A

DEMOCRACY

DEMOCRACY. A literal translation of the Greek dēmokratia, democracy means rule of the people, or government by the people. It was understood by the ancients as the direct participation of the citizen body in the government of the political community. The political and social institutions that originally gave rise to democracy both as a form of government and as a tool of political analysis soon died out, but democracy as an idea or an ideal persisted in various permutations through the survival or recovery of classical political thought.

CONVENTIONAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT

In the classical and conventional typology of constitutions or forms of government, as in Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), democracy is viewed as an unlawful or unjust form of rule. There are three legitimate forms of rule: monarchy, aristocracy, and polity—the rule of one, the few, or the many in the public interest. The corresponding illegitimate forms are tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy—the rule of one, the few, or the many in their own interest. Thus, democracy originally was understood as government conducted in the interest of the poor rather than in the public interest. Democracy did not shed these negative class incrustations until late in the nineteenth century, when it came increasingly to be equated with representative and liberal (constitutional) government.

The feudal and monarchical structures of the medieval West reinforced this tradition. Yet three major historical movements signaled the disintegration of the traditional order, and spawned new political ideas that, although not in themselves democratic, led to the rise of democracy. The first are the Renaissance, the Protestant (especially Puritan) Reformation, and the Enlightenment; the latter are republicanism and social contract theory.

RENAISSANCE AND REPUBLICANISM

The rise of the Italian city-states brought a radical change in political practice and political theory. Popular political institutions emerged, and government by the people was shown to be possible and desirable. These city-states, and the political thought they produced, contributed significantly to the history of modern democratic thought and practice. A renewal of interest in ancient history and culture, especially in historians such as Polybius (c. 200–c. 118 B.C.E.), Sallust (c. 86–35 or 34 B.C.E.), and Tacitus (c. 56–c. 120 C.E.), combined with the political experience of the Italian city-republics, produced a political literature focused on the problems of popular government, and on its relation to liberty and equality. For the first time since the ancients, arguments in favor of popular rule were articulated. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) is the culmination of this tradition. His thought links popular government, political liberty, and civic and political equality with the socioeconomic health and military strength of the body politic. Government by the people is deemed necessary to the pursuit of the public interest, and the other governmental forms are therefore seen as inferior. Machiavelli is thus a watershed in the history of democratic theory and practice. As such, his thought was mined by subsequent thinkers such as James Harrington (1611–1677), Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu (1689–1755), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778).

New attitudes. The waning of the Middle Ages, the Protestant Reformation, the dissolution of feudal ties, and the disintegration of a unified religious view, along with profound economic change and painful social dislocations, led to new attitudes, both in the way people perceived themselves and in the way they saw politics and society. The increase in knowledge and wealth, and the spread of literacy and printing, contributed to rapid political and social transformation. The English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution signaled the rise and growing importance of these new attitudes. The execution and deposition of kings exploded the traditional belief in the passive acceptance of political power, showing that the basis for that power is human will and action. Major political theorists such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694), and John Locke (1632–1704) responded to these economic, political, and intellectual changes by redefining and redirecting traditional ideas of natural law, human nature, and government. Hobbes in particular, with his absolute individualism and radical skepticism, expresses the breakdown of traditional forms of community and legitimate government, and their reconstitution by human reason and will.

Contemporary with Hobbes and with the Puritan revolution there developed in Britain a pamphlet literature in which some authors articulated definite arguments for democratic ideas. Chief among these were the Levellers, whose leader, John Lilburne (c. 1614–1657), located sovereignty in the common people as represented in Parliament. The Levellers developed the first truly modern conception of democratic government, proposing such ideas as universal manhood suffrage, equal representation of electoral districts, equality under law, freedom of expression, and biannual election of Parliaments. English republicanism, as enunciated by James Harrington, John Milton (1608–1674), and Algernon Sidney (1622–1683), also looked to the sovereignty of the people to ensure the public interest. Although not strictly democratic, it was concerned with electoral and political devices that later democrats addressed.

Dutch republicanism contributed significant strands to democratic thought and practice. Weaving together ancient Roman historians, Italian republicanism (especially Machiavelli), and the work of René Descartes (1596–1650) and Hobbes, thinkers such as Pieter de la Court (c. 1618–1685) and his brother Johan (also Jan) de la Court (1622–1660), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Pufendorf elaborated a theory of the state in which the individual interests and passions of both ruler and people would be subordinated to the common good. Spinoza and the de la Courts believed that a (more or less) democratic system would enable individuals to obey the will of the government and at the same time obey their own will, which in a democratic system is an element of the government's will. Spinoza, especially, thought that of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, the last was the most natural as well as the most rational.

English political thought, whether republican or contractualist, was much more concerned with individual rights than with the rights of the sovereign. Even Hobbes, who obligated the individual to obey an absolute sovereign, nevertheless recognized the absolute and sovereign rights of the individual in the natural state. It was John Locke, though, who integrated the rights of the individual in civil society with the power of the sovereign. His notion of government as a popular trust placed supreme power with a legislature representative of the people, who never alienated their right to change the constitution. Natural right, contract, and political obligation were important ideas; yet they were not necessarily democratic. Most early modern thinkers defined the notion of the people quite narrowly. But they did offer a defense of legislative supremacy, mixed government, and constitutionalism against the traditional and paternalistic claims of absolute monarchy.

In France, Montesquieu combined English ideas of mixed government and parliamentary rights with republican and Machiavellian ideas of the balanced constitution to criticize the despotic tendencies of the French monarchy. The classical sixfold classification of governments he reduced to three: despotism, monarchy, and republic. The latter, in a manner reminiscent of Florentine republican ideas, he further subdivided into aristocratic and democratic. Montesquieu's theory of despotism and his doctrine of the separation of powers were important influences on liberal constitutionalism and on the theory of limited government, but his preferences for limited monarchy and aristocratic government made his ideas undemocratic.

ENLIGHTENMENT AND SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY

The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on human rationality and the efficacy of scientific inquiry, and with its belief in the human capacity for growth (or what Condorcet and Rousseau call "perfectibility"), undermined the religious, cultural, and customary underpinnings of the social and political order. Voltaire (1694–1778) and Denis Diderot (1713–1784) in France, like David Hume (1711–1776) and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) in Britain, explored the human and temporal bases of governmental power. The freedom of thought and expression so necessary for cultural, scientific, and moral development was intimately interwoven with political and civil liberties. In France especially these ideas constituted a thoroughgoing critique of church and state. These thinkers prepared the ground for democracy's future emergence as an actual system of government.

It was Rousseau, product and critic of the Enlightenment, who took the disparate ideas of both the ancients and the moderns (Plato and Aristotle, Roman writers, Machiavelli, Locke, Montesquieu) and made a truly original contribution to democratic theory. Rousseau's thought weds the ancients' concern with the primacy of political activity to the moderns' emphasis on political sociology. Humanity is defined by its capacity for liberty, and liberty means to be the author of one's actions. Thus, in Rousseau, liberty and equality presuppose each other, such that the people, when they come together as the sovereign body, look to the general and common interest of the community. The people acting together as equals in the pursuit of the public good generate the general will. Liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty are embodied in the citizen body as it makes laws for itself through the general will. By returning to the ancient polis, in which the public sphere is the realm of liberty, and in which equal citizens form an indivisible community, Rousseau formulated a novel theory of democracy.

Early modern Europe, from the Renaissance through the Reformation to the Enlightenment, was a transitional stage characterized by political, social, and intellectual/cultural transformation. It established the conditions that would, with the American and the French Revolutions, make possible the birth of the modern. It germinated and brought together ways of thinking and acting that would later form modern democracy. Ideas such as legislative supremacy, representation, constitutionalism, majority rule, and liberty and equality as indefeasible political rights were elaborated during this critical stage of European history. As a result, the basis of political legitimacy was radically transformed: all political power must issue, or appear to issue, from the people.

See also Condorcet, Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de; Descartes, René; Diderot, Denis; English Civil War Radicalism; Enlightenment; Grotius, Hugo; Harrington, James; Hobbes, Thomas; Hume, David; Liberty; Locke, John; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Milton, John; Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de; Natural Law; Reformation, Protestant; Renaissance; Representative Institutions; Republicanism; Revolutions, Age of; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Spinoza, Baruch; Voltaire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bock, Gisela, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds. Machiavelli and Republicanism. Cambridge, U.K., 1990. Provides interesting and informative essays on Machiavelli, his forerunners and contemporaries, and on his influence on English and Dutch republicanism.

Burns, James Henderson, ed. The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700. Cambridge, U.K., 1991. A comprehensive history on all aspects of political thought.

Dahl, Robert A. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven, 1989. An analysis of democratic thought and practice.

Dunn, John, ed. Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508 B.C.to A.D. 1993. Oxford, 1992. A number of theorists such as Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and David Wootton offer interesting analyses of democracy from the ancient Athenians to the present.

Graubard, Stephen R. "Democracy." In Dictionary of the History of Ideas. New York, 1973. A good survey and discussion of democratic thought and practice since classical antiquity.

Hazard, Paul. European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing. Translated by J. Lewis May. London, 1954. Translation of Pensée européenne au XVIIIème siècle. A good discussion of Enlightenment thought.

Pagden, Anthony, ed. The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 1987. A series of essays on the political and intellectual changes in early modern Europe.

Riley, Patrick, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau. Cambridge, U.K., 2001. Number of essays on various aspects of Rousseau's thought.

Sartori, Giovanni. The Theory of Democracy Revisited. Chatham, N.J., 1987. Provides both an analytical and historical discussion of various theories of democracy.

Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Vol. 1, The Renaissance, and Vol. 2, The Age of Reformation. Cambridge, U.K., 1978.

BENEDETTO FONTANA