Politics, 1279b34-80a4): “The argument seems to show that the number of the governing body, whether small in an oligarchy or large in a democracy, is an accident due to the fact that the rich everywhere are few, and the poor numerous. Therefore … the real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men ...