Beasts and Gods

How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose

Roslyn Fuller

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781783605439
• eBook ISBN: 9781783605453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Democracy does not deliver on the things we have assumed are its natural outcomes. This, coupled with a growing sense of malaise in both new and established democracies forms the basis to the assertion made by some, that these are not democracies at all. Through considerable, impressive empirical analysis of a variety of voting methods, across twenty different nations, Roslyn Fuller presents the data that makes this contention indisputable. Proving that the party which forms the government rarely receives the majority of the popular vote, that electoral systems regularly produce manufactured majorities and that the better funded side invariably wins such contests in both elections and referenda, Fuller's findings challenge the most fundamental elements of both national politics and broader society. Beast and Gods argues for a return to democracy as perceived by the ancient Athenians. Boldly arguing for the necessity of the Aristotelian assumption that citizens are agents whose wishes and aims can be attained through participation in politics, and through an examination of what "goods" are provided by democracy, Fuller offers a powerful challenge to the contemporary liberal view that there are no "goods" in politics, only individual citizens seeking to fulfil their particular interests.

PART I

1

Democracy in Athens: People Power is Born

It does not matter if a cat is black or white. As long as it catches mice, it is a good cat.

Deng Xiaoping

The ancient city-state of Athens is often credited with being the birthplace of democracy. Although democracy was also practised in other Greek states, the political structure of Athens has been the subject of the most study as well as some of the best-preserved records written by people who personally experienced it. These people woke up every morning and went to bed every night under democracy; they witnessed some of the most dramatic moments of history with their own eyes, and were personally involved in the important decisions of Athenian political life. The writings of these ancient political observers are almost like time capsules, delivering information about their society far into the future in a way that those alive at the time could probably never have imagined possible. And in their turn, they tell us about an ancient system of government that is equally hard for us to imagine today. It may have shared the name ‘democracy’ with our own, but it used vastly different methods of governance. So different, in fact, that they call many of our own ostensibly democratic traditions into question. To understand just how profound these differences were, it’s necessary to know a bit about the culture that came up with them.

When we look at the classical marble statuary of Greek civilization in museums, we often get an impression of solemn formality but when they were created, these statues were often painted, brightly coloured masterpieces not of grave reverence, but of passion, wisdom and power. After all, the ancient Athenians lived in the dynamic atmosphere of one of the most powerful and developed cities on earth. Feats of engineering, chariot racing and risqué theatre productions – Athens had something for everyone. The philosophers who lived, studied and congregated in this city of ideas were already hypothesizing that the world was round, that the sun was a ball of fire, and that all matter was constructed from building blocks too small to see that they christened ‘atoms’ – all far-sighted theories that would not be conclusively proved for millennia. But what really distinguished Athens from other important cities of the time was that its citizens aspired to the good life. Socializing, satisfying meals, beautiful things, and a break from hard labour – this cultivated prosperity was what made life worth living. In this sense, the Athenians shared values with many people living in Western societies today.

But there were also important differences. At the time that the Athenian navy dominated the Aegean Sea, its architects designed the Acropolis and philosophers like Plato founded schools of thought that would influence human reasoning for thousands of years, no one really thought that democracy was a good thing unto itself or that people had an inherent right to live under this kind of government. In fact, many of the greatest thinkers of the time were convinced that other forms of rule, such as oligarchy or aristocracy, were superior to democracy. Even important and respected nations like Sparta and Rome were positively proud of their undemocratic way of life. Their citizens and rulers did not hesitate to disparage the very idea of democracy or boast that their own political practices were far more advanced precisely because they did not give ‘the common people’ any say in government. Democracy, in short, was not at all fashionable, and no one felt compelled to pretend that they lived in a democracy.

And in the absence of pretence, it was easier to get absolute clarity on what democracy was. It was measured on one thing only: who held political power? To the ancient Greeks, this was the bottom line in defining political organization, and it is reflected in the names they gave to each form of government. To us, words like ‘oligarchy’ or ‘democracy’ may sound like technical terms, but they are really just straightforward Greek descriptions of how government decisions are taken. In ancient Greek demos means ‘people’ (in the sense of the people of a nation), while kratos means ‘power’. Demos + kratos (demokratia in ancient Greek) means ‘people power’. By the same token oligos means ‘few’, while arches means ‘rule’. Oligarchy therefore means ‘rule by the few’.

So, when the Athenians spoke to each other in what they would have considered to be plain Greek, they literally said, ‘so here we are in a people power [state]’ or ‘yes, of course, Sparta is a rule by the few [state]’. This is significant, because it meant that the ancient Greeks did not confuse the means via which decisions were made (e.g. by one person, a few people, or everyone) with the end they were trying to achieve (e.g. a well-run economy, sound foreign policy, etc). The Athenians would not have seen ‘elections’ or ‘human rights’ or ‘economic prosperity’ as signs that a nation was a democracy. Democracy simply meant ‘people power’. How the people of a nation acquired that power and what they did with it were separate issues. By the same token, oligarchy did not necessarily mean ‘oppression’ or ‘human rights abuses’. It simply meant ‘rule by the few’. Whether those few were benevolent or not was another question entirely. Therefore, no matter how impressive a state’s achievements might be, it could only qualify as a democracy if political power genuinely resided in the hands of the people, if they, and no one else, made all decisions.

While modern Western democracies are often accused of failing to deliver power to the people (a well-founded accusation, as we will see in the following chapters), Athenian democracy unarguably achieved this goal. Perhaps even more importantly, while the Athenians did not associate other goals, such as an impartial justice system, lack of corruption or real equality between citizens, with democracy in the same explicit way that we do today, their form of government did a much better job of actually delivering these goods than ours does.

So how did they do it?

How Athenian democracy worked

In modern times, it is understood that elections are the very essence of democracy, so it is reasonable to expect that the first democrats, the Athenians, also held elections to determine who their leaders would be. This assumption is correct to the extent that the Athenians were very familiar with the concept of elections and they did indeed use them to directly select government officials and a 400-member legislative debating chamber.

But they did so before they became a democracy.

Like other ancient peoples, the Athenians viewed electoral leadership as a version of oligarchy. It was rule by the few, and the fact that those few were subject to change once in a while did nothing to alter that fundamental point. In fact, Aristotle described elections as giving ‘the people only the necessary minimum of power’ to remain free citizens and not be classified as slaves.¹

The Athenians, and their neighbours, agreed that in a true democracy, the people did not obey the decisions taken by those empowered to do so via election or any other means. Instead they took all decisions themselves through two important bodies: the Assembly and the courts.

Assembly: meeting of the many

While there were many important democratic practices in Athens, the Assembly was its centrepiece, and it remains the part of Athenian democracy that is most easily understood today. The Assembly was simply a gathering that every Athenian male citizen was entitled to attend by virtue of turning up at the right place and time. While regular Assembly attendance was viewed as a duty, it was also generally voluntary. There were usually between 5,000 and 6,000 people present at each Assembly meeting out of a total eligible population of around 35,000 to 45,000 adult male citizens. This meant that proportionally speaking Assembly attendance ran at about 10–20 per cent of the voting population. Translated to modern terms, it would be as if 30–60 million Americans attended a meeting of Congress or 10–20 million Brits descended on Westminster. It sounds unimaginable, but such a high level of participation was everyday fare in Athens.

And the assembled Athenian citizens did nothing more glamorous than sit down together and make all of the decisions necessary to run their country. They passed laws, bestowed citizenship on others, approved state expenses, and took executive decisions, such as the decision to embark on a war. It is no exaggeration to say that absolutely every political decision was taken in the Assembly, which never delegated its powers to individual officials, even in states of emergency. As one historian put it, ‘[t]he week-by-week conduct of a war, for example, had to go before the Assembly week by week, as if Winston Churchill were to have been compelled to take a referendum before each move in WWII’.²

Despite this high level of responsibility, the Assembly was an extremely efficient body. It met only four times each month, and when it did the Athenians quickly got down to the business of making decisions in a fashion as effective as it was unpretentious.

There were no prime ministers or Speakers of the House in ancient Athens. In fact, no one was truly in charge of the Assembly. Order was kept by a panel of randomly selected officials, one of whom was (again randomly) designated the ‘supervisor’ for the day. It was the supervisor’s not-very-illustrious job to present the various motions that had been suggested by citizens since the last meeting. The assembled citizens then voted on whether each motion should be accepted unchanged or subjected to further debate. For example, a motion might be that some form of state relief should be provided for orphans, or that the citizenship rules should be reformed, or (ever popular) that the Athenians should rip up the latest peace treaty with the Spartans and attack. However, the motion rarely said how exactly this was to be achieved, so it was usually necessary to thrash things out together in Assembly. Once debate was opened, citizens volunteered to make speeches for or against a certain view, amendment or interpretation of the issue under debate. Any citizen could choose to address the Assembly freely because each and every citizen had the right to express himself, not just publicly, but in a forum where public decisions were being made and on equal terms with all other speakers. The Athenians called this right ‘isegoria’. Athenians, in other words, did not just enjoy the right to attend and vote in Assembly, each citizen had a right to share his views with it. Once this debate had been concluded, the Athenians voted for or against each motion put forward by a show of hands. Such were the workings of the Athenian Assembly, in a nutshell.

However, before anyone gets the wrong idea, it’s necessary to point out that the Athenian Assembly was not by any stretch of the imagination a secluded realm of thoughtful introspection. Neither was participation at Assembly all about the grand moments of history. Most of the time, business was decidedly prosaic. On one lacklustre occasion, the assembled citizens (all men, of course), presumably wearied of handling luggage, could think of nothing better to do with their time than to pass a law stating that no woman would henceforth be allowed to travel with more than three dresses. One can only guess at how this law was received within the family home, but it didn’t stay on the books for long.

The processes of the Assembly were also characterized more by pragmatism than philosophical ideals. Sharing in Assembly was not intended to be an emotional unburdening in a judgement-free zone where each thought was equally valued and respected. The assembled citizens were well aware that their time was precious. They did not like long-winded speeches (unless they were really good) and they did not have much patience for anyone who did not appear to know what they were talking about or who was failing to add anything to the conversation. And while Athenian democracy is notable for its near-complete lack of violence, heckling, being forced off stage and even the occasional death threat were all part and parcel of the action. The way the Athenians saw it, if you couldn’t take the heat, you had best get out of the kitchen.

So isegoria was a right – an important and treasured right – but ultimately the idea behind it was for citizens to get out there and share their knowledge for the greater good of the community. It was supposed to enable people to say what they thought and to fight for what they thought. It did not, however, guarantee that others would take those thoughts seriously or hesitate to point out any shortcomings in them. This did not present any major difficulties for the Athenians, because they tended to be admirably unfazed by these social perils. We know that citizens from all walks of life did not hesitate to use their right to address their fellow citizens in Assembly, and that often people who were normally not very conspicuous in public life chose to speak up on an issue that was important to them, and managed to carry the vote on it, even when opposed by more famous and polished speakers.

Athenian citizens did just not ‘give input’ or ‘make their voices heard’ in Assembly – the frequent demands of pro-democracy advocates today – they collectively took the final decision on their nation’s policies on each and every substantive point after making an attempt to convince those present of the merits of their own views. This means that despite the robust nature of Athenian public debate, it was still a much more inclusive form of political decision-making than we practise today, because everyone, even wallflowers who never took advantage of their right to speak publicly, got an equal vote on every motion.

For these reasons, Athenian democracy is often referred to as ‘direct democracy’ to distinguish it from ‘our’ type of democracy, in which we elect individuals to make political decisions on our behalf. In reality, however, any given decision in the Assembly was usually the product of a debate conducted between 10 and 20 per cent of the population. In a sense, all other citizens were represented on that particular issue by those who happened to be in attendance on the day that it was debated. But it was a different kind of representation to what we know today because the concrete identity of the citizens in Assembly rotated constantly in unforeseeable patterns, and they were numerous enough to reproduce a more accurate cross-section of societal interests.

At first glance, that may sound innocuous, even banal, but it’s not. Later on, when we look at our own modern democracies, we are going to see just how vital the ever-shifting nature of Athenian democracy really was. But before we do that, there are a few other matters to clear up, because in Athens democracy was not just a matter of making laws in Assembly, it was also a matter of interpreting them in the courts.

The courts: justice by the thousands

According to Aristotle, Athens’ judicial system was an integral component of its political organization, and it was very different to our court system today.

To start off with, all Athenian courts were jury courts, staffed by large numbers of randomly selected jurors. The minimum jury size for a private suit was 201 jurors, which increased to 401 if the claim was worth more than 1,000 drachmae (a drachma was the Athenian unit of currency, and 1,000 drachmae would have been something like $60,000 by today’s standards). In public cases, the juries were even larger. The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: What is Democracy?
• Part I
• Part II
• Bibliography
• Index