JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S contention that “the voice of the greater number always obliges the rest” is a commonplace of today’s electoral politics, yet the assertion masks a crucial assumption: the idea that political legitimacy is not fully achieved until a regime enjoys the unanimous support of its citizens. Only then can a government count itself as securely established on its social foundations. Since democracy implies that each individual is the bearer of fundamental rights, the consent of all is the only incontestable guarantee of respect for each. This “individualistic” understanding of the requirement of unanimity is the fundamental justification of the legal state. Taken together, universal suffrage and a government of laws define the democratic regime.
But the underlying requirement of unanimity is broader than this formulation implies. There is also a more anthropological interpretation of unanimity, in which unanimity symbolizes the organic wholeness of the society. In order to understand fully the significance of electoral legitimation, one has to study the way in which the individualistic legal requirement is embedded in a holistic vision—a vision that treats unanimity as an intrinsic moral, social, and political value.
Democratic regimes eventually adopted the principle of majority rule as a practical procedural necessity, since numerical unanimity was virtually impossible to achieve. Yet at the same time they remained under the sway of this older idea of substantive unanimity. Substantive unanimity is a less reductive concept than numerical unanimity. The numerical notion of “majority” has no anthropological equivalent. Ultimately, this latent contradiction would eventually undermine the idea that legitimacy can spring from elections alone. In order to gauge the extent of the problem, a brief exploration of the old sense of unanimity is warranted.
In the ancient world, a united, peaceful society was the political ideal. Greek cities paid homage to Homonoia, the goddess of concord, and Roman subjects erected temples to Concordia throughout the empire.1 To participate in this harmony was to assert membership of the community and support for its institutions. This sense of belonging was exemplified by the famous Roman formula SPQR, Senatus populusque romanus. This meant that the Senate and people of Rome were one; it implied no mandate or delegation of authority. If “representation” of any kind existed, it was simply in the sense of an assumed identification. But the citizen could participate only in a whole, a totality.
No political device for the expression of division was sanctioned. That is why popular acclamation played such a central role. In Rome, popular acclamation symbolized the consensus ideal, and not only cities but the empire as a whole were supposed to be governed by it. At the municipal level, it was fairly common for acclamations to accompany the voting on public proclamations in honor of euergetes (benefactors) and other notables.2 In this ancient political economy, gratitude and honor—symbolic goods signified by shouts of acclamation—were exchanged for material gifts. In this context, approval (and, more rarely, disapproval) could only be global, never partial. Popular approbation merely sealed a bargain whose terms, though instinctively recognized, were never explicitly spelled out. Political sociologists today refer to such a situation as one of “apparent consensus”.3 The function of “voting,” if we can call it that, was not to decide anything or to initiate a new round of policymaking. It simply affirmed the status quo and proved that the city was functioning as it should.
Similar “rituals of unanimity” existed elsewhere, in Germania and Gaul, for example. Both Caesar and Tacitus were deeply struck by them and often referred to such rituals in The Gallic Wars and Germania. Both described how assemblies of armed men raised their lances to express approval of their leaders’ words, or else murmured disapproval of statements they disliked.4 Consent was again collective, with no notion of vote-counting. Popular assemblies were merely a way of testing and reaffirming the cohesion of the group and of celebrating the fusion of group and leader. (The various Germanic terms for “king” derive from kin, “people,” which is also the word for “tribe”.) The idea of unity was reinforced by the religious world view into which it was incorporated. Supernatural qualities were attributed to the tribal chieftain, thereby tying the community to its gods.5 Warrior assemblies thus had a sacred dimension, which was indistinguishable from their “political” dimension. Priests therefore played an essential role. They initiated deliberations and, as the guardians of tribal peace, exerted a powerful influence on the group. When unanimity was disrupted by overt dissidence, this was immediately seen as a bad omen, a threat to the social order to be stifled as rapidly as possible.
The Church in the first few centuries of Christianity embraced this ancient culture of participation culminating in unanimity. The first Christian communities sought to copy what they took to be positive ideals, which remained in an embryonic state in the municipal culture of the period.6 They hoped that unanimous approbation would demonstrate respect for their Trinitarian God. The Church therefore assigned an important role in managing its affairs to the assembly of the faithful. Isolated, highly egalitarian Christian communities spontaneously organized themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. Christianity thus fostered a vocabulary of deliberation and participation, to which it attached positive value. Indeed, it was in Christian communities that the term universal suffrage was first used to denote communal accord.7 Early Christians also used the word unanimitas to denote the true communion to which they aspired.
In the first century after Christ, the apostles relied on elections to fill various posts in Christian communities. With the passing of the first generation of apostles, whose ascendancy over the faithful was in a sense natural and uncontested, the election of bishops spread widely.8 Later, the principle was solemnly reaffirmed. At the beginning of the fifth century, for example, Pope Celestine I promulgated the rule that “no person may serve as bishop without having been accepted by the Christian people”. His successors regularly repeated the formula.
There should be no mistake about the meaning of electio in this context, however. There were neither candidates, ballots, ballot boxes, nor vote counts. Elections took place plebe praesente, that is, in the presence of the people, with their acquiescence or approval. An election was a ritual of communion. It expressed the confidence of the community in the person who was to lead it, but no precise rules governed the electoral procedure. Surviving accounts of such elections emphasize the group’s state of mind and suggest that the community was present merely to confirm a choice that originated in a smaller group, composed solely of clergy, and that the sense of the community had been canvassed previously. The assembled group expressed its approval by acclamation, with words such as “Fiat, fiat, dignum et justum est”. The goal was mainly to demonstrate the perfect unity of the community. We do not know whether there was any way to say no or abstain.
We find the same totalizing concept of the body politic in Italy at the dawn of the twelfth century, when the first towns were being organized. The leadership group included all the free men of the town, who gathered in an assembly that was unlike any electoral body we might imagine today. The definition of the common good did not allow for differing points of view; a moral and social consensus was taken for granted. Voices within the community did not all carry the same weight: occupation and neighborhood defined a hierarchy.
In this context, the modern idea of voting would have made no sense. Acclamation remained the natural way of expressing the communal sentiment. Until the thirteenth or fourteenth century, the terms laudatio or collaudatio—words suggesting homage as well as collective voice—were used to denote the expression of popular consent.9 When town statutes alluded to popular approbation, they generally omitted any mention of procedures of deliberation and choice.
Indeed, the term election did not denote methodical counting of individual choices; one spoke, rather, of electio ad vistam or electio ad vocem.10 The first elections in which votes were actually counted took place within small ruling councils: when a town council weighed a decision, for instance. In such a setting, the need to count votes was not a sign of social division; it was merely a way of eliminating uncertainty. In these early towns, no one ever thought of counting votes to select leaders. Indeed, aldermen were often chosen by lot so as to avoid inflaming the passions of rival groups. Lotteries were a substitute for unanimity; the idea of the body politic remained holistic. Individual equality was not recognized: lotteries were simply a device for exorcising discord.
In each of the instances discussed above, unanimity should not be interpreted in numerical terms. It was not the result of counting votes. It was understood, rather, as a social quality. Unanimity defined the state of a collectivity or the nature of its constitution, its enduring unity. Yet it was here that popular participation in government began. Political participation did not initially mean taking sides, expressing an opinion, or indicating a preference for a particular clan or faction. Indeed, the civic ideal of inclusion and participation was initially affirmed in opposition to what we would today characterize as a pluralistic-individualistic understanding of political activity.
The notion of “majority” made no sense in a culture of unanimity without procedures for measuring consent. Such a culture never had to face the problem of numerically divided opinion. The need to confront this problem first arose in groups smaller than the community at large. These were primarily religious communities, groups characterized by their small size and homogeneity.11
An assembly of monks or nuns bore little resemblance to a mass gathering of the population in a cemetery or outside a church. In a religious community, each person occupied a definite place in a well-defined group. Deliberation could be organized in a structured way, and precise rules could easily be applied to the manner in which a decision was reached. Monasteries adopted the principle of election quite early—a reflection of monastic ideals of equality and fraternity.
In a closed group, however, daily contact gives rise to powerful affects. The abbot is not a remote leader but an intimate presence, whose temperament affects each monk directly. In monastery elections, dissident or even merely doubtful voices could therefore fairly naturally make themselves heard. Minority factions did in fact form in these communities, sometimes as informal groups. How were they acknowledged and treated? The question is important enough to warrant a brief digression.
At first, differences of judgment were treated as mere fleeting expressions of sentiment. Temporary lapses of unanimity could be corrected rapidly, as long as the minority rallied to the position of the majority. The minutes of monastery meetings barely mention the brief moments of discord: the ultimate agreement was entered into the record as unanimous.
Before long, however, the stakes grew to the point where minority positions hardened, and minorities organized as relatively coherent factions, or even “parties”. The Church sought to work around this difficulty, whose nature was philosophical as well as practical, by proposing to distinguish between electors on the basis of quality as well as quantity.
To cope with failure to achieve numerical unity, the notion of the sanior pars was proposed: the term designated the wiser members of the group. The notion of unity was redefined accordingly. For a time, the terms sanior pars and major pars were used interchangeably.12 This attempt to apply different weights to the opinions of different segments of the community was doomed to failure, however, because no simple criterion for determining the sanior pars emerged.
To put an end to interminable disputes over the definition of the sanior pars, the Church ultimately recognized the majority principle as a technical device. Dominican constitutions adopted majority rule in 1221. The Carthusians and Benedictines followed suit. More egalitarian orders such as the Franciscans found the principle attractive on doctrinal grounds. For them, it was a logical consequence of their radically egalitarian worldview.
The procedures for the election of popes underwent a similar evolution.13 At first, the rule that the Sacred College must reach a unanimous decision was taken for granted as a spiritual necessity: the head of the Church had to reflect its unity. In reality, however, things were not that simple. Many conflicts went unresolved, and disagreement at times led to schism. From the inception of the Church until 1122, 159 popes had served as its head, but during the same period, 31 “antipopes” had been recognized by dissident factions.
The problem had grown worse over time. From the middle of the ninth until the middle of the tenth century, twelve of twenty-six elected popes had been relieved of their duties, five had been sent into exile, and five others had been assassinated. Before the twelfth century, all popes were by law unanimously elected. This led, however, to numerous schisms, since minorities had no choice but to leave the Church or resort to covert internal opposition. In reaction to this, the Lateran Council decided in 1179 that a qualified majority of two-thirds would suffice to elect a pope. This lessened the bitterness of dissidents. A short while later, the idea of bringing all electors together for a “conclave” helped to promote a spirit of compromise.14
Here, too, the acceptance of the majority principle was merely a tactical maneuver. In no way did it imply the embrace of a pluralistic perspective, of the idea that differences of opinion are natural and productive—an idea that remained unthinkable in the religious context. The only real causes of disunity, people believed at the time, were intrigue and incomprehension. Unanimity remained the philosophical ideal of Christian communities.
Contrary to a widely held idea, the Church was not a laboratory for democratic experimentation.15 Election by majority vote in this limited context had no repercussions on the political order. Rousseau discussed the role of the ephors and tribunes of Antiquity at length, delved into the problems raised by the use of the liberum veto in the Polish Diet, and analyzed the institutions of certain Swiss cantons in detail, but he said not a word about ecclesiastical practices. At the time of the American or French revolutions there was no discussion of them; indeed, few people had any idea what they were.
In the late eighteenth century, the old ideal of unanimity still loomed large. If John Locke and Rousseau accepted majority voting, they never for a moment suggested that a well-ordered political system could be based on confrontation between a majority and a minority.16 On this point they were closer to the ancients and the political theologians of the Middle Ages than to modern theorists of pluralist democracy.
The advent of the right to vote established the majoritarian principle as a pragmatic expedient, yet the old ideal of unanimity persisted nevertheless. We see this in the terms in which Sieyès, the father of the French Constitution, laid out the issue in 1789. The author of Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (What Is the Third Estate?) no longer saw society as community. His concept of society was rooted in egalitarian individualism, and he explicitly defined the general will as the sum of all individual wills.
This led him to posit unanimity as a formal ideal while thinking of it in numerical terms. If individuals are free and equal by nature, none should be in a position to dominate others, and legitimate power can arise only from the unity of individual wills. But how are we to think of such “mechanical unanimity,” in contrast to the old primordial unanimity? Sieyès resolved the problem by recourse to a fiction: the majority was said to be an equivalent of unanimity.
Let us follow the steps of his argument. First, “a political association is the product of the unanimous will of its members”. Next, “since unanimity is very difficult to obtain in any moderately large group of people, it is clearly impossible to achieve in a society composed of several million individuals…. One must therefore make do with plurality”.17
For Sieyès, there were two reasons for identifying majority with unanimity. The first was the idea of “mediated unanimity”: since everyone recognized the need for unanimity, it was legitimate to take plurality as a substitute for it.18 Second, it was essential to “recognize all the different characters of the common will within an accepted plurality”.19 Sieyès accordingly held that the majority view should prevail as if it were unanimous. The problem was that he failed to make it clear whether this was a necessary legal fiction (whose consequences for the relation between law and politics remained to be spelled out) or a substantive equivalence. He was also unclear about what majority rule would mean in terms of choosing people to govern and legitimating their power.
This ambiguity was destined to endure. One sign of this is the fact that for a long time the word majority was rarely used. The more circumscribed technical notion of “plurality of votes” almost always served in its place. This was clearly the case in the eighteenth century. In France, “majority” had still not become part of the political lexicon as late as the 1840s. One of the leading dictionaries of the mid nineteenth century remarked that the word was “new in politics”.20 It still had no precise numerical significance: it was taken as a synonym for “the general opinion” or the “assent of the greater number”.
When “majority” was used, it was always in opposition to the previous regime of suffrage censitaire, in which the right to vote depended on property qualifications. The word thus referred to a global social perspective and was not used in a technical political sense. Recall, moreover, that the word majority was totally absent from the political language of the eighteenth century. There is no article “Majorité” in either the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert or the Encyclopédie méthodique of Jean-Nicolas Démeunier.
The English term majority, which made a tentative appearance in British parliamentary vocabulary early in the eighteenth century, did not make it across the English Channel to France. The 1814 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française still gives only one definition of majority: “Age of competence for full enjoyment of one’s rights”. In 1848, the Dictionnaire démocratique went so far as to say that “majority” was a “dangerous word and subject to misinterpretation”.21
The complementary notion of “minority” also proved problematic. Minorities, it was believed, posed a challenge to democratic societies, or stood as anomalies. A minority was either a persistent archaism, a survival of the past in the present, or the bearer of a new idea that had yet to become a part of customary practice.22 Minorities were thus defined not as political groups but as mere historical artifacts of the progress of civilization. They were by their very nature temporary and destined either to wither away or to gain support until they one day expressed the sentiment of the entire society.
The old culture of unanimity persisted even after the advent of universal suffrage. Its enduring influence is obvious not only in the political thought of the period but also in the practices of later democratic regimes. The towns of eighteenth-century New England offer a particularly striking example of this. These towns were the very embodiment of democratic modernity. In them a deep egalitarian ethos reigned, and decisions were made in town meetings attended by all residents. Individual suffrage was first introduced in this setting, and town statutes respected the principle of majority rule.
In practice, however, things were not so simple. Concern for unanimity remained paramount, and town meetings were thought of more as ways of consolidating group opinion than as venues for the expression and resolution of differences. The legal status of any resolution passed by a simple majority was dubious. “True” legitimacy could come only from unanimity. Conflict was accordingly perceived as illegitimate, an undesirable and artificial disruption of the civic order.23 If an election resulted in a clash between individuals or groups, this was taken as a sign that the community was in serious crisis. Political sermons and speeches in this period exalted consensus as the only normal and desirable social state.24 If divisions existed, they were to be resolved quickly. Democratic politics was totally identified with the cult of unity.
When serious conflicts arose, majority rule was never contemplated as a means of resolving them. Secession was the only way out. The minority withdrew, leaving one homogeneous and united group behind and forming another somewhere else. In eighteenth-century Massachusetts, people either lived together in harmony, or they parted ways; there was no middle ground.
Indeed, it is fascinating to observe the urban dynamic in this period. Some towns chose to forsake growth rather than risk accepting new residents from other churches.25 They sought to preserve the homogeneity of the existing group at all cost, even to the detriment of their own economic interests. By the same token, when new towns were created, it was almost always on the basis of a strong social and religious consensus (in contrast to the way in which towns would form when the West was conquered a century later).
Only slowly and gradually did this way of thinking evolve over the course of the nineteenth century. Although Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, in The Federalist, granted that factions might play a positive role in the political system, they did not really repudiate the earlier view. Their point was purely pragmatic (to counter the negative effects of deep division by allowing a large number of lesser divisions); it lacked philosophical depth. In the United States and elsewhere it was only much later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, that party pluralism ceased to be regarded as a political pathology.
Examination of the French case will afford us a deeper look at the persistence of holistic concepts of the social in modern democratic states. In 1789, the rights of the citizen-individual were solemnly consecrated. The principle was now to count heads rather than weigh orders. The egalitarian imperative—one man, one vote—thus imposed a numerical idea of democracy at odds with corporatist conceptions of society.
But the terms in which this important change in thinking was formulated led to the exaltation of the unified nation. “We have but one desire: to lose ourselves in the great whole”. The historian Jules Michelet rightly regarded this petition by the Commune of Paris as a symbol of the French revolutionary spirit. In order to achieve the new ideal of equality and fraternity, the revolutionaries actually sought to erase all prior distinctions and particularities. The sacralization of the individual and the exaltation of social unity therefore went hand in hand. The nation could only be understood as a complete and homogeneous totality, the perfect antithesis of the hierarchical society that preceded it.
The general will that the revolutionaries hoped to forge was thus supposed to manifest itself “in an awe-inspiring, spontaneous, and unanimous manner,” to quote one of the leaders of the Cercle social.26 Unanimity and immediacy were clearly seen as the two essential qualities of democracy in this period. The necessity of breaking definitively with the Old Regime thus led in practice to a contradiction of the initial sacralization of the citizen-individual. The nation could only be seen as one great whole, founded on the rejection of everything that stood in opposition to it. For Sieyès, it had to be essentialized and absolutized in order to assert its presence, so that the national interest could be established in a “pure and unadulterated” way.27
These representations of the general will survived the revolutionary period. In 1848, even as universal (male) suffrage was proclaimed, signs of unity and fraternity were apparent everywhere. Universal suffrage was not welcomed as a way to create the necessary conditions for pluralism and allow the expression of social and occupational differences. At first it was seen as a way of demonstrating national harmony. Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, one of the great figures of the time, summed up his vision of this nascent democracy in this astonishing passage: “Political science has at last been discovered…. It is merely a question of summoning the great masses of the people, the sovereign in its entirety, and invoking unanimous consent concerning those issues on which the popular conscience speaks with such eloquence, and all in unison, by acclamation”.28 The poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine lyrically celebrated this spirit of unanimity, seeing the advent of universal suffrage as a way of “solidarizing all individuals, all wills, and all forces within the population”.29 For him, political participation was what “mutualizes hearts and enthusiasms” and not what reveals and resolves differences.30 The idea of elections was not yet linked to the idea of arbitrage or competition. Thus the advent of democracy in 1848 seems only to have revived and solidified the old ideal of a unified community capable of speaking with one voice, as if the Old Regime had been the only obstacle to its realization. Although the majoritarian principle governed electoral outcomes, it remained alien to the representations that actually dominated the sphere of politics.
To be sure, the legislative elections of 1849, which saw the first clash of “reds” and “whites,” marked a sharp break with the past. But they resulted in a regional split rather than division within communities. Indeed, the ideal of unity persisted. Under the Third Republic, it was not unusual to see candidates elected with more than 90 percent of the votes.31 Such behavior declined only very slowly, as more highly organized political parties came into being around the turn of the twentieth century. Even then, the idea that “good” policy should put an end to partisan clashes remained influential. On the right, people believed that if only “ideology” did not encourage false ideas of class struggle, reasonable people could find common ground. On the left, people held that society would be unified once power was wrested from the hands of a small number of privileged individuals.
These “unanimist” representations and practices were particularly pronounced in France, where they drew on antipluralist attitudes stemming from what I have called the “political culture of generality”. But the phenomenon was common to all nascent democracies. Even Great Britain, the cradle of pluralism, was influenced by the feeling that elections offered an occasion to tighten communal bonds and affirm the cohesiveness of the community. Although British society was strongly hierarchical, electoral rituals allowed people to indulge in certain fantasies of imaginary community and thus to believe that despite apparent differences there existed something like a “British people”.32 The Italian case is perhaps an even better example: think of the excitement created by the plebiscites held at the time of unification, when all Italians joined in chorus to welcome democratic modernity. The vote in this case was a sort of staging of the inaugural social contract, and it was experienced as a kind of sacrament of social unity.33 These elections were practically indistinguishable from the acclamations of old. Since then, all around the world, countless plebiscites have nurtured the flame of the political culture of unanimity.
Thus far, all the examples of the demand for unanimity have been taken from the history of Western Europe and its offshoots. It would be easy to broaden our view, however. In Africa, the central role of the palaver can only be understood in terms of an underlying ideal of consensus.34 In the Muslim world, the notion of igma (unanimous accord of the community) also plays a key theological and political role.35 In China, we find that the imperative of harmony stems from an idea of legitimacy based on the fusion of different orders of reality: human will, morality, and nature. There is nothing positive about conflict. The common good is inseparable from social unity. In the monastic communities of medieval Japan, the idea of ichimi dôshin (communion of hearts) was applied to group “decisions”.36 It would be easy to multiply examples, but already we have enough to suggest that defining legitimacy in terms of unanimity is a universal ideal.
As we have seen, majority rule was introduced into democratic constitutions almost surreptitiously, as a sort of practical necessity, which in the beginning was never fully theorized. It took hold despite the fact that the concept of a majority had no philosophical foundation or authentic constitutional status.37 Universal suffrage would gradually alter the terms of the problem, however. Elections ceased to be a kind of sacrament marking the primordial social unity that prevailed in the moment that a people achieved autonomy. They became instead a means of expressing social division.
The ballot box became a peaceful substitute for armed insurrection. It was thus possible to reconcile universal suffrage with class struggle: voting became a means of expressing differences and resolving conflicts. Yet even as voting found new uses quite different from its earlier function as a celebration of unanimity, old representations of the social persisted. Many of these simply looked forward to some postrevolutionary era when the proletariat would be abolished: this was the paramount ideal. In the late nineteenth century, few European thinkers acknowledged the enduring legitimacy of conflicts of interest and differences of opinion (the situation was different in the United States).38
At the end of the nineteenth century political parties came under attack everywhere. These attacks were not solely a response to the parties’ dysfunctions. They were also a natural product of a certain system of social representations. The vilification of political parties allowed them to serve as scapegoats, alibis for discord within society itself. Condemning the parties made it possible to avoid asking deep questions about the meaning of divisions in democracy. Democratic generality (in individualist societies where the ideal of unanimity was impossible to achieve) was therefore never explored or theorized. Legitimation by the ballot box remained fundamental, but something had changed: elections lost their initial aura. Universal suffrage played an indispensable but limited role: the people enjoyed the “power of the last word”. Elections therefore remained a source of legal legitimacy, but their moral authority was permanently compromised. Yet the problem never received careful analysis.
Unanimity was not the only basis of legitimacy. In the nineteenth century the substantive consequences of voting also counted. People fought for universal suffrage because many believed that electoral reform would make it possible to satisfy the needs of the majority. The arguments advanced in favor of the cause in England and France attest to the importance of this idea.
In Britain, the Chartists made extending the right to vote the centerpiece of their 1838 manifesto. Everything that made the worker’s lot miserable—low wages, poor working conditions, workhouses—was blamed on limited suffrage. The rich were powerful, the Chartists argued, because they made the laws, and because they made the laws, they were rich. Bronterre O’Brien, the leading theorist of Chartism, therefore looked on universal suffrage as “the great panacea for all ills”.39 George Harney, another figure in the movement and close friend of Friedrich Engels, summed up the situation as follows: “We are asking for universal suffrage because we believe that it will bring us bread, beef, and beer. Universal suffrage will beget universal prosperity”.40
The same attitude can be found in France before 1848: “Representative government means a governmental machinery capable of satisfying the needs of the people,” was the way a leading figure in the Société des Amis du Peuple put it.41 During the first battle for electoral reform, Claude Tillier, one of the period’s most famous pamphleteers, bluntly commented that “political rights give bread to the people. If the people were sovereign, they would not allow their toast to be sliced as if they were children”.42
“The people who make the law make it for their own benefit”: this was the leitmotif of the period. When universal suffrage was proclaimed in 1848, the vast majority of the people believed that, because of it, a new economic and social era was about to begin. “From the day this law goes into effect, there will be no more proletarians in France,” Ledru-Rollin effused.43 The “correct representation” guaranteed by universal suffrage was seen as leading inevitably to the adoption of “correct policy,” which would redound to the benefit of the greater number. These expectations and hopes would soon be dashed on both sides of the English Channel and everywhere else they appeared. Yet a trace would always remain, contributing to the desacralization of the electoral ritual by removing a little more of the luster that once attached to it.
Modern democratic regimes, whose establishment depended on a certain blindness as to their true nature, were fragile from the beginning. Their subsequent history has been marked by a long series of disillusionments. The phrase crisis of democracy, which entered the European political vocabulary in the 1920s, reflected the consequences of the failure to conceptualize democratic legitimacy.
It was not the failure or betrayal of a previously coherent project that led to crisis. It was simply that it took some time for democratic regimes to mature to the point where their fundamental contradictions became apparent. Trouble first appeared in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Antiparliamentary sentiment provoked frightened responses. A few decades later, in the 1920s and 1930s, the challenges took a more radical and immediate turn. Ultimately they fostered fatal totalitarian fantasies of a return to unanimity: old images of holistic society were imposed on individualistic modern societies. At the same time, many people sought to revive Proudhonian notions of democracy within supposedly “natural” social or occupational groups. They hoped to create a more unified and coherent environment, albeit on a relatively limited scale.
Somewhat earlier, however, toward the end of the nineteenth century, another approach had been tried—an approach that was at once more modest and more effective in countering the dysfunctions of the electoralrepresentative system and its unrequited need for legitimacy. The idea was to create an institution capable of embodying the general interest: the bureaucracy. It is to this phenomenon that we turn next.
1 See Gaëtan Thériault, Le Culte d’Homonoia dans les cites grecques (Quebec: Les Éditions du Sphinx, 1996); and Frédéric Hurlet, “Le consensus et la concordia en Occident (Ier–IIIe siècles après Jésus-Christ),” in Hervé Inglebert, ed., Idéologies et valeurs critiques dans le monde romain: Hommage à Claude Lepelley (Paris: Picard, 2002).
2 See Christophe Hugoniot, “Les acclamations dans la vie municipale tardive,” in Ingle-bert, Idéologies et valeurs critiques.
3 See Philippe Urfalino, “La décision par consensus apparent: Nature et propriétés,” Revue européenne des sciences sociales (Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto), vol. 45, no. 135, 2007.
4 Julius Caesar, The Gallic Wars, book 8, 21; and Tacitus, Germania, chap. 11.
5 William A. Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970).
6 See the documentation of this point in the appendix “Le rôle du people dans l’Église chrétienne d’après la correspondance de S. Cyprien,” in François Jacques, Le Privilège de la liberté (Rome: École française de Rome, 1984), p. 428.
7 As far as I know, it was Cyprian, bishop of Carthage in the third century, who was the first to use the expression populi universi suffragio (letter quoted in Jacques, Le Privilège de la liberté).
8 See “Élection des évêques,” in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, vol. 4 (Paris, 1911).
9 Roberto Celli, Pour l’histoire des origines du pouvoir populaire: L’expérience des villes-États italiennes (XIe–XIIe siècles) (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université catholique de Lou-vain, 1980).
10 Edoardo Ruffini, “I sistemi di deliberazione colletiva nel medioevo italiano,” in La Ragione dei più: recherché sulla storia del principio maggioritario (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1977). For an overview of the French case, see Albert Rigaudière, “Voter dans les villes de France au Moyen Âge (XIIIe–XVe siècles),” Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres: Comptes rendus des séances de l’année 2000, July–October (Paris: De Boccard, 2000).
11 See Léo Moulin, “Les origines religieuses des techniques électorales et délibératives modernes,” Revue internationale d’histoire politique et constitutionnelle, n.s., vol. 3, April–June 1953, and “Sanior et maior pars: Note sur l’évolution des techniques électorales dans les ordres religieux du VIe au XIIIe siècle” (2 articles), Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 1958; and Jean Gaudemet, Les Élections dans l’Église latine des origines au XVIe siècle (Paris: Éditions Fernand Lanore, 1979).
12 According to a formula consecrated by the Third Lateran Council in 1179.
13 Joseph M. Colomer and Iain McLean, “Electing Popes: Approval Balloting and Qualified-Majority Rule,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 29, no. 1, summer 1998, as well as the article “Élection des papes,” in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, vol. 4.
14 The papacy ended the election of bishops in the late Middle Ages owing to the proliferation of divisions. On the French case, see Valérie Julerot, “Y a ung grant desordre”: Élections épiscopales et schismes diocésains en France sous Charles VIII (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006).
15 Scientific interest in the question did not develop until much later, at the end of the nineteenth century. Essential contributions include Adhémar Esmein, “L’unanimité et la majorité dans les élections canoniques,” in Mélanges Fitting (1907), vol. 1 (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1969); Ladislas Konopczynski, Le Liberum Veto: Étude sur le développement du principe majoritaire (Paris: Vrin, 1930); and Edoardo Ruffini, “Le principe majoritaire: Aperçu historique (1927–1976),” Conférence, no. 23, fall 2006.
16 The problem is clearly discussed in Pierre Favre, “Unanimité et majorité dans le Contrat social de Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” Revue du droit public, January–February 1976. For Locke, see Willmore Kendall, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959).
17 Sieyès, “Préliminaire de la Constitution française,” (Versailles, July 1789), p. 38.
18 Ibid.
19 Sieyès, Vues sur les moyens d’exécution dont les représentants de la France pourront disposer en 1789 (Versailles, 1789), p. 18.
20 “Majorité,” Dictionnaire politique (Paris, 1842), ed. Pagnerre.
21 “Majorité, minorities,” in Francis Wey, Manuel des droits et des devoirs: Dictionnaire démocratique (Paris, 1848).
22 For example, the article “Minorité” in the Dictionnaire politique, distinguishes between a “minority of the past” and a “minority of the future” without ever conceiving of a “democratic normality” in which a minority would be a persistent presence in the political contest.
23 Michael Zuckerman, “The Social Context of Democracy in Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4, October 1968.
24 Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era (1730–1805) (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1990).
25 For examples, see Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970).
26 François-Xavier Lanthenas, Motifs de faire du 10 août un jubilé fraternel (Paris, 1793), p. 19.
27 Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (Paris: PUF, 1982), p. 60.
28 Bulletin de la République, no. 19, April 22, 1848.
29 Speech of October 6, 1848, in Alphonse de Lamartine, La France parlementaire (1834–1851), vol. 5 (Paris: 1865), p. 463.
30 See Dominique Dupart, “Suffrage universel, suffrage lyrique chez Lamartine, 1834–1848,” Romantisme, no. 135, spring 2007.
31 See Alain Garrigou, Le Vote et la Vertu: Comment les Français sont devenus électeurs (Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1992), and Yves Déloye, Les Voix de Dieu: Pour une autre histoire du suffrage électoral: le clergé catholique et le vote, XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2006).
32 See Frank O’Gorman, “Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England, 1789–1860,” Past and Present, no. 135, May 1992. See also the four celebrated paintings of elections by Hogarth in the John Soane Museum in London.
33 See Gian Luca Fruci, “Il sacramento dell’unità nazionale: Linguaggi, iconografia e pratiche dei plebiscite risorgimentali (1848–1870),” in Alberto Mario Banti and Paul Gins-borg, eds., Il Risorgimento (Storia d’Italia. Annali) (Turin: Einaudi, 2007).
34 Jean-Godefroy Bidima, La Palabre: Une juridiction de la parole (Paris: Michalon, 1997); and Sherif El-Hakim, “The Structure and Dynamics of Consensus Decision-Making,” Man, vol. 13, 1978.
35 Marie Bernand, L’Accord unanime de la communauté comme fondement des statuts légaux de l’Islam (Paris: Vrin, 1970).
36 On this and other cases of consensus decision in the non-Western world, see the rich and suggestive series of studies in Marcel Detienne, ed., Qui veut prendre la parole? (Paris: Seuil, 2003).
37 There has been little theoretical work on this question. Pierre Favre, La Décision de majorité (Paris, Presses de la FNSP, 1976), is mainly interested in the paradoxes that result from the aggregation of preferences to form a majority, following in the wake of Condorcet and Kenneth Arrow, but this is a different question.
38 On this point, see my Le Peuple introuvable: Histoire de la representation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1998).
39 Quoted in Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-Class Radicalism of the 1830s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 258.
40 Quoted in Édouard Dolléans, Le Chartisme (1830–1848) (Paris, 1912), vol. 1, p. 285.
41 Discours du citoyen Desjardins sur l’ association républicaine (Paris, 1833), p. 11.
42 Lettre au système sur la réforme électorale (1841), in Claude Tillier, Pamphlets (1840–1844) (Paris, 1906), p. 61.
43 In a declaration he wrote on behalf of the provisional government, Bulletin de la République, no. 4, March 19, 1848.