the story of democracy
(Atlantic Books: 2005)
“This book sets out to
explain the extraordinary presence of democracy in today’s world. It
shows how it began as an improvised remedy for a very local Greek
difficulty two and a half thousand years ago, flourished very briefly
but scintillatingly, and then faded away almost everywhere for all but
two thousand years.... It registers its slow but insistent rise over
[a] century and a half, and its overwhelming triumph in the years since
1945.... [However,] when any modern state claims to be a democracy, it
necessarily misdescribes itself. But that is very far from rendering
the misdescription inconsequential, and cannot credibly be viewed
merely as deliberate self-deception. [For] there is every reason for
today’s citizens to insist that their own state describe itself in
these terms.... The label of democracy...expresses symbolically...the
degree to which all government, however necessary and expeditious, is
also a presumption and an offence. Like every other modern state, the
democracies of today demand obedience, and insist on a very large
measure of compulsory alienation of judgement on the part of their
citizens. (To demand that obedience and enforce such alienation is what
makes a state a state.) When they make that demand in their
citizen’s own name, however, they...close the circle of civic
subjection.... Everywhere that the word democracy has fought its way forward across time and space, you can hear [two]
themes: the purposeful struggle to improve the practical circumstances
of life, and to escape from arbitrary and often brutal coercion, but
also the determination and longing to be treated with respect and some
degree of consideration.”
I don’t know about you, but books about democracy clutter my shelves so
successfully, I have to clear them out every few years...lest they
overwhelm my other interests. But there are vanishingly few that can
hold their place for the long haul. For the mechanics - as you might
say - there’s quite a variety, as befits the (numbing) complexity of
the thing...although I really can’t go past Thomas Ferguson’s Golden Rule(1995), Mancur Olsen's Rise and Decline of Nations(1982) and Diana C. Mutz’s Impersonal Influence(1998)...with Enid Lakeman’s Voting in Democracies(1955, and still the best), Richard H. Thaler & Cass Sunstein's Nudge(2008), Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons(1990), James S. Fishkin’s Voice of the People(1997) and Jane Jacobs’ Cities and the Wealth of Nations(1984)
for the ongoing shapes of our cure. In the more rarified realms of
history/philosophy, however, my essentials list would be much, much
shorter. This one, and Eric Havelock’s groundbreaking The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics(1964).
Dunn has long impressed me, starting way back with Political Theory in the Face of the Future (1978) - a thoroughly disillusioned tour of our possibilities that,
nevertheless, refuses to abandon the hope for something better. Which
stance, I’d have to say, he has refined and deepened to the utmost with
this recent work...making the perfect companion-piece to the Havelock.
For whereas Havelock’s is an optimism tempered by care, Dunn’s vision
is that of pessimism shot through w/hope. Both are extremely fine - and
original - scholars and, together, they allow us to genuinely grasp the
real possibilities of democracy. Furthermore, their complementary
visions both start with - but are not limited by - the radically direct
democracy of the Athenian polis...a very different “democracy” than ours.
“There is...little
direct relation between the political institutions and practices of
ancient Athens and those of any human community today. But there is
unmistakably at least one connecting strand, which runs without
interruption from the texts of Aeschylus to the present day. What is
transmitted along this strand is seldom, if ever, firm structures of
power , or definite institutional practices. What travels along it,
often with great vitality, are conceptions of what to value and aim
for, and why and how to act on the basis of those conceptions.... [For]
as we peer back towards the democracy of Athens through the murk of
history, and quarrel endlessly about what was ever really there, we
largely recapitulate Greek arguments. We do so partly because of an
obvious continuity of subject matter: because the reality we are trying
to grasp was to such a large degree what those arguments were about:
and partly too because recapitulating Greek arguments was what for
almost two thousand years Europeans, and later North Americans, were
tirelessly trained to do. But we also do so because of the enduring
power of some of those arguments, itself a testimony to the power of
the way of life from which they first came.”
“It is not debate which is a hindrance to action, but rather not to be instructed by debate before the time comes for action.”
(Pericles, quoted by Dunn, p.27)
If Havelock’s political ideas have been ignored - to the extent that
they have had, in a way, to be “reinvented” unknowing by capabilities
theorists such as Nussbaum & Sen - Dunn’s is much more the modern
mainstream vision of ancient democracy...albeit both more pessimistic
and more insistently hopeful (if such a combination may be conceived)
than any other. Drawing primarily from the work of M. I. Finley, Mogens
H. Hansen & Josiah Ober, Dunn’s Athens is no realm of sweetness
& light. Instead, it is the forum - and result - of desperate
political contingency.
“What then was Athenian
democracy? Of some things, we can be quite certain. For the Athenians
themselves, what it was remained fiercely contentious from its
beginning to its end. It could scarcely have been less like the anodyne
political recipe which democracy readily seems today, an almost wholly
unreflective formula.... Democracy in Athens arose out of struggles
between wealthier landowners and poorer families who...risked being
forced into unfree labour by their accumulated debts. It did not arise,
directly and self-consciously, through that struggle itself...but
through a sequence of political initiatives which reshaped the social
geography and institutions of Athens.... The most important of these
initiatives, the reforms of Solon, were put in place before Athens had
in any sense become a democracy. Solon was an Athenian nobleman (Eupatrid), chosen magistrate (Archon)
for the year 594, and given full power to reorganize the basis of land
ownership, credit, and personal status among the Athenians, and give it
lasting legal form. He codified the laws, revised the levels of
property on the basis of which wealthier Athenians were eligible to
hold public office, modified the structure of law courts greatly
improving access for the poor, freed those already enslaved for debt,
and abolished debt bondage for the future. He firmly refused to
redistribute land. By these means Solon tamed the brutal dynamics of
appropriation...[but] what he failed to do was establish a political
mechanism.”
“The next key
initiative, the conventional date for democracy’s inauguration, came
almost a century later, and after much political turmoil....
Kleisthenes, who brought to Athens in 507 BC what the Athenians in due
course came to call democracy, was...also a nobleman (Eupatrid)
like Solon; but...none of the historical sources presents him as
setting out from a clearly articulated conception of the fundamental
challenges Athens faced, or carefully selecting democracy for their
remedy. Democracy, indeed, was not merely as yet unnamed. It was not
even a pre-specified formula, applied to solve a clearly defined
problem.... What was different about [Kleisthenes’] solution was that
the framework he established was from its outset a way of organizing
political choice which took it outside the ranks of the well-born and
relatively wealthy, and assigned it clearly and unapologetically to the
Athenian demos as a whole.
Herodotus presents Kleisthenes’ adoption of this approach, not as an
instance of intellectual or moral conviction, but as a practical
expedient to muster support against his aristocratic rivals and their
Spartan allies. But even at the time the motives and aspirations which
led him to select it may not have greatly mattered, once he had done
so. What mattered more even then, and still matters to this day, is
that in many ways and for a surprisingly long time the expedient
worked.”
“It is not hard...to
pick up some of the fierce directness of Athenian democracy, and the
formidable dispersion of personal power and responsibility across the
citizen body which made it possible. What remains hard to see clearly
is quite how this startling immediacy in Athenian politics, and the
permanent and intensely personal accountability which it enforced,
nevertheless fitted with and modified the continuing role of its
political leaders.... Where the leaders made their mark, and laid
themselves open to...acute personal danger, was by setting themselves
forward to champion major changes in the law, or defend one line of
policy...and by competing to lead the armies or fleets sent off to
fight.... To do the first, they had to win the consent of the Assembly,
and do so without the backing of an organized personal following which
could ever have mustered a substantial proportion of the votes
required. (Contrast any modern legislature in action.) To do the
second, they had to get themselves elected for the purpose. [Moreover,]
the election of the Generals, strangely to our eyes, was widely
recognized as the least democratic feature of Athens’ political
arrangements, a clear concession to the massive importance of warfare,
and the dire potential costs of losing at it.”
While you won’t find here an exhaustive treatment of ancient Athens’
political structure - you’ll have to see Mogens Herman Hansen for that
(as should, for example those seeking to successfully reform Third World tribal democracies, as Kleisthenes holds the key) -
Dunn’s argument is clearly informed by same. But he is much more
concerned to probe the meanings of democracy...both then & now. What’s more, he has very skilful
judgement as to the compelling piece of information, which allows him
to deal highly judiciously with such a broad swathe of history. For
there was essentially no place for democracy in the variety of forms of
European governance between Alexander and the seventeenth century wars
of religion. Even amidst the latter, where the English Levellers strike
us as eminently “democratical”, that word - in that period - was merely
a conservative insult in the face of reform...and it took well over a
century more before it would begin to be recuperated for any positive
sense.
“Looking at it from
today, what we most want to believe is that Athenian democracy somehow
worked because it should have done so, because, within its own narrow
confines, it organized power in essentially the right way...[and] it is
above all that conviction, however confusedly, which we locked into
place when we turned the noun which initially described it into our own
name for the sole basis on which it is decent to claim political
power.... [And, as such, its power] came less from its continuing
capacity to elicit enthusiasm than from its utility in organizing
thought, facilitating argument, and shaping judgement. This is
extraordinarily important. It means that democracy entered the
ideological history of the modern world reluctantly, and facing
backwards. It won its vast following not by by evoking a golden
past...[but] by referring, and in less than seductive terms, to
possibilities now opening up before them.”
Our story, thus, is essentially in two parts - an ancient expedient
turned way of life (and remembered mostly through the insults of its
elite critics), and the development of political modernity. In treating
these, we are - of necessity - faced with diametrically opposed
problems. For the scanty and biased testimony of the past becomes the
overwhelming flood of the present, and it is a rare scholar who can
successfully deal with both. However, Dunn has an incisive eye for both
key players and distinctions, and - if anything - his treatment of
modernity is even more impressive than what we have already seen. He
starts with the vexed question of the lineage of representational
democracy, and suggests a rather disturbing hybrid:
“Beyond the Americas,
the impact of [the U.S.A.] on the politics of other countries was still
quite modest until the First World War, and did not really come into
its own until the aftermath of the Second. Before then, democracy’s
unsteady dispersion across the world was no testimony to American
power, and not much even to the force of American example.... More
plausibly, but still quite puzzlingly, it might instead be testimony to
the force of another and far more obtrusively ambiguous historical
example, the awesome Revolution which overwhelmed France. [For] what
happened in France in the few short years between 1788 and 1794 changed
the structure of political possibilities for human communities across
the world almost beyond recognition. It did so, for reasons we still
very vaguely comprehend, both radically and permanently. Even when it
was over...it left a different conception of what politics meant, a new
vision of how societies can or must organize themselves politically,
and a transformed sense of the scale of threat which their own
political life can pose to any society, and all within their reach. It
was within this new conception that democracy forced itself, slowly but
inexorably, upon one community after another.... The democratic legacy
of the Revolution was very much the product of its intense and often
devastating political struggles. But it [included] no echo of its
public symbols, nor of the language in which those struggles were
openly conducted. Only at a handful of points was the category
democracy deployed explicitly to define what was at stake within them,
and even then only once at the storm centre of the struggle itself.”
And, even more ambiguously, that sole deployment was by Robespierre
himself, architect of the Terror - albeit, it defense of universal
suffrage... However, not even he was a convinced democrat before the
Revolution - or even in its earlier stages. In this, interestingly, the
American and French Revolutions mirror one another...democracy being
the inexorable victor (in ideological terms), despite having been
discounted in advance by all the leading figures.
“Democracy perishes by
two excesses, the aristocracy of those who govern, or the contempt of
the people for the authorities which it has itself established.”
(Robespierre (1894), quoted in Dunn, p.118)
The French Revolution forms a complex pattern: the aristocracy
revolting against monarchical rule, the commons revolting against
aristocratic privilege & power, and then the self-consuming fire of
its final stages - in which royalty, aristocracy, and then dissenting
commons were all laid under the blade... But if much of the force of
democracy as an ideal stems from its bloody French embodiment, its
mechanics and - most importantly - its economic bargain is of mainly
American parentage. And, by reviving the formula of a long-dead French
Revolutionary - Gracchus Babeuf - not to mention the slogan of a
Russian reformer, Pyotr Stolypin, Dunn illuminates our political
history with a coldly uncharitable light, equally harsh on both left
and right...
“In America, once the
constitution was firmly in place, democracy soon became the undisputed
framework and expression of the order of egoism.... American equality
was above all an equality of standing, and a comprehensive rejection of
all overt forms of political condescension. It arose from and endorsed
a society both self-consciously and actually in rapid motion....
[Moreover,] to delegate government to relatively small numbers of
citizens, but also insist that they be chosen by most, if not all, of
their fellows was a cunning mixture of equality and inequality. It
could not guarantee sustained victory in practice to the partisans of
opulence and distinction. But it could and did open up an arena in
which victory could be sought and won, time and time again, and won
through the judgements and by the choices of the citizens
themselves...because opulence and distinctions (the combination
offered) have struck more citizens on balance as collectively
beneficial than simply malign. What gives the formula such strength
over time is its elasticity in settings where opulence has grown, [for]
it could scarcely work for long anywhere where distinction must be
sustained through stagnant or diminishing wealth, and has been widely
and understandably abandoned, often with little hesitation, in
circumstances of this kind.... [But] what, in the long run, has [most]
blunted equality’s appeal as a goal are the unpromising instruments for
realizing it, and the rigidities inherent in its pursuit...[for] these
rigidities come, in effect, from the goal itself.... [And] wherever the
opportunity to vote freely has been extended across an entire adult
population, the majority has found it unattractive to vote explicitly
for the establishment of equality.”
“Untrammelled and
complete equality...appeals to too few human emotions, for much too
little of the time, and is swamped, rapidly and fatally, by the
immediacy and impact of its incessant collisions with far too many
other emotions. As a goal for rule it requires of any ruler who tries
to implement it extreme and permanent coercion; and it guarantees to
their subjects nothing but recognition (if indeed that). Certainly
neither ease nor comfort, nor amusement, and for the recalcitrant
amongst them (those with opinions, tastes and wills of their own) not
even security. As Benjamin Constant saw it, early in the nineteenth
century, it offers ancient liberty, the delusory rewards of a notional
share in rule, in exchange for the surrender of modern liberty, the
real rewards of living as they please, within the bounds of the
criminal law and their own incomes. It then turns this offer into a
doctrinaire programme which suppresses the order of egoism en bloc.”
“As the title of a form
of government, in the key ideological outcome of the last two centuries
of an ever more global politics, the partisans of the order of egoism
have captured the word of the Equals. The Equals, in the meantime, have
largely been driven from the political field. But neither their
scattered remnants, nor even their more sophisticated intellectual
admirers, have felt inclined to surrender a word they still find
irresistibly compelling. To them, the capture, even now, seems not a
conquest in a just war, but an unabashed theft, secured by expedients
they still do not really understand.... By now, however, the
incomprehension of the losers is no testimony to their political
intelligence.... In embracing the term democracy so steadily, and so
purposefully, the political leaders of capitalism’s overwhelming
advance have not been juggling idly with empty symbols. They have
recognized, and done their best to appropriate and tap, a deep
reservoir of political power.... For most of human history, it has been
above all dependence and exclusion which have given structure to human
societies. With the coming of literacy, and the formalization of many
aspects of the relations between human beings over most of the world’s
inhabited surface, both dependence and exclusion were converted
increasingly into self-conscious principles of social order.
Democracy’s triumph has been above all the backwash from this great
movement of subordination. It signals and reinforces the steadily
rising pressure to break the sway of these two principles, and
refashion the relations between human beings on softer and less
offensive lines.”
“Democracy has altered
its meaning so sharply since Babeuf because it has passed definitively
from the hands of the Equals to those of the political leaders of the
order of egoism. These leaders apply it (with the active consent of
most of us) to the form of government which selects them, and enables
them to rule. It is a form of government at least minimally adapted to
the current requirements of the order of egoism, shaped within, and
adjusted to the continuing demands to keep that order in working
condition.... What has enabled it to surmount all challenges is still
open to question. But much of the answer unmistakably lies in the sheer
potency of the order of egotism.... The Wager on the Strong is a wager
on the rich, to some degree perforce on those with the good fortune to
be rich already, but above all on those with the skill, nerve and luck
to make themselves so. In the long run, the Wager on the Strong has
paid off stunningly. But...why did the Strong select this of all words
to name the form of government which has served them best of all in
their titanic struggle to mould the world to their purposes? ...[And]
what still remains harder to see is just how it aids or impedes those
who do choose to use it, augmenting their political strength, exposing
their deceit, or blurring their comprehension of their own goals.”
Dunn is quite merciless when it comes to the illusions on all sides of
politics, and his strength as a historian is that he refuses to
discount material or ideological factors, although he is quite clear that the latter are
always more complex in their causation. In this, he reminds me at times
of Ernest Gellner...particularly when he draws the connection with
expanding literacy which was so important to Gellner’s arguments on
nationalism. And, very like Gellner, he has a withering way with those comforting ideas that do not bear close scrutiny:
“It is quite tempting
to believe that democracy has won its present eminence for either or
both of two reasons. Some prefer to attribute its victory to its
evident political justice, its being plainly the best, and perhaps the
sole clearly justifiable basis on which human beings can accept the
apparent indignity of being ruled at all. Others find it easier to
believe that it owes this eminence to the fact that it and it alone can
ensure the well-protected and fluent operation of a modern capitalist
economy. Neither cheery view, unfortunately, can possibly be right.
Democracy in itself, as we have seen, does not specify any clear and
definite structure of rule. Even as an idea (let alone as a practical
expedient) it wholly fails to ensure any regular and reassuring
relation to just outcomes over any issue at all.... [Moreover,] any
actual structure of rule will face incentives quite distinct from, and
often sharply at odds with, the requirements for the fluent operation
of a capitalist economy. But democracy, quite explicitly, thrusts upon
its sovereign and notionally equal electors the right, and in some
measure the opportunity, to insert their own preferences directly into
the operating conditions of the economy.... As a bargain, this has a
great many advantages. But no one could reasonably see it as a safe
recipe for ensuring the dynamic efficiency of the economy at the
receiving end.”
“Athenian democracy had
very serious reservations about the divisions of political labour.
Except under the special conditions of open warfare...it simply refused
to pick individuals to exercise power in its name, and without further
recourse to it. It organized the daily tasks of government, quite
largely, by rotating them across the citizen body; and it made every
great decision of state, legislative, executive, or even judicial, by
the majority choice of very large numbers, whether in the Assembly or
the Courts. Under democracy, the citizens of Athens, quite reasonably
and accurately, supposed that they were ruling themselves. But the
vastly less exclusive citizen bodies of modern democracies very
obviously do nothing of the kind. Instead, they select from a menu
which they themselves can do little individually to modify, whichever
they find least dismaying amongst the options on offer...[and] it is
easy for electors not merely to regret individual past choices
(bargains that have gone astray), but also to lose heart more generally
in face of the options presented to them.”
“Any coherent complaint
must, in the end, once again be made on behalf of the order of
equality, and against the order of egoism. [And,] however else we
understand democracy today, we cannot safely or honourably brush aside
the recognition that it has been the clear verdict of democracy that
the struggle between these two orders is one which the order of egoism
must win.... [Therefore,] the big question raised by that victory is
how much of the distant agenda of the order of equality can still be
rescued from the ruins of its overwhelming defeat.... What is not
elusive about it, however, is that it requires the systematic
elimination of power (the capacity to make others act against their own
firm inclinations) from human relations. At the very least, it demands
the removal of any form of power stable enough to disclose itself to
others, and resistant enough to survive for any length of time once it
has done so.... Incoherent and implausible though it almost certainly
is, it is almost unmistakably the full programme of the Equals.... But
it is not a coherent description of how power can be organized, or
institutions constructed: not a causal model of anything at all.”
“The world in which we
all live is a world principally structured by the radicalization and
intensification of inequalities. Between the inhabitants of much richer
countries, these inequalities need not result in wider gaps in wealth,
status, or personal power than those which...still exist in far poorer
countries today. But, by the principle of economic competition and its
cumulative consequences, they work through, and have to work through,
the sharpening and systematization of inequality in the lives of
virtually everyone. It is by its pervasiveness and its peremptory
practical priority that the order of egoism precludes equality. It
tolerates, and even welcomes, many particular impulses towards
equalization. But what drives it, and in the end organizes the whole
human world, is a relentless and all-conquering principle of division
and contrast.... [And] the precise limits which the order of egoism
sets to equality do not form a clear fixed structure, which can be
specified in advance of political experience. They are an endless and
ever shifting battleground.... The role of democracy within this
remarkable form of life...is to probe constantly the tolerable limits
of injustice, a permanent and and sometimes very intense blend of
cultural enquiry with social and political struggle...an endless tug of
war between two instructive but very different senses of democracy. In
that struggle, the second sense, democracy as a political value,
constantly subverts the legitimacy of democracy as an already existing
form of government. But the first, too, almost as constantly on its own
behalf, explores, but then insists on and in the end imposes, its own
priority over the second.”
John Dunn’s Setting the People Free: the story of democracy (2005) is a major work, both deeply learned and accessible to the
general reader. Building on the best revisionist historical work of the
last half century, it brings into stark relief typically unquestioned
aspects of our political faith - via historical insight - and serves
the new humanities project as the dark counterpart to Eric Havelock’s
extraordinary (and neglected) Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (1964). By juxtaposing our modern political realities with those of
Ancient Athens, and the ideas of key players in the eighteenth century
revolutions that ushered democracy back onto the public stage, Dunn
forces us to see what an extraordinary compromise it is that we so
unhesitatingly label democracy...and, moreover, why it is that we are
so readily disgusted with what it brings forth. This is not a
“pleasant” book, by any means. But it is a very clear and important
one...
“What we affirm today,
when we align ourselves with democracy, is hesitant, confused, and
often in bad faith. It becomes less convincing, almost always, the more
clearly we bring out the premisses which lie behind our own values, and
the more openly we acknowledge the realities which make up the
institutions which we take them to commend. Where we have become
clearer, more frank, and more confident as time has gone by is in what
we deny when we take our stand on democracy. Above all, what we deny is
that any set of human beings, because of who or what they simply are,
deserve and can be trusted with political authority. We reject, in the
great Leveller formula, redolent of England’s seventeenth-century Civil
War, the claim (or judgement) that any human being comes into the world
with a saddle on their back, or any other booted and spurred to ride
them.”
(Dunn, pp.69-70)
