Time For Some Democracy!

by Ivo Mosley

Not many people know that what we call ‘democracy’ was regarded as anything but democratic for most of history. Before 1800, electoral representation was reckoned to be an aristocratic, or oligarchic, form of government; in other words, it was thought to be directly opposed to democracy. This was the accepted opinion from Plato and Aristotle right through to Locke, Rousseau and Madison.

In other words, if - like most people - you feel our system isn’t very democratic, you have two and a half thousand years of tradition on your side.

So: before 1800, what did the word ‘democracy’ mean? It meant that political assemblies and political officials were chosen by lot from among citizens, much as juries are chosen today. Government in a democracy consisted of citizens taken out of their everyday lives for fixed periods to do their duty - just like jury service, except that they decided on law and policy too.

The difference between democracy and electoral representation is huge. Electoral representation brings with it professional politicians and political parties, whose interests and objectives are bound to be partial. Democracy meant that government was conducted directly by the people in their common interests.

This suggests a question: How did it happen that around 1800 people began to think that electoral representation was a form of democracy, when for two thousand years everyone had been thinking it was the opposite? Again, it’s a simple story, but so little-known that it’s almost a secret history.

My story begins with the revolutionaries who liberated the United States from British rule: Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton and Jefferson to name the most prominent. Having won the war of independence, they designed a self-consciously elitist system of government. This government, incidentally, effectively entrusted power to themselves; four of those five names became president and the fifth was killed in a duel.

The Founding Fathers made no bones about it: they did not think ordinary people should be given power. They were very rude about democracy - which, like everyone else, they understood to mean assemblies chosen by lot.

Here are some samples from their published writings:

Madison (1787):
‘Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention… and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.’

Hamilton (1787):
‘The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very nature was tyranny.’

John Adams (1814):
‘Democracy wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.’

Washington (1798) (with a distinct lack of political correctness):
‘you could as soon scrub a blackamoor white as change the principles of a profest democrat; and that he will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the government of this country’.

Jefferson (1816):
thought democracy was ‘impracticable beyond the limits of a town.’

Benjamin Franklin is credited - perhaps wrongly, though it’s not out of character - with the sentence: ‘Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner.’

The system the founding fathers wanted was republican. In Jefferson’s words, power would be entrusted to a ‘natural aristocracy’ of the most talented and virtuous, replacing the old ‘artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth’. Elections would give people the right to choose who those ‘natural aristocrats’ should be. In Madison’s words, public opinion would be ‘refined and enlarged’ by passing it ‘through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.’

The constitution was accepted by a majority of voters in the United States as the best that could be thought of at the time. To the disappointment of many, however, within ten years of the constitution being ratified, politics was dominated not so much by superior individuals as by strong political parties, representing not the shared interests of citizens but powerful embedded interests. The fault lines were already apparent that would result in the Civil War: one party represented the industrial North, the other represented the agricultural and slave-owning South.

The significant crisis during which ‘democracy’ changed from being a dirty word to a badge worn with pride came after the 1800 presidential election. The electoral college was in deadlock over who would be the next president. Rival state militias (Virginia and Pennsylvania vs Massachusetts) were ready to march on Washington to take control of the government for the party they supported. Jefferson, the Republican candidate, had the largest share of the popular vote (counting, ironically, slaves voted for by their masters at three-fifths of a vote each). His supporters claimed that the will of the people should prevail. Jefferson became president, and civil war was averted.

It had become apparent that there was a strong, potentially overwhelming demand among Americans for ‘democracy’ not as a political system, but as a feeling - that ‘the people’ would be in charge of their own destiny. Only the most educated individuals were aware that democracy had a tradition of its own in direct opposition to electoral representation. The majority of people looked to elections to satisfy their need for democracy.

Jefferson referred to his victory as ‘the revolution of 1800’. In his words, ‘the nation declared its will by dismissing functionaries of one principle and electing those of another’. Jefferson’s party changed its name from ‘Republican’ to ‘Democratic-Republican’. A new enthusiasm for ‘democracy’ swept the nation. In 1809 Elias Smith proclaimed, ‘My friends, let us never be ashamed of democracy!’

In this way, the re-invention of electoral representation as a form of democracy took place not in theory, but in the sphere of practical politics. For the few who held real power, it was a windfall: they could carry on dominating the political scene by joining the pretence that politics was democratic - the exact opposite of what they understood it to be. In the words of historian Joanne Freeman, ‘The period’s cultural shift from deference to democracy’ occurred as ‘politicians adjusted their assumptions and expectations to the situation in hand, struggling to accommodate their ideals and their actions.’ Or as Burckhardt put in 1867: ‘The experience of revolution was that public opinion forms and transforms the world. The traditional powers, too weak to prevent it, began making deals with individual currents in the stream of public opinion.’

And that, as Rudyard Kipling might say, is how democracy came to mean its opposite: as if by shaving a dog and feeding it oats, you could believe it was a horse.

This new and powerful reality has never been justfied in theory, for one simple reason: it is impossible. To argue that rule by elected party officials is a form of democracy, when there is a perfectly good democracy of participation at hand, is a non-starter. The political historian Bernard Manin writes that the best anyone has done is to summon up the old aristocratic theory of consent, and maintain that by voting every few years the people signifies its consent to be so governed.

True democracy, of course, needs no such theory: citizens are rulers one day, and ruled over by their fellow-citizens the next.

To all this, you might say - so what? - Today, when we say democracy we mean electoral representation - the history is irrelevant. But I think it is important to recover the old way of thinking, and to recognise that electoral representation is essentially anti-democratic. For two reasons:

Firstly, it helps us understand the world we live in today. It explains how power is unaccountable. It explains how elected governments in Africa and Europe have instituted programs of genocide. It explains why western governments pursue policies that are destroying the planet. It explains how governments can destroy home industries and give bankers free rein to bankrupt their nations. It explains why ‘welfare’ is deflected away from the truly needy towards those who might vote. We can understand why Hamas may lob rockets into Israel in the name of citizens who would never, if asked, give their consent. We can understand why Israel, most of whose citizens are cosmopolitan and humane, is ruled by religious and racial extremists. In other words, it explains how things get transformed into the opposite of what they should be.

But secondly, it gives us hope for the future. Democracy is an untried adventure. How many people in Britain know that democracy worked in a variety of ways and at different levels, often alongside electoral representation, in Athens, in Florence and in Venice? Or that for four hundred years it worked in local government in our own Great Yarmouth.

For two centuries we have treated government as a problem to be solved by a single formula: majority vote. All other creative possibilities were discarded.

Oligarchy and Oncocracy

Many people among our elite today agree with the founding fathers that real democracy would be a bad idea. In moments of honesty they say: ordinary people are stupid, ill-educated and incompetent: to put them in government is the worst idea in the world. And many citizens would rather do without the onerous burden of true democracy, of having to contribute to the political debate responsibly and in person. So we might say true democracy is an unpopular non-starter. But I would argue it is time we ordinary people take responsibility and participate. Our oligarchies have led us to where the opportunities for global self-destruction are so multifarious, it will be a miracle if we escape them all.


Professional politicians, as Plato said and many have repeated, make the worst rulers, because their ambition and lust for power lead us all into trouble. Ordinary people, however, are on balance guided by morality, not by ambition and power.

If we accept that we in the West live not in democracies but in oligarchies, the question arises, ‘What is the nature of these oligarchies?’

An oligarchy is defined as ‘the few who have power over the many.’ So many people have power over us now, this term seems rather stretched.

Until about thirty years ago, our oligarchy consisted of competing factions; there were old landed and agricultural interests, industrial interests, and the power-base of organised socialism: even the church and the professions held a certain sway. When several powers compete with each other, each acts to restrain the power of the others; furthermore, each power has to behave with a modicum of good behaviour in order to retain public approval. But when one power comes out on top, that is the death knoll for freedom.

What makes the power of our oligarchy so alarming today is that most of these competing interests have dropped out. We are left with globalised corporate capitalism and with government acting as its poodle, co-conspirator and apologist. As we witnessed recently on television, these people are not devils; rather, they inhabit a strange culture of self-delusion. Like a pre-historic tribe who believes that the sun only rises every day because they ask it to, these oligarchs believe that without them the rest of us would flounder.

Membership of the new oligarchy is tenuous: you must conform and play by the rules, or you are out. And this is true both of the corporate world and of politics.

The power of corporations and governments has immense and varied implications for our freedom. Daily encroachments of our freedoms are a major theme of this conference. For instance, embedded in a largely benign bill called the ‘Coroners’ Bill’ there is a clause designed to ensure that if the government kills someone it will be able to conduct its own inquest in secret: a clause so odious to democracy, freedom, and all other civilized virtues it is hard to contemplate.

But there is another, less noticed freedom which has been the lifeblood of the human species, and that is moral freedom: the freedom, in Acton’s words, to act according to the dictates of conscience, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

The most valuable freedom to those who called themselves ‘democrats’ for two thousand years was the freedom to be a politically involved citizen and exercise free moral agency in that capacity. They had a single word for that - ‘politikos’. We don’t have a word for it because it is unfamiliar to us. Citizens exercising free moral agency inside politics are a rarity. If you go into politics, you join a party. No point complaining that politicians are duplicitous and obfuscatory; to stay in politics you must trim your conscience to the demands of the party.

Moral freedom is rather unglamorous to citizens conditioned as we are today, so I’ll quote an authority who is usually dug up and dusted off in the cause of selfishness: Charles Darwin. According to Darwin, the moral sense - which he also calls conscience or duty - is the most important quality in the survival and evolution of the human species. When Darwin came to consider human beings in relation to Natural Selection, he wrote that ‘of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.’

Moral freedom is the ability to choose for ourselves what we believe is right. To what extent have corporations and governments limited this freedom?

Corporations are legally bound by their obligation to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. In other words, they are obliged to ignore morality. In reality they go further, avoiding legal obligations too by such practices such as ‘creative accountancy’. They also seek to have laws made in their favour - in other words, to corrupt law itself by making it an interested party to their ambitions. In this way, moral agency has retreated in the great public endeavour of the workplace. It was frequently said in Victorian times, while the corporation was bit-by-bit achieving its legal entity, ‘a corporation has neither body to imprison nor soul to damn.’

As for governments, they undertake to transform our lives for the better, and to this end they adopt more power. The corollary of power is always degradation: power, as Burckhardt observed, is insatiable. Governments now control areas that were previously a matter for society. There are still many who believe the state can make a heaven-on-earth - in spite of its achievements in the opposite direction.

Government is imposed upon us willy-nilly and lives off us. In that sense it is parasitical. But by taking over health, education, welfare, responsibility for business, and a host of other functions that used to be a matter for society, government has become something worse. It has invaded the organs of society, swelling them into huge state apparatuses and making it harder and harder for professionals to carry out their duties. Guidelines, constant supervision, form-filling, quota- and target-meeting etcetera, mean that administrators, consultants and state employees make good livings while people’s needs are not met. In this way, government has become not a parasite but a cancer. It might be said we live in an oncocracy, if that were not such an unlikely word.

We citizens of this oncocracy have lived for many years on the drip feed of industrial mass-production and on exploitation of poorer countries. It seems now that perhaps the chickens are coming home to roost.

What should we do? John Locke, that quintessentially respectable philosopher, wrote the following:

Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty, will be born by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going; it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected; and without which, ancient names, and specious forms, are so far from being better, that they are much worse, than the state of nature, or pure anarchy; the inconveniences being all as great and as near, but the remedy farther off and more difficult.

Democracy and freedom are candles in our political darkness. If we recover the true meanings of these words, we can begin to recover their practice. True, participatory democracy is possible at all levels. The creative possibilities of democracy in the modern world are as various as the informed imagination can suggest. It is not my purpose here to suggest a political program - God forbid, we have had enough of those! - but to plea that an awareness of true democracy, and a debate about its inclusion, become part of the political conversation.