Demotic Moments

Democracy is, by nature, a work in progress, and Western history has had very few occurrences when the “demos” became a politically self-conscious actor. What do these moments teach us?

According to Sheldon Wolin, democracy could be represented as a practical division of labor regarding how to get from A to B. The population decides where B is, while the elites supply the expert “know-how” to reach it. He adds that nothing, unfortunately, can guarantee that a reality check will help stay on track, even though the people need it on the elite’s ambitions and the elite on the irrationality of the people. As the late John Robert Lewis used to say, “Democracy is not a state, it is an act,” meaning that there is nothing mechanical or achieved once and for all about it. In other words, everyone has the formal political responsibility of actively committing to the common good in a democracy. This is the price each citizen must pay for a government of, by, and for the people.

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Though exclusively exercise by male citizens, democracy did exist for a short while in ancient Greece under the governance of Pericles (c. 495 BC-c. 429 BC). Depicting Pericles as a model of rationality, the historian Thucydides (c. 460 BC-c. 400 BC) said that after the death of this great leader, the citizens “allowed private ambitions and private interests” to prevail. Where Pericles had “led the multitude instead of being led by them,” the new leaders “catered to the whims of the multitude,” each outbidding the other in vying for popular approval. The result was a “host of blunders” culminating in a disastrous defeat in Sicily.¹ That signed the beginning of the end for Athens’s prestige and influence, as well as the disappearance of the democratic ideal for a long time to come in the Western world.

Over the next two millennia, a politically entrenched cast succeeded in keeping society’s middle and lower classes out of politics. The power structure functioned on principles of exclusion, and the few who ruled were supposedly entitled to their position of power in virtue of the Creator’s transcendent will. But with the modernization of society at the end of the Middle Ages, a secularized elite of bankers, scientists, engineers, skilled administrators, military leaders, and political advisers boasted their strategic talents. What these new auxiliaries of power lacked in authority, they more than compensated with their command of new forms of knowledge. For its part, the vast majority of the population gradually realized that if ordinary folks were to regain entry in politics, it would be as a “people” and on the ground of their raw numbers. The inner struggle of the multitude to convert itself into a politically self-conscious actor was starting to take place.

Contrary to the Athenian demos, the “lower” class’ political ambition, by then, could only be to gain a representative foothold in a particular branch of the legislature rather than taking over the entire institutional system and democratizing it. This was well illustrated during the so-called Putney debates during the English Civil War of the 1640s. These exchanges were triggered when the spokespeople for the rank and file of the revolutionary army, representing the views of the Leveller movement, proposed adopting a written constitution ensuring that ordinary men would be guaranteed the right to vote. “That would have meant,” says Sheldon Wolin, “the abolition of the prevailing property qualifications then governing elections and parliamentary representation.” The debates exposed the tensions between demotic claims on behalf of political equality and a nascent capitalist elite defending the principle of its own political hegemony.²

Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law, made a case for the latter in a subtle but revealing way. He emphasized that the appeal to natural rights as the foundation for political rights put all property at risk. Any man might “take hold of anything that a[another] man calls his own.” If “you admit [as electors] any man that hath a breath and being” along with those itinerants who are “here today and gone tomorrow,” then there could be no guarantee that they would not vote “against all property.” To Ireton, having property is the principle of an ordered society and must, therefore, be the foundation of politics. It follows that those who represent the permanent interest of society are “the persons in whom all land lies, and those in corporations in whom all trading lies. This is the most fundamental constitution of this kingdom, and which if you do not allow, you allow not at all.” Of course, those who had no property would nonetheless have an “interest” under rule by the propertied, for they would be protected and enjoy the freedom “of trading to get money and to get estates by”³ and would eventually join the ranks of the propertied.

The reason given by Ireton to restrict voting rights to people with property makes some practical sense, of course, as “those who shall choose the lawmakers shall be men freed from dependence upon others,”⁴. But the fact, as Sheldon Wolin reminds us, is that “When power is organized in the form of an economy based upon private capital and the division of labor, then ipso facto the lives of most persons will be directed by others.” Henry Ireton did not see—or did not want to see—that not making a clear distinction between the practical independence given from owning property and freedom as a human right would drive political life away from transactions among equals.

“In the centuries that followed,” adds Sheldon Wolin, “the economy of capitalism became increasingly powerful, both as a system of production and a system of inequalities. While, unquestionably, the new economy would raise the ‘standard of living’ of the ‘masses,’ it would also succeed in translating concentrated economic power into political power.” Faced with that reality, those who represented numbers but little or no economic or intellectual power “would introduce their trump card, the threat of a revolution.” A new species of leaders emerged who, instead of hoping to join the governing elite, opted to remain with “the people.”

1. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, II.65
2. See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975); Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London: Routledge & Paul, 1954), ch. 2-3; and the collection of essays in Margaret C. Jacobs and James R. Jacob, The Origins of the Anglo-American Radicalism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1991).
3. Aylmer, The Levellers, 100, 101, 113, 107, 114.
4. Ibid., 121