How has Democracy changed?

DEMOCRACY

A LIFE

PAUL CARTLEDGE

OUP Oxford, Softback, 416 pages, 2018, 9780198815136, RRP £12.99

Available at a discount from www.booklaunch.london

EDITOR’S NOTE

Modern “evolved” democracy, such as it is, is far from Athenian democracy, and needs to be constantly tended, says Paul Cartledge. It is damaged by the demagoguery of the Left (qv former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn) and of the Right (qv former US President Donald Trump), and both have had a ripple effect on the wider world. The appeal of crude emotionalism and nationalism over fact-based analysis not only undermines the merit of democratic liberalism as the most beneficial form of government but leaves it vulnerable to underinformed distrust. This book needs to be read.

In the United Kingdom of Great Britain the leading intellectual and political opponent of the French Revolution—though not, a little surprisingly, of the American Revolution—was the Dublin-born Anglo-Irishman Edmund Burke (1729–1797). In the privately expressed view of his fellow parliamentarian and fellow member of Samuel Johnson’s Literary Club, Edward Gibbon, Burke was ‘the most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew’. Burke placed his eloquence long term in the defence of the principles of representative government, as opposed to government by delegated elected officials; his 1774 Speech to the Electors of Bristol at the Conclusion of the Poll had made that plain quite early on in his career. But as to representative democracy, Burke shared pretty much the same three basic objections that had been voiced against democracy in its original, direct Greek form. First, ‘the people’—meaning non-elite, non-aristocratic persons—lacked the requisite intelligence and knowledge to be capable of exercising proper governance. Second, common people—unlike, ex hypothesi, members of the social-political elite—were congenitally incapable of resisting the passions that were all too easily and dangerously aroused by demagogues, and such passions were likely to be directed against established traditions and institutions, in particular those of conventional religion. Third (shades of both Xenophon and Plato), democracy was for him intrinsically a form of collective, majoritarian tyranny—wielded heavyhandedly against minorities whose views were deemed unpopular.

It was against Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that Thomas Paine penned in 1791 his Rights of Man, an appropriately eloquent defence of not only liberal but also representative democracy. He completed his three-pronged programme for radical political reform— Common Sense had been published in 1776—with The Age of Reason, a religion-focused tract published in three parts (1794, 1795, 1807). Or rather it was an anti-religion tract, subtitled An Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology. This was a source for nineteenth-century free thought that kept on giving. As Edward Thompson brilliantly commented, Paine ‘had taken the polite periods of the comfortable Unitarian ministers and the scepticism of Gibbon, translated them into literal-minded English, and thrown them to the groundlings. He ridiculed the authority of the Bible with arguments which the collier or country girl could understand’. It was not of course necessary to be an atheist or freethinker to be a good democrat, but, if the goal was to open politics to the hitherto disenfranchised working man and woman in an inclusively egalitarian way, then Paine’s nostrums offered a viable if not painless programme.

By contending that all citizens could and should be protected by the State against the predictable hazards of poverty and insecurity, Paine arguably became, together with the French Marquis de Condorcet, a plausible if distant founding father of social democracy—the socialised (sometimes also socialist) version of liberal democracy. But he was no democrat in any ancient Greek sense. Unarguably, the kind of democracy he believed in and advocated was of the representative, not direct, variety. Against Paine, in a friendly written exchange of 1791, the French revolutionary Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836) pertinently observed that it wasn’t and couldn’t possibly be democracy that he was promoting, since the people would be unable to speak or act except through their representatives. He himself, like Paine, was all for representative government, but, unlike Paine, wished to distinguish in theory and on principle between a representative regime and a republic—of which latter form he too was equally fervently an advocate.

Paine himself, however, never stood for office and so missed the chance or the necessity of attempting to translate his political ideas into mundane parliamentary practice. A younger contemporary and compatriot of his, George Grote (1794–1871), did just that, and a great deal more besides. He is the principal subject, if not hero, of this final chapter in our life of democracy. Grote was educated in Classics at Sevenoaks and Charterhouse schools, but did not go on to university. Instead, he helped to found one: the University of London, initially just University College, in 1826. He came from a banking family, and worked for a while in the family bank, but between 1832 and 1841 he served as an elected Member of Parliament (MP) at Westminster, where he joined a tendency sometimes known as the Philosophical Radicals. (CONTINUED AFTER THE BREAK)

READERS’ COMMENTS

Josiah Ober:

A passionate and erudite biography of a revolutionary idea that became a way of life.

David Runciman:

Reminds us how much we still have to learn from the ancient Greeks.

These were momentous times: the first Reform Act was passed on his watch in 1832, and extended the franchise to an appreciable degree. From the 1830s to the 1850s the movement for a People’s Charter—calling for manhood suffrage, pay for MPs, and secret ballots—gathered and then lost a head of steam under the leadership of William Jones. In 1839 Welsh Chartists, including Jones, actually led an armed uprising against Newport that resulted in more than twenty deaths. But the Chartists were ahead of their time, even if they made some impression upon Karl Marx and his Communist Manifesto of 1848. By that time, however, and clearly with a sense of relief, Grote had withdrawn from what Edward Gibbon, a historian-parliamentarian predecessor, had called a ‘school of civil prudence’, and taken up once again his bookish historical studies. For his History of Greece, eventually published in twelve volumes (1846–1856), had been begun as early 1822, when he was not yet thirty.

However, Grote was also, and from our standpoint most importantly, a pioneer in the re-evaluation of ancient Athens as a democracy. Grote, for example, did not shrink from defending the institution of ostracism that had attracted such ire from Aristotle onwards. He also spoke up in defence of the Athenians’ treatment of their leaders. As a specialist in ancient philosophy, he devoted a whole long chapter to a defence of the Sophists against theirprincipal critic (or calumniator), Plato; this was also an integral part of his very nineteenth-century linkage of democracy with intellectual progress, to which he allied also a defence of the necessity of rhetoric as a means to enable ordinary people to make up their minds and thereby give their genuine consent to political decisions.

But although Grote did more than anyone to rehabilitate the ancient Athenian democracy, he did so as a historian, and not as an advocate of a return to Athenian-style governance. Like Paine, but even more like his friend and disciple John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), Grote believed in representative, not direct democracy. Grote’s History appeared in instalments over a ten-year period and at once attracted fierce criticism. Equally fiercely, Mill leaped to Grote’s defence, both intellectually and politically, in a telling series of reviews published in the Edinburgh Review. For example, he wrote: ‘The Athenian Many, of whose irritability and suspicion we hear so much, are rather to be accused of too easy and good-natured a confidence, when we reflect that they had living in the midst of them the very men who, on the first show of an opportunity, were ready to compass the subversion of the democracy’. This was in reference to the so-called Thirty Tyrants, who reigned with terror from 404 to 403, but could be applied equally to the briefer but not much less terroristic regime of the Four Hundred in 411.

Mill himself not only approved Grote’s take on the ancient Athenian democracy but, unlike his mentor, went back to ancient Athenian democracy to help him formulate certain aspects of his own theory of democratic government. Thus was unwittingly created what has been dubbed the ‘myth’ of ancient Athens—as a model for today.

Yet actually Mill (like Tocqueville and Burke) greatly feared what he envisaged as the tyranny of the unenlightened, ignorant, fickle majority, and he was therefore, like Grote, much keener on representative than direct democracy. Indeed, so much keener was he that in Representative Government (1861) he elaborated a theory of what, and how, parliamentary representatives—as opposed to delegates—should represent. That work further developed the notions of ‘liberal’ democracy that he had expressed in his 1859 essay On Liberty: liberty of thought and discussion, limits set to the authority of society over the individual, and promotion of individuality. That essay was the proximate ancestor of Isaiah Berlin’s theories of negative and positive liberty.

For well over a century Mill’s version of democracy—Greek-inflected but not Greek-infected, if I may so put it—prevailed, as the only viable model on offer within the context and increasingly globalised presence of liberal, representative, parliamentary democracy. Or, as Winston Churchill famously put it in the House of Commons on 11 November 1947 (Armistice Day) ... (CONTINUED IN THE BOOK)