“The history of citizen self-government in the Greek city-states clarifies what democracy is – and what it does (and does not) deliver. Ancient Athens, like some other Greek city-states, was a democracy, not a liberal democracy. Ancient Athenians neither embraced human rights nor separated religion from coercive state authority. Liberalism is a moral ideal born of the 18th-century Enlightenment and centred on the value of individual autonomy. Liberalism offers reasons why rights should be regarded as universal, as inhering in each individual human being, and why a coercive state must be neutral in regard to religion. A political regime might be liberal but not democratic – the 19th century Austro-Hungarian empire, for example.”
“When scholars use the term democracy in a narrow sense, it is generally taken to mean simple ‘majority rule, full stop’, as opposed to the rule of law. For those who, like James Madison, the principal author of the US Constitution, fear the spectre of mob rule, democracy without liberalism risks majoritarian tyranny. Ancient Greek democracies show that imagining democracy as nothing more than majority rule is an error. Democracy, even democracy before it is liberal democracy, is actually more than majority rule.”
“Reducing democracy to majoritarianism authorises elite rule. Plato, with his plan for ‘philosopher kings’, was an early proponent of such elitism. He believed that good government requires keeping most people away from active participation in politics. Plato’s goal in restricting government to a few was the promotion of virtue. The modern world also has influential political theorists, for example the late Ronald Dworkin, who urge that ordinary people must be kept at bay in the name of defending the liberal moral values of autonomy, rights, and distributive justice.”
“However well-intentioned, the elitist approach to government is dangerous (as well as undemocratic) because moral commitment is not enough to guide the day-to-day behaviour of most people most of the time. Liberal morality alone cannot produce a stable social order based on free choices of self-interested individuals. In order to produce social stability, contemporary liberalism needs either democracy or autocracy as its political foundation.”
“The Athenians named their new government ‘democracy’, or demokratia in Greek, which combines demos (‘the people’) and kratos (‘power’). So democracy is ‘people power’ – but specific demos in the sense of ‘all citizens’, and kratos in the sense of ‘the capacity to do things’.”
“The new name asserted both an ideal and a practical fact.”
“First, the word proclaimed that the citizens as a collectivity, rather than a tyrant or a small gang of aristocrats, ought to rule their own state: the people were the most legitimate public authority.”
“The ideal of democracy also held that the people were morally and intellectually capable of governing themselves. They were fallible, but competent to pursue public interests in a rational manner.”
“The people ruled by using the new institutions of their democratic government to make and execute policy, without a boss. Citizens from all walks of life deliberated on matters of policy in ways at once cooperative and competitive. They pooled information and knowledge to devise innovative solutions to problems. The best argument, rather than the loudest voice, had a good chance of carrying the day.”
“In an annual lottery, the Athenians chose the 500 citizen-members of a democratic Council. The Councilmen consulted experts, debated policy, and set the agenda for frequent meetings of an Assembly open to all citizens. A typical Assembly meeting in the age of Aristotle drew between 6,000-8,000 voting citizens.”
“For Athenian democrats, the demos included everyone who could be imagined to be capable of actively exercising political authority within a bounded state territory. The ancient Greek cultural imagination of ‘who could be a citizen’ of a state privileged ‘free, adult (over 18) males, who are either of native birth or who had proven their loyalty to the state’. In historical perspective, their imagination was expansive because it included all native males, without a property or educational qualification. The ancient Athenian level of inclusive citizenship remained unequalled until at least the 18th century Age of Revolution.”
“Of course, in the 21st century, the ancient Greek cultural imagination of who could be a participatory citizen appears so bounded as to be illegitimate. It excluded women, slaves and most foreign-born residents of Athenian territory. Some students of Greek history therefore assert that Athens was not democratic. But what they actually mean is that Athens was not a liberal democracy, in that the Athenians did not recognise the human rights of slaves, women and long-term foreign residents. Indeed, Athens was not a liberal democracy, but it was a democracy – that is, it was governed by its citizens.”
“Mature, ancient Greek democracy consisted of limited and collective self-government by citizens. Is that still the essence of democracy today? The question can be answered philosophically. Imagine a large modern population, inhabiting a defined territory; call it Demopolis. The diverse population of Demopolis contains rich and poor. The citizens of Demopolis come from different ethnic backgrounds. Some are liberals, others are libertarians, republicans and religious believers of various faiths.”
“The people of Demopolis are self-interested in the usual ways that people are, and no more naturally cooperative than other people. But they do agree on three things: they want to create a state that is 1) stable and secure, 2) prosperous enough to compete with rival states, and 3) non-tyrannical – it is not ruled by a powerful individual or coalition. The people of Demopolis can create new constitutional rules for their state, but, if the new order is to succeed, they must limit those rules to those that its diverse population will actively support.”
“Demopolis’ constitution-writers do not presume that they are setting up a system that will be universally best for all people, everywhere. Rather, they seek a government that will allow the people of Demopolis to gain the three goals of security, prosperity and non-tyranny. They will pay some costs in the form of time and taxes to live without a boss, but they do not intend to devote their entire lives to governing. The hypothetical constitution-writers of Demopolis are collectively responsible for making sensible and sustainable rules for themselves and for future generations. The rules must enable the citizens and their descendants collectively to enforce and, when necessary, change those self-same rules. The citizens must, therefore, be willing and able to engage in joint action, as a collective agent.”
“In order to achieve their three goals, the people of Demopolis need to establish basic rules. The first rule requires participation in making and enforcing the rules. The participation requirement means that all those persons culturally imagined as potential citizens are actual citizens. Because this is modernity, that includes all native adult men and women, and at least some naturalised foreigners. The participation rule also means that all share the costs of government. All citizens have a duty to help make and enforce the rules. They have a corresponding duty to sanction anyone who fails in her participation duty. The participation rule is necessary to reduce free-riding. Each citizen, insofar as she is rationally self-interested, can choose to enjoy the goods of security, prosperity and non-tyranny without contributing to the effort of maintaining them. But the state will not long remain secure and prosperous if it is beset by free-riders.”
“The second rule concerns how decisions will be made. Non-tyranny means that no defined faction of the demos can legitimately rule, as a collective autocrat, over the rest of the demos. Participation plus non-tyranny implies that each citizen must have an equal vote, and an equal opportunity to join in making legislation and taking on whatever other political roles are created in the course of establishing the rules. Moreover, legislative policy must aim not only at non-tyrannical process, but also at efficiency. If they are to achieve the end of security in a dangerous and mutable environment, governing decisions made by the citizens must be better than ‘coin-flip’ random choices. To make better decisions, the citizens therefore also require freedom of thought, speech and assembly.”
“A third rule sets limits on collective authority: the legislative, policy-making process must restrict citizens’ collective ability to make rules threatening the functional equality or freedom of citizens. Strong protections are needed because political freedom and civic equality are necessary to secure the basic purposes for which the state exists. Because the citizens agree that they want a state that is secure, prosperous and non-tyrannical, the citizens – as legislators – recognise that they must not make any rule that would be likely to make the state insecure, impoverished or autocratic. In brief, the rules must meet a constitutional standard: the rule forbidding legislation that threatens the three ends of security, prosperity and non-tyranny must be legally entrenched and enforced.”
“The three basic rules – requiring participation in making and enforcing the rules, establishing procedures for shared and effective decision-making, and forbidding legislation that would threaten the conditions necessary for making and carrying out decisions – yield a basic government for the imaginary Demopolis.”
“That government has core features identical to those of actual ancient Greek democracy: collective and limited self-government by a large and diverse body of politically free and equal citizens. That government is not liberal, in the contemporary sense of guaranteeing universal human rights, but neither is it majoritarian tyranny. It is, in fact, democracy.”
“Demopolis is just a thought experiment, but it has close analogies in the real world. In the past quarter-century, many people have sought to create new state governments that would be non-tyrannical, secure and prosperous – recall the Arab Spring and the eastern European ‘colour revolutions’. Like the real ancient Athenians and the citizens of imaginary Demopolis, they aimed at democracy, as collective self-government. But not all of them embraced liberalism. For some liberals, that must be seen as a moral failure. The anarchy and autocracy that have so often followed what were supposed to be democratic transitions point, however, to a more fundamental political failure. That failure can be attributed in part to the fact that basic democracy, without liberalism, was never on the international policy menu.”
“There are many reasons that the Arab Spring and other recent revolutionary movements have not resulted in stable, prosperous and non-autocratic states. But the modern tendency to conflate democracy with liberalism has made it harder to implement a successful democratic but non-liberal regime. Such a regime falls short of what liberal democrats hope for: it might not support human rights, might impose religious conformity, might distribute material goods less than justly. But a non-liberal democratic regime can be stable and need not devolve into majoritarian tyranny. It should provide political equality along with basic political freedoms for citizens. When the alternatives are repressive autocracy or anarchy, democracy – as collective self-government – is a worthy goal. Democracy can provide a sturdy foundation for political order. It might even lead to liberal democracy.”
“Both democracy and liberalism offer laudable features for a modern society. But we must not underestimate how hard it is to sustain collective self-governance by citizens while protecting and advancing liberal rights.”