Democracy

The Persian debate at Book III, 80–83 is the earliest Greek text in which the merits of popular rule, oligarchy, and monarchy are argued through named spokesmen. Otanes proposes isonomia, equality under law, and urges its advantages on his listeners: the drawing of lots for office, the accountability of magistrates at the end of their term, and the conduct of all public business before the assembled community. Megabyzus, replying in favor of oligarchy, objects that the crowd has neither discipline nor judgment, and that to hand the state over to the multitude is to trade one tyrant for many. Darius then argues for monarchy, on the ground that a single excellent man will rule more justly than any committee, and the historian notes that a majority of the seven Persian conspirators accepts Darius's view. Herodotus reports the exchange as an event in Persian history, but his Greek audience cannot have failed to hear its bearing on the constitutional disputes of their own cities.

The marks of popular rule that Otanes names are the very ones the later tradition will treat as its defining features: office assigned by lot rather than held for life, magistrates held to account at the end of their term, and open deliberation of public questions before the assembled people. Elsewhere in the History Herodotus shows how these practices took hold. At V.78 he remarks on the isēgoria, the equal right of speech, that the Athenians enjoyed after the expulsion of the Pisistratidae, and credits that equality with the military energy the city soon afterward displayed. In Book VI he describes Cleisthenes's reorganization of the Attic tribes, by which the demes were mixed across the city so that old loyalties of family and region might not overpower the common interest. The historian offers no verdict of his own between the constitutions, but he leaves no doubt that the rise of Athens is inseparable from the acquisition of a share in rule by ordinary men.

Though Herodotus keeps his own judgment in reserve, his report supplies the terms in which the question will be posed for the whole subsequent tradition. Otanes's charge that absolute power corrupts even the best character, and exposes the ruled to the caprices of a single will, belongs to the argument against TYRANNY that Plato, Aristotle, and Tacitus will each develop in their own idiom. Megabyzus's complaint that the multitude cannot judge well is repeated with little alteration in the Republic and the Statesman, and remains the standing objection which later defenders of popular rule, from the Federalists to Mill, are obliged to answer. Darius's preference for the rule of the one best man prefigures Aristotle's treatment of pambasileia and the medieval ideal of kingship. The passage is thus something like a prologue to the subsequent discussion of CONSTITUTION and GOVERNMENT, and the categories it lays down remain serviceable when writers more than two millennia later take up the same questions.

Herodotus does not conclude the argument he reports, but the lines along which it is carried on in every subsequent chapter on the subject are already drawn in his pages. The case for democracy, on the argument from the fairness of isonomia, and the case against it, on the argument from the incompetence of the multitude, recur, often with little alteration, whenever later thinkers defend or attack popular rule.

Plato's account of democracy in the Republic is sharply critical. In Book VIII of the Republic, democracy arises when oligarchy breeds such inequality that the poor majority rise up and seize power. Its distinguishing feature is liberty: isonomia, equality before the law, and parrhēsia, the freedom to say anything. All desires are treated as equal, and each citizen lives "as he likes."

This is charming at first, Plato concedes: democracy is "a pleasant constitution, full of variety and disorder, dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike." But it has no principle of order. Desires multiply without hierarchy, appetite displaces reason, the wise are ignored and the flatterers applauded. When at last some popular leader promises to protect the people from the rich, he becomes their champion, then their master. Democracy naturally gives birth to the tyrant.

Plato's indictment is that a regime built on equality and freedom has no answer to the question of who should rule. Ruling requires knowledge; lot and vote do not secure it. Without philosophical wisdom at the helm, the ship of state drifts toward catastrophe.

The question Plato's account raises, whether majority rule can avoid becoming the rule of appetite and, in the end, the tyranny of a demagogue, is addressed by each of the thinkers who follow him on this subject.

Aristotle classifies regimes by number of rulers and the interest served. Rule by one, few, or many, for the common good, gives kingship, aristocracy, polity. Rule for the rulers' own interest gives tyranny, oligarchy, democracy. On this schema, democracy is a deviation: rule of the many poor for themselves, not for the whole.

But Aristotle is subtler than Plato. He observes actual Greek cities and finds that democracy and oligarchy are the two regimes that really exist, and he studies their varieties. Some democracies are moderate, giving the poor a share but preserving law; others are extreme, with the demos acting as a collective tyrant. The best practical regime, he concludes, is a polity: a mixture of democratic and oligarchic elements, resting on a large middle class that checks the extremes.

He even notes, in a famous passage, that the many, when they deliberate together, may see more than the few: each contributes a share of virtue and practical wisdom, and their pooled judgment can exceed any individual's. This observation underlies later arguments that democratic deliberation has epistemic value of its own.

Aristotle's analysis classifies democracy as one of six regime-types, dangerous in its pure form but stabilizable by a large middle class. The question his account does not fully resolve is whether a polity's stability requires rough economic equality, a difficulty that Tocqueville and Mill will encounter when democratic equality coexists with widening commercial inequality.

Aquinas inherits Aristotle's regime-analysis and baptizes it. In the Summa, treating the Old Law, he asks what regime Moses established and answers: a well-mixed one. There was a single ruler (Moses, then the judges); a council of elders chosen for virtue (aristocracy); and the people themselves participated, both in choosing rulers and in consenting to laws.

This mixed regime, he argues, is the best by nature. Pure monarchy is efficient but risks tyranny. Pure aristocracy and democracy carry their own dangers. A regime combining all three (rule by one, shared with the virtuous few, grounded in the consent of the many) is most stable and most just.

Aquinas also insists that law, to be law at all, must aim at the common good and be made by the one who has care of the community, either personally or by those who represent it. This is a principle that grows, through the later scholastics and the natural-law tradition, into the modern doctrine of popular sovereignty.

Aquinas defends the principle of mixed government and maintains that law must aim at the common good and derive its authority from the community it serves. This argument is developed by the later scholastics and, through them, informs the modern doctrine of popular sovereignty, as treated in the chapters on LAW and GOVERNMENT.

According to Hobbes, the only escape from the war of every man against every man is for individuals to covenant together and lay down their natural right to self-rule in favor of a single sovereign power. That power can be a monarch, an assembly of a few, or an assembly of all (these correspond to monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy), but in every case the sovereign's authority must be absolute and indivisible.

Hobbes is not an enemy of democracy in principle: he admits that the original contract in his account produces a democratic assembly, which may then transfer its power elsewhere. What he refuses is divided sovereignty. The fashionable republican idea of a "mixed government," dividing power between king, lords, and commons, is, for Hobbes, a recipe for civil war. Every political body must speak with one voice or dissolve into faction.

He is also skeptical of democratic deliberation on practical grounds: assemblies are swayed by rhetoric, slow in emergencies, and prone to secret cabals. But the deeper argument is structural. Sovereignty, wherever lodged, must be supreme; the virtue of any regime lies in the unity of its command.

Hobbes's analysis of sovereignty and its requirements raises a question that later democratic theorists continue to address: how to make the many speak with one voice without producing either paralysis or tyranny.

Locke rebuilds politics on consent and rights. In the state of nature, each person has natural rights (life, liberty, property) and the executive power to defend them. To escape the inconveniences of self-help, people join together and consent to be governed. Once a political society is formed, Locke argues, it must be moved by the majority: this is the practical meaning of consent when unanimity is impossible.

But majority rule is not unlimited. Government exists to protect natural rights, and any government that violates them, including a democratic legislature, dissolves the trust on which it rests. The people retain a right to resist and, if necessary, to revolt. Sovereignty is thus placed in the people, but the people themselves are bound by the moral law that made consent binding in the first place.

Locke prefers representative institutions, with a separation between legislative and executive power, and rule of law over arbitrary command. He gives modern democracy its characteristic combination: majority decision, individual rights, and the right to replace rulers who violate the public trust.

Locke's treatment establishes a vocabulary for liberal democracy: consent, rights, majority rule, and the right of revolution. An unresolved tension remains, however, in that majority rule is legitimate only within the constraints of natural law, yet Locke provides no institution empowered to enforce those constraints. Rousseau regards this as incoherent; the American founders attempt to address it through judicial review and constitutional separation of powers.

Montesquieu links each regime to a characteristic "principle," the passion that animates its citizens. Monarchy runs on honor, despotism on fear, and republics (including democracy) on virtue: love of country and laws, willingness to prefer the public good to one's own. When virtue fails, the republic decays.

This makes democracy demanding. It cannot rest on self-interest alone; it must cultivate a civic ethos through education, religion, manners, and modest equality of conditions. Extreme inequality and luxury dissolve the bond of common purpose on which democratic self-government depends.

Montesquieu's other great contribution is the separation of powers. Having traveled and studied England, he argues that liberty is best preserved when legislative, executive, and judicial powers are held by distinct bodies that check one another. This framework becomes, through the American founders, the backbone of modern constitutional democracy.

Montesquieu's analysis of democracy thus has two aspects: an account of the civic character on which it depends, and an institutional design by which the power even of virtuous citizens is kept within bounds.

Rousseau radicalizes the consent tradition. In the Social Contract, legitimate political authority arises only when each individual gives himself entirely to the whole and obeys only the general will, the will that aims at the common good, in which each, by obeying, obeys himself. This is the famous paradox of being "forced to be free."

From this it follows that sovereignty is inalienable and indivisible. It cannot be handed over to a representative, cannot be divided into branches, cannot be separated from the people. The English, Rousseau says, think themselves free, but they are free only on the day of elections; the moment a representative is chosen, they become slaves. True democracy would require direct participation and small states.

Rousseau thus produces an exacting ideal. He doubts that pure democracy has ever existed or can exist ("were there a people of gods, they would be governed democratically"), but he insists that any legitimate regime must take its authority from the general will and operate within the horizon of popular sovereignty.

Rousseau's account makes popular sovereignty absolute and inalienable. Questions about the practical consequences of this position, and about how the general will can be identified and expressed without becoming an instrument of majority oppression, are treated in the chapters on GOVERNMENT and LIBERTY.

Jefferson, drafting the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776, gives to the Lockean premises of natural rights and popular consent a concise and public form. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; when they destroy the ends for which they are instituted, the people retain the right to alter or abolish them. Jefferson is not primarily a systematic philosopher but a Virginia planter, lawyer, and statesman who, through state papers, legislation, and a voluminous correspondence carried on into old age, works out the practical meaning of popular sovereignty as it touches suffrage, religion, education, slavery, and the federal frame. The Declaration itself, together with the Notes on the State of Virginia and the exchange of letters with John Adams from the years of retirement, constitutes the body of writings in which his political thought can be read.

In the correspondence with Adams Jefferson distinguishes the natural aristocracy of virtue and talents from the pseudo-aristocracy of wealth and birth, and holds that the free election of representatives is the means by which a republic may separate the first from the second. The natural aristocracy he calls the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and the government of society; the artificial one he sets down as a mischievous encumbrance. In the Notes on the State of Virginia he makes the case for a ward system of local self-government, by which each citizen would take an active share in public business, and for a system of public schooling designed to raise up from every condition those capable of public service. The same Notes also confess the deep contradiction that chattel slavery introduces into a republic founded on the equal rights of men, a contradiction Jefferson acknowledges with foreboding without ever resolving in his own practice.

Where Rousseau had doubted whether representation was compatible with real self-government, and where Montesquieu had held republican government suited only to small territories, Jefferson, together with Madison and Hamilton, stakes the American settlement on the opposite premises: that representation need not be a betrayal of popular rule, and that a republic may be extended over a continent. His insistence on the ward republic and on the education of every citizen gives the popular side of that settlement its characteristic form, and his phrase about the natural aristocracy passes into the argument by which later defenders of democracy, Mill above all, try to reconcile rule by the many with the claims of merit. The unresolved question of slavery, which the Declaration's universal language makes more rather than less acute, is answered only by civil war, and its answer becomes the ground from which subsequent writers on EQUALITY and LIBERTY take up the discussion.

Jefferson leaves no treatise on democracy, but the state papers and letters through which his political thought is scattered have supplied the American conversation with its working vocabulary. His confidence that the people can be trusted with their own government, provided they are educated to the trust, and that a natural aristocracy will rise into public office once privilege no longer stands in its way, is the hope on which the American experiment is defended, and the claim against which Tocqueville, Mill, and Marx will in turn measure it.

Hamilton, Madison, and Jay write The Federalist to defend a new kind of popular government: a republic, distinct from the small direct democracies that classical theory had declared unstable. Where Montesquieu held that republics could only survive in small territories, Madison argues in Federalist 10 that the opposite is true: the larger the republic, the more factions it contains, and the more difficult it is for any one faction to form a majority and oppress the rest.

The Federalists' innovation is the combination of scale and representation. Direct participation gives way to elected delegates who "refine and enlarge the public views." Sovereignty remains with the people, but is filtered through institutions designed to slow passion and check ambition. Federalist 51 puts it starkly: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary"; since they are not, "ambition must be made to counteract ambition," and powers must be separated so that each department checks the others.

The distinction they draw between democracy (direct, Athenian) and republic (representative, extended) becomes the central vocabulary of American constitutional thought. They defend popular sovereignty while designing it against its own excesses: the majority's tyranny, the faction's heat, the demagogue's flattery.

The Federalist papers present an argument for making popular government workable at the scale of nations, through representation, separation of powers, and the institutional arrangement by which competing interests check one another.

Tocqueville sees democracy as more than a form of government: it is a social condition, the gradual, providential leveling of ranks that has been unfolding in the West for seven centuries. In America, he studies this condition at its most advanced and asks what preserves liberty under it.

He is struck by American associations (civic, religious, professional) that multiply spaces of self-government between the individual and the state. Local self-government, an independent judiciary, religious belief, and a free press together habituate citizens to public action and restrain the centralizing pull of democratic equality.

But Tocqueville's warnings are famous. Democratic majorities can exert a tyranny softer than ancient despotism but more pervasive: not chains, but the suffocating pressure of public opinion on thought and speech. Individualism, left unchecked, withdraws citizens into private life; the state grows, not by violence but by providing for all their needs, until it rules a "flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

Tocqueville's analysis examines both the conditions that sustain democratic government and the characteristic dangers to which it is prone. The questions he raises about conformism, centralization, and the retreat into private life are treated more fully in the chapters on LIBERTY and GOVERNMENT.

Mill is a committed but chastened democrat. Representative government, he argues in Considerations, is in principle the ideally best form: it engages the active faculties of the citizens, protects their interests, and is the only regime in which all affected may have a voice. But democracy carries its own characteristic dangers, and Mill designs institutions to counter them.

Chief among those dangers is the tyranny of the majority, a phrase he inherits from Tocqueville. On Liberty is in large part a defense of individuality against the social and legal pressure of democratic majorities. The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. Opinions, experiments in living, and unconventional character must be protected even when they displease the majority.

Mill also experiments with institutional design: plural voting weighted by education, proportional representation, competent legislative committees, an informed civil service. His aim is democracy improved, not replaced: a regime in which majority rule is both effective and restrained by the higher claims of liberty and qualified judgment.

Mill's argument for representative government is among the fullest modern defenses of democracy, though it contains an unresolved tension: if plural voting weights educated opinion more heavily, and if the laboring classes and women are excluded from the best education, his qualified democracy may in practice reproduce the inequalities in political participation that the natural rights tradition had aimed to remove.

Marx treats liberal democracy with a mixture of appreciation and scorn. Appreciation, because the bourgeois revolutions overthrew feudal hierarchies, proclaimed equality before the law, and won formal rights of speech, assembly, and suffrage. Scorn, because these rights remain formal: behind the democratic state stands capital, which owns the means of production and therefore the real conditions of life.

In "On the Jewish Question," Marx distinguishes political emancipation from human emancipation. The modern state can recognize equal citizens while leaving society fractured by class. "The political state, in relation to civil society, is just as spiritual as heaven is in relation to earth." Universal suffrage does not abolish the wage relation; elections do not control the economy. Democracy remains, for Marx, a form of bourgeois rule so long as capitalism persists.

Real democracy, for Marx, would require the abolition of classes. His sketches of the Paris Commune and the Critique of the Gotha Program gesture toward a self-governing association of producers, without a separate state apparatus standing over society. This is democracy radicalized beyond the political sphere into economic life itself.

Marx's analysis reframes the democratic question. On his account, it is not only about institutions of voting and representation but about who owns the social conditions of life. The question whether political democracy is compatible with wide economic inequality is taken up more fully in the chapters on EQUALITY and LABOR.