Democracy and Its Crisis

A. C. Grayling

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786072900
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The EU referendum in the UK and Trump's victory in the USA sent shockwaves through our democratic systems. In Democracy and Its Crisis A. C. Grayling investigates why the institutions of representative democracy seem unable to hold up against forces they were designed to manage, and why it matters.First he considers those moments in history when the challenges we face today were first encountered and what solutions were found. Then he lays bare the specific threats facing democracy today.The paperback edition includes new material on the reforms that are needed to make our system truly democratic.

PART I

1

THE HISTORY OF THE DILEMMA PART I

Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli

It is customary to begin discussions of democracy with Plato’s attack on it. This is appropriate, because one side of the dilemma of democracy is identified by him: the danger – in his view, the inevitability – of democracy in fact being, or at least rapidly collapsing into, rule by the least well-equipped to rule; as Plato put it on the basis of how such a process could occur in an ancient Greek city state, mob rule or rather mob anarchy – the situation for which the term ochlocracy was coined. That would be undesirable enough in its own right, but he took it that because democracy thus conceived is unsustainable it will, he says, with further inevitability eventuate in the restoration of order by a strongman ruler – a tyrant.

There is another danger implicit in Plato’s conception of democracy, which is that of a hidden oligarchy (in our contemporary sense of rule by a group, claque or cabal) or perhaps even a hidden tyranny, capturing the reins of government under cover of democracy, by exploiting and directing sentiment through demagoguery and manipulation to achieve its own ends. This might happen even in benign ways, as was arguably the case under Pericles in the democracy of fifth century BCE Athens; but if we make the assumption, as we do in contemporary systems predicated on the idea that political authority lies with whoever counts as the enfranchised among the demos, hidden oligarchy would not be legitimate because it would not be democracy.

Aristotle did not see eye to eye with his teacher Plato in matters of politics. The interest in Aristotle’s thought for present purposes is that he believed there to be a form of political order, which he called polity (in Greek politeia), intermediate between oligarchy and democracy, which could be described as a good or positive form of democracy if the label ‘democracy’ had not been placed in such bad odour by Plato that few were prepared to defend a political system under that name, not only among Plato’s successors but until very recently in history. Yet the demand for wider participation in matters political that has grown in modern times in fact has considerable affinity, whether unconsciously or accidentally, with the Aristotelian notion of polity.

In the eighth book of the Republic Plato describes a set of political regimes arranged in descending order of merit, beginning with the kind he advocates – aristocracy, ‘rule by the best’ – and proceeding downhill to the worst kind, which is tyranny, rule by a single individual. ‘Worst’ here does not necessarily mean despotic or cruel; parts of the Greek world of Plato’s time were ruled by individuals whom the nomenclature of the time designated tyrannos, though they might equally well have been called princes, kings, rulers, or dictators – in the neutral sense of this latter term, as used by Romans to denote the plenipotentiary leader they appointed in times of national emergency. But with the evidence before him of the actualities of tyranny, in which the licence to cruelty, murder and injustice is unrestrained either by inner virtue or outer constitutional forms, Plato viewed tyranny as the worst form of government, because, as Lord Acton long after him noted, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ And thus the word ‘tyrant’ came to have a thoroughly bad connotation.

Between aristocracy and tyranny lie three intermediary forms, each a degeneration from the better form above it. Aristocracy, as noted, is rule by the ‘best’, understood not as an hereditary nobility – that was a much later misappropriation of the term – but as the most knowledgeable, virtuous and wise among the citizens, who rule disinterestedly because they have no vested interests in anything but the welfare of the state. A related form of government is epistocracy, rule by those who know, in other words by experts, people who are knowledgeable, experienced and educated. But the term aristoi means people who are not only knowledgeable and smart but highly moral. Aristocrats were Plato’s ‘philosopher kings’, whose knowledge and virtue – which, as a subtlety of his ethical theory, are the same thing in effect – arise from grasping the nature of the eternal Good. In contemporary terms one might describe Plato’s aristocrat as a kind of meritocrat, a highly intelligent and educated man, raised and trained to rule, whose dedication to his task excludes any interest in the trappings of wealth and power and even of a personal life. Indeed Plato required that the philosopher kings should have neither property nor family, but should live as, in later times, monks chose to do.

The austerity and high-mindedness of this conception explains why Plato thought there was a risk of aristocracy degenerating into timocracy. In modern parlance timocracy is rule by those whose qualification for government is the possession of a certain minimum of property, but in Plato’s usage it denotes rule by those who seek honour, status and military glory. Unlike aristocrats, whom they somewhat resemble in being intelligent and educated, they nevertheless have an incomplete grasp of the Good, and mistake it for its outer shows – the wealth and reputation that people seek in the erroneous idea that these things are the greatest goods worth having. Whereas aristocracy would ensure stable and enduring government because no inner divisions threaten it, from timocracy downwards rivalry enters the picture, and with rivalry a greater chance of instability.

It is an easy slide from timocracy to oligarchy. Today this term means rule by the few – by a group, class, cabal or junta; Plato meant rule by the rich over the more numerous poor. Today an alternative label is used for this latter type of regime, viz. plutocracy. Timocracy degenerates into oligarchy because timocrats are permitted to accumulate private wealth, from which follow the vices that wealth encourages: pursuit of pleasure and luxury, making the possession of money seem desirable as an end in itself, and its accumulation as more important than virtue or honour. Timocrats still cared about honour, said Plato, but oligarchs only care about money.

The oligarchies of Plato’s own day gave him examples of what there is to deprecate in them. If wealth is the qualification for rule, wise but poor men will be excluded from government. Class distinctions arise from the differentials in wealth, destabilizing society. Military weakness will follow, because the effete rich, denying arms to the poor for fear of insurrection, are not guaranteed to be good soldiers.

The rich enjoy a large measure of freedom because their wealth buys it for them. They have choices and personal autonomy. Envy of such freedom causes oligarchy to be overcome by democracy. The populace rises against the oligarchs in order to dispossess them, generally with violence and turmoil; or at best the oligarchs capitulate without a revolution, for fear of one. One way or another democracy supervenes because the many want what the few enjoyed without rival for so long. In democracy everyone claims and possesses freedom and the right to make and break laws, and that, said Plato, very soon means anarchy, for such freedom is not freedom but merely licence.

Implicit in the idea of degeneration from the best form of government, the aristocratic, is Plato’s claim that the members of the demos lack the knowledge and virtue of the aristoi, which is what make the latter fit to govern. He thinks that the collapse of the democratic state is inevitable given the supposed opposite characteristics of the polloi or general public: ignorance, self-interest, prejudice, envy, and rivalry.

‘In such a state of society’, Plato writes,

the master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors; young and old are all alike; and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with him in word or deed . . . And above all, and as the result of all, see how sensitive the citizens become; they chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority and at length, as you know, they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten; they will have no one over them.¹

Accordingly democracy is no different from anarchy, or at the very least rapidly collapses into it, a situation which soon invites the intervention of a strongman to restore order. Once a strongman is in power, getting rid of him can prove difficult, and the people will be in the worst situation of all: they will live under tyranny. Thus, said Plato, do tyranny and slavery arise out of extreme forms of liberty.

* * *

Aristotle thought that Plato’s version of aristocracy was impractical because it ignored human nature. Can there really be philosopher kings remote from the normal human desire for affection and the amenities that make life pleasant? His own idea of what would be the best kind of political order is one in which every citizen – where ‘citizen’ is a restricted notion meaning someone qualified to engage in the state’s political life – is virtuous, equipped to attain excellence of character, and therefore able to live a life of eudaimonia or happiness. Such a society is in practice unlikely to exist, however, so a more modest ambition is the aforementioned polity. This is a mixed constitution in which no single order of citizens, whether rich, aristocratic or poor, can override the interests of the others.

In the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle had defined virtue as the middle path between opposing vices – courage as the mean between cowardice and rashness, generosity as the mean between miserliness and profligacy, and so on – and he applied this philosophy of the middle ground to his idea of the best practicable state. Such a state will be one in which there is a large middle class, itself neither rich nor poor but occupying the territory in between, whose members will be more inclined to be fair and just than either of the other two classes because, he says, those who are moderately well off find it ‘easiest to obey the rule of reason’ and will be least inclined to faction.

‘Large’ in ‘large middle class’ here is a relative term. Like the Athenian democrats before him, Aristotle believed that polity is possible only in a city state small enough for the voice of the public crier, the stentor, to be heard all over town. In such a setting all citizens could know everything that was going on, and could know personally the men who took office as magistrates, generals or jurymen; such a society is a ‘face-to-face’ society.

More recent theorists have found interesting Aristotle’s view that although democracy is not as good as polity because it gives an unbalancing amount of influence to the poor, who would be likely to constitute the majority, it is nevertheless the least bad of bad systems, and could be defended on the grounds that the pooled wisdom of the many might sometimes be better than the individual wisdom of the few.

Aristotle’s view of democracy is not, however, as friendly to direct democracy as its invokers would like, because – like Plato before him – he anticipated most later thinking about the question of who can be a participant in political life, and gave the answer almost everyone gives, which is: ‘not everyone’. The restriction is introduced through the idea of citizenship. Aristotle defined a citizen as a man who has the right to take part in the assembly, to hold office as a magistrate, and to sit on juries. Even poor men can be citizens of a state, but women, slaves and foreigners are again excluded. This in effect is the same problem, in early form, of who ‘the people’ are in the standard rhetoric about democracy in modern thought. I examine this crucial term in more detail later.

For Aristotle a key point was that any constitution has to be one that embodies the rule of law. The kind of democracy he most disapproved of ‘is where the mass is sovereign and not the law. This kind arises when dictats are sovereign instead of the law, which happens because of demagogues. In law-abiding democracies demagogues do not arise; on the contrary, the best citizens guide. This is because the demos becomes a monarch, one person composed of many; for the many are sovereign not as individuals but collectively.’²

Aristotle’s views on politics have not been as influential as those of Plato largely because his empirical study of constitutions, and the political theory he based on it, related to the Greek city states that were then on their way out of history. It is hard not to find compelling, though, his idea that as more citizens become educated and better off, so a democracy evolves into a polity, defined as that political order in which the pooled wisdom of reasonable and informed citizens might result in a dispensation only one notch below the ideal state all of whose citizens are aristoi, the best. The practical difficulty of achieving even this lesser ideal is one that remains a challenge for democracy today.

Herodotus makes clear that the Greeks’ resistance to the Persian invasion of the early fifth century BCE was premised on the idea of freedom – eleutheria – which they regarded as applying peculiarly to themselves. Persians might be richer and grander, but they were slaves to their imperial overlord. In fifth century BCE Athens the goddess who personified democracy, Demokratia, was honoured alongside the city’s tutelary deity, Athena. In his famous Funeral Oration delivered early in the succeeding Peloponnesian War Pericles is reported by Thucydides as saying:

Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbours’, but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbour if he does what he likes . . . While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.³

These are stirring words, so long as we forget that the ‘citizens’ referred to constituted less than 20% of the total population. But they can be taken to embody an aspiration which is implicitly realizable in Aristotle’s idea of polity enlarging itself as more and more of the population become citizens. It is possible to read Pericles as describing an ideal for an inclusive democratic order in the contemporary world, but the actualization of a Periclean democracy today would require at least what Plato thought the polloi (the ordinary people) lacked – namely education, information, and a high moral sense – and what Aristotle said the middle class of a polity should exemplify: namely wisdom, pragmatism, and civic-mindedness. The practical difficulty of achieving this at the scale at which contemporary political orders exist, in large countries with populations in the tens of millions, is an intensification of the dilemma of democracy itself.

And history demonstrates that the dangers identified by Plato are genuine ones. It is a speaking fact that the dangers exist even in what are arguably the best conditions for democracy – the small city state where citizens know one another and can gather together and debate. In more populous and diverse states the same risks are much magnified. The test case for the purest form of direct democracy, namely what happens in the power vacuum following a revolution – think of the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian Revolution of 1917 – almost always bears him out.

It is borne out even when ruling elites can no longer obstruct the masses’ chance of a share in political processes by denying them education, information, mobility, and the ability to assemble with others, as was the case for example in feudal times when most people lived in conditions of serfdom. The revolutionary movements of 1789, 1848, 1917, 1949, 1956, 1968 and thereafter, in various parts of th...