Chapter 3
A Defence of Politics against Democracy

There are those who would tell us that democracy is the true form of politics. Some would even say that it is politics, or that it is clearly and always a form of government, value, or activity superior to mere politics. But politics needs to be defended even against democracy, certainly in the sense that any clear and practical idea needs defending against something vague and imprecise. We will argue that while democracy as a social movement must exist in nearly all modern forms of political rule, yet, if taken alone and as a matter of principle, it is the destruction of politics.

Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs. She is everybody’s mistress and yet somehow retains her magic even when a lover sees that her favours are being, in his light, illicitly shared by many another. Indeed, even amid our pain at being denied her exclusive fidelity, we are proud of her adaptability to all sorts of circumstances, to all sorts of company. How often has one heard: ‘Well, at least the Communists claim to be democratic’? But the real trouble is, of course, that they do not pretend to be democratic. They are democratic. They are democratic in the sound historical sense of a majority actively willing to be ruled in some other way.

So while democracy has most often been used to mean simply ‘majority rule’ (which in a sizeable state can only mean majority consent), all kinds of special meanings have arisen (many to refute rather than to refine this common view). Perhaps its primary meaning to most people at the moment is no more than ‘all things bright and beautiful’, or some such rather general sentiment. Then others hold that, surprisingly enough, democracy ‘really means’ liberty, even liberalism, or even individualism, even to defend the (democratic) individual against the (democratic) majority – this is certainly an amiable view. The late Ernest Bevin once told a Trade Union Conference that it was not democratic for a minority to continue to question the decisions of a majority – and he received the equally sincere and astonishing reply that democracy meant that he – an offending Brother – could say what he liked, when he liked, how he liked, against whom he liked, even against a majority of the T.G.W.U. The word can be used, as Tocqueville used it, as a synonym for equality, or, as Herbert Spencer used it, to mean a highly mobile free-enterprise society with great (Darwinian) differences in station and wealth. Or it may be seen as a political system which places constitutional limitations even upon a freely elected (democratic) government (the most sought-after use, but the most historically implausible and rhetorical); or, on the contrary, as the ‘will of the people’, or the ‘General Will’, triumphing over these ‘artificial’ restraints of constitutional institutions. To many democracy means little more than ‘one man, one vote’ – to which others would hopefully add: ‘plus real choices’. And in broad terms embracing all of these usages, democracy can be seen as a particular recipe of institutions, or as a ‘way of life’, some style of politics or rule, as when it is said that the ‘spirit of democracy’ is more important than any institutional arrangements, or that a democracy is where people behave democratically in their speech, dress, amusements, etc.

There was a time when ‘the meaning’ of democracy was thought more certain, but was also thought by many, even in the most politically advanced country of the time, to be simply and only an affair of small units of rule. ‘It is ascertained by history,’ George Mason told the Virginia Convention of 1788 which met to ratify the proposed Federal Constitution, ‘that there never was a government over a very extensive country without destroying the liberties of the people. History also, supported by the opinions of the best writers, shows us that monarchy may suit a large territory, and despotic governments over so extensive a country, but that popular governments can only exist in small territories.’ Only in small territories could the people themselves see what was going on, and take part in what was going on. The democrats of the day, for this reason, argued vigorously that power should reside in the separate States of the Union. Some of the national government men launched an equally fierce polemic against popular government, against democratic tendencies, on precisely this same logic. There was a danger that the alternatives would be seen as either a strong oligarchical national union or a mere alliance of popular governments. But the solution had already been seen. Few indeed really argued for a democratic government: the question was how strong should the democratic element be? Mason himself was reported saying at Philadelphia: ‘he admitted that we had been too democratic, but was afraid that we should incautiously run into the opposite extreme.’ The solution, an invention or recognition fundamental to modern politics, had already been stated by James Wilson of Pennsylvania: ‘He was for raising the Federal pyramid to a considerable altitude, and for that reason wished to give it as broad a basis as possible.’ Thus to achieve strong government at all, it must rest on ‘the confidence of the people’. This was true, even in this pre-industrial society, because there was already ‘a people’, at least a large number, who had already exercised for many years, in their provincial and local assemblies, the habits, rights, and duties of political citizenship. They could not be ignored: the administration of any possible form of government depended upon them. But neither could conscript soldiers be ignored if the problem was, as Napoleon made it, to put a nation in arms against a system of dynastic professional armies. And nor could the skilled industrial workers be ignored if the survival and welfare of a country depended upon rapid industrialization – whether in the case of Victorian England or Stalinist Russia. In this context, too, is to be seen Michels’ famous dictum explaining the unique strength of the modern political party: ‘that every party organization represents an oligarchical power grounded upon a democratic base.’

The difficulty is that this discovery or invention is completely general. When it occurs in the context of a society which already enjoys free institutions, such as Colonial America, the result is an extension of political liberties; when it occurs in Revolutionary France or Russia, the result is very different: it can then actually strengthen centralization and autocracy. The need for democracy as an instrument of government then creates the need to manufacture popularity, to sustain mass enthusiasm, to mechanize consent, to destroy all opposition. The people are ground down in fear by constant news (half-real or wholly invented) of conspiracies against the nation and the party, and then are raised up in hope by grandiose promises of vast future (always future) benefits. Democracy, then, not merely stabilizes free régimes, it makes stronger unfree régimes, and it has made possible totalitarianism. For the first time every stratum of society is important to the ruler and is open to exploitation, whether moral or economic. Let no one think that I am lumping together for all purposes people as different as Hitler, de Gaulle, Baldwin, and Kennedy to say that they are all figures, for good or evil, who could only have arisen in states with a democratic franchise. But let us not be too sceptical. No propaganda can manufacture opinion which does not correspond to some real need. The experience and fear of poverty and war everywhere make men willing to sacrifice some liberty (particularly if they have never known it on any regular basis) to parties and governments which promise them relief (sometime) from these two grimmest burdens of mankind. Even let us grant that some, much, or most mass support for a totalitarian régime is a ‘genuine’ and free surrender of freedom (as for so many in the German elections of March 1933), if only in the sense that people are led to believe that ‘true freedom’ is sacrifice for the cause; yet the point still remains that Wilson of Pennsylvania was right: the higher the pyramid of power is pushed, the broader must be the base. But he was right in a sense that embraces all important forms of modern rule: democracy is not necessarily related to political popular government based upon free citizenship. And even where democracy, in this sense, does coexist with free politics, as in modern America, with an intimacy almost inextricable, yet there is tension as well as harmony; the parties in this marriage are involved in famous quarrels – democracy is jealous of liberty and liberty, at times, fears democracy. Nowhere else in the world, both to the horror and honour of Americans, is the large question of the ‘tyranny of public opinion’ so debated. ‘If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority.’

Majoritarian democracy appears in its most unsatisfactory and unpolitical form in the famous doctrine of the ‘Sovereignty of the People’ (which people?). The Declarations of the Rights of Man of 26 August 1789 stated: ‘The source of all sovereignty is essentially in the nation; no body, no individual can exercise authority that does not proceed from it in plain terms.’ It should be the test of whether a man values liberty effectively, of whether he is in earnest about free politics, to see if he is willing to recognize the meaninglessness of this rhetorical phrase, this sadly empty doctrine. A constitution may claim to be based on the ‘sovereignty of the people’, but this has never helped anyone, rulers, judges, or politicians to decide what disputed words may mean or which policies to adopt. ‘The people’ may be consulted by a referendum, as in France, when the constitutional framework is changed: but their role is limited to ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a complicated and predigested document. And the complicated decisions of actual governments, even the management of large political parties, can never be undertaken by a body as large as, or a concept as vague as, ‘the people’. ‘Sovereignty of the people’ can mean little more than an affirmation that government should be in the interests of everyone and that it should be representative. But the representative assembly itself will almost invariably represent particular constituencies or particular interests or parties. In other words, it will represent an actual political situation, not a theoretical ‘sovereign’ situation in which all power is supposed to stem from an undivided and indivisible ‘people’. Such an affirmation should be made – though it might be better made in a form that seems to exclude the representation of the people by a single party: ‘the right (need?) of the people to choose the government they want’, or some such. But no such affirmation solves any practical difficulty of government – whether of political governments, totalitarian governments, or forms more ancient. Indeed, the doctrine, if taken too seriously, is an actual step towards totalitarianism. For, quite simply, it allows no refuge and no contradiction, no private apathy even. ‘A patriot,’ said Robespierre, ‘supports the Republic en masse, he who fights about details is a traitor. Everything which is not respect for the people and you – the Convention – is a crime.’ This is but another form of the cruel chimera, already observed, of supplanting political prudence and moderation by the reign of ‘society as a whole’, the subsuming of the political by the ideological. The violence and the terror needed to produce unanimity are no more rendered humane by the plea of democracy than they are by the pleas of racial purity or economic equality. ‘The terror,’ continued Robespierre, ‘is nothing but justice, swift, stern, and unrelenting, it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a particular principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the pressing needs of the country.’

Even ‘fraternity’ can be as deceitful as ‘virtue’ as a purifying principle for mere democracy. As the apostate Nazi Rauschning argued in his Revolution of Nihilism, people at first did not march in the endless parades and torch-light processions because they were full of fraternity; they marched because marching gave them the feeling of fraternity. Or as the American longshoreman Eric Hoffer has said: ‘Collective unity is not the result of the brotherly love of the faithful for each other. The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole – the church, the party, the nation, not to his fellow true believer. True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.’¹

Here it is as well to digress and say that not merely the concept of ‘sovereignty of the people’ is un- or even anti-political, but also the whole doctrine of sovereignty. The concept can, of course, mean many things. I am considering the claim of Thomas Hobbes and the English positivist lawyers, that there must be absolute power of final decision in every organized society in some clearly recognized and effective institution. This doctrine of sovereignty can, indeed, historically and theoretically be given a meaning only as a contradiction to normal political conditions even if, at times, a necessary contradiction. Sovereignty is the realm of emergency, the potentiality of defence to maintain order at all in face of clear and present danger, the justification of emergency powers by which all régimes, including political régimes, including democratic régimes in any possible sense, must find a capacity for decisive, centralized, and unquestioned (and hence nonpolitical) action – if a state is, in desperate times, to survive at all. Politics, as Voltaire said of liberty, has no relevance to a city in a state of siege. The practical difficulties of deciding when a state of emergency exists are always great – but they are practical and procedural difficulties: they do not destroy the real distinction between the time of politics and the time of sovereignty. If sovereignty is the father of politics, then once we are grown up enough to look after ourselves, we should only fly to him when in very great distress. For there are those in free régimes who harp so much on these ‘toughminded’ or ‘realistic’ themes of power and sovereignty, on every possible occasion, often with a sadly transparent masochistic relish, that they are guilty of turning the subtle play of political life into a crude melodrama. Man cannot live by fear alone – or he will fear to live. But equally guilty are those wishful tender souls who would repress any and all mention of sovereign power, except to deny its existence; this is neither political courage nor principle, but a prudishness which bowdlerizes a plain human tale. Accident as well as design, as Machiavelli reminds us, can create conditions of emergency. Yet it is only in totalitarian régimes that a continuous state of emergency is maintained, a sense of permanent revolution, a belief that there is a continual desperate struggle against traitors within and aggressors without, which is often maintained quite artificially, though seemingly as a device of government essential to such régimes.

The democratic doctrine of the sovereignty of the people threatens, then, the essential perception that all known advanced societies are inherently pluralistic and diverse, which is the seed and the root of politics. Few have understood more clearly than Alexis de Tocqueville the importance of group loyalties intermediate between ‘society’ and the State. He was the first to see clearly why ‘the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world . . . I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new . . .’² Thus he wrote even in his Democracy in America in which he sought to show that there were diversifying institutions in American society which could mitigate the danger of a ‘tyranny of the majority’. In his L’Ancien Régime et la Revolution he christens this new thing ‘Democratic Despotism’ and characterizes it thus: ‘No gradations in society, no distinctions of classes, no fixed ranks – a people composed of individuals nearly alike and entirely equal – this confused mass being recognized as the only legitimate sovereign, but carefully deprived of all the faculties which could enable it either to direct or even to superintend its own government. Above this mass, a single officer, charged to do everything in its name without consulting it. To control this officer, public opinion, deprived of its organs; to arrest him, revolutions, but no laws. In principle a subordinate agent; in fact, a master.’³

That the word ‘democratic’ can now be used to describe what earlier writers would have termed ‘mixed-government’ (which is a clearer interpretive translation of Aristotle’s politeia than simply ‘polity’), is a dangerous loss to political understanding. The older tradition of political theory in using the term ‘democracy’ had exemplified Aristotle’s tripartite usage: democracy as, intellectually, the doctrine of those who believe that because men are equal in some things, they should be equal in all; constitutionally, the rule of the majority; sociologically, the rule of the poor. Democracy he saw as a necessary element in polity or mixed government, but alone it was destructive of the political community, attempting the impossible feat of the direct rule of all – which in fact meant the unrestrained power of those who were trusted by most. Democracies were particularly prone to fall by ‘the insolence of demagogues’ into tyrannies. Modern experience seems to bear out Aristotle’s precise description of democracy rather than that of those who would have it stand for ‘all things bright and beautiful’.

The Western World, for all its good fortune in having a political tradition, has had the disadvantage that what should have been the great modern consolidation of politics – the spread of the idea of liberty from an aristocracy to the common people – took place in an age when relics of Feudalism associated all intermediate political and social groups between the individual and the State with privilege unredeemed by function. The aim of the friends of liberty became too often merely to sweep away such institutions so as to leave revealed the undoubted majestic and spontaneous harmony of a sovereign people and a sovereign State. There is no incident more significant for genuine political thought than when John Stuart Mill confesses in his Autobiography that reviewing Tocqueville led ‘my political ideal from pure democracy’ into considering ‘the necessary protection against its degenerating into the only despotism of which, in the modern world, there is real danger – the absolute rule of the head of the executive over a congregation of isolated individuals, all equals but all slaves’. Indeed much of Mill’s great essay On Liberty would be more convincing, if less dramatic, if recast on narrower grounds as simply a defence of politics itself. Liberty, in Mill’s sense, is a political achievement – it is, both logically and historically, a product of politics, not a prerequisite. Democracy, in modern conditions, is a necessity of strong government. Government must be prior to politics, but democracy may or may not be political. There is both totalitarian democracy and political democracy.

Now if ever there was a natural unanimity of opinion in any society on all great issues, politics would, indeed, be unnecessary. But in societies which claim to be pure democracies, and full of such pure democrats that no one wishes to speak against the government – for all agree with its policies, it is more likely that politics has been forbidden in order to try to reach such a unanimity rather than that it has withered away because there is unanimity already. The eighteenth-century democrats commonly called a man a ‘pure and incorruptible democrat’ (as, for instance, John Wilkes was toasted in many a tavern) if he was thought (incredibly enough) to have no particular interests, only the general interest at heart. Particular interests were always a corruption of the pure common interest or the general will. But it is notorious what Rousseau thought should be done to the earnest seeker who, look into his heart as he will, purify himself and strip himself of particular prejudices and loves as he must, still does not agree with the general will: he must be ‘forced to be free’. There are, of course, many things a man may be as a consequence of force – he may be less dangerous, he may be made safe despite himself, less hungry despite himself, perhaps even, in some sense, be made ‘better’, certainly be made ready and available for a moral re-education; but whatever he is, it is nonsense to say that he is free. It is better to admit that for democratic (or any other governmental) purposes those in power may on occasion have to take away people’s freedom – far better than to claim that this taking away is freedom. Otherwise, we lose the power to understand what is right even when we cannot act. And if we lose that, then the defeat is perpetual.

The identification of democracy and freedom can, of course, be attempted in the other direction. Just as liberty can get buried by democracy, democracy can get buried in liberty. Democracy, some will tell us, means a liberal constitutional régime in which the rights of the individual are preserved even against a majority. But calling such a régime democratic, even though it will almost certainly have a strong democratic element in it, is not a help to understanding anything – except how great is the prestige of the word. For it to make historical or sociological sense, to describe an actual state of affairs, it would have to be argued that liberty can exist only in a democracy.

But, as Burke reminded us, liberty in politics can mean only ‘liberties’. An ounce of law is worth a ton of rhetoric if a court will recognize certain liberties and order their preservation against the State itself. And certainly all sorts of liberties, highly important to politics, can become established, preserved, and protected in societies which are by no stretch of the imagination ‘democratic’. By the 1770s in England certain liberties already existed which would seem fundamental to stable political régimes: the subject was free from arbitrary arrest; he was tried by jury, not by royal judge alone, and juries frequently flew in the face of the law in their dislike of political prosecutions; he was free to criticize the government from a platform or in print; he could report Parliamentary debates, and he could travel without passports or special permission – yet the franchise was corrupt, inequitable, and inadequate. The franchise needed to be made more democratic before the government could adequately represent the changing real interests and real power of the governed; but there is absolutely no doubt – here indeed is a platitude which needs to be taken seriously – that liberty preceded democracy and lived a life of its own. It is sadly obvious that there was more liberty in the England of the 1760s than in the People’s Democracies of the 1960s – though there may have been, at times, more hunger. But the point is simply that not being hungry is not liberty: it is a different value. Other values may be deemed superior. There even may be, amid all the turbulence, injustice, and insult, more liberty of the subject in the closing stages of a Colonial régime than amid the intolerant enthusiasm for unity of a new national government. Most people will have little doubt which is to be preferred, and even sceptics will have little doubt which alone is possible. G. K. Chesterton once said of the milder fanaticisms of temperance reformers: ‘Better England free than England sober’. And anyone who doubts that ‘self-government is better than good government’ is indeed a reactionary Canute scolding the tides of history. But unless the intellectual distinction is drawn between personal liberty and national self-determination, whatever the necessities of the moment, new states may never return to or achieve a political tradition – and the alternative is ever greater violence and propaganda to maintain the artificial unanimity once the common enemy has gone. Such states may, then, justly be called democratic, but it is, at the least, confusing to call them free. But, equally, if we call all free states democratic, we may obscure the need for them to become more democratic if they are to survive in changing circumstances.

Take the case of Great Britain. ‘Democracy’, to the generation before 1914, had a much more precise meaning than now. People took it to mean, amid the overtones of simple majority rule, such things as: an increased working-class representation in Parliament; an increase in the power of Trade Unions; more investigation of and more publicity about all aspects of public administration; increased educational opportunity; a decrease in the power of the House of Lords and of the landed interest. And it was beginning to show overtones of a non-doctrinaire kind of socialism, as the rising Labour Party seemed to exemplify democratic institutions and to espouse democratic habits and causes, just at the moment when the Liberals became more and more split between their radicalism and their whiggery. But the word, increasingly respectable though it was, was never used to characterize English life in general or English politics in particular. There were friends and foes of democracy, but no one in their right mind in 1913 would have called Britain, as it was, a democracy. It simply was not. It was a free society, it had a system of representative government in which some popular reforms were proving increasingly possible, but it was not democratic. Only with the First World War did it learn that it was fighting – being conscripted, indeed – to preserve democracy. The rhetoric of Lloyd George, the genial cynicism of Churchill and Beaverbrook, and the idealism of Woodrow Wilson, all contrived to rob the term of any precise meaning whatever. The word was established for the sovereign purposes of war at the cost of stripping it of any real political meaning. Sacrifices could be demanded in the name of democracy which could not be expected for mere patriotism for the social order as it was. Tories who should have known better, and radicals who did know better but who were hoping for better, conspired to make Britain (verbally) democratic. And it has remained (verbally) democratic ever since.⁴

Or take the case of the United States. Here indeed must be an uncontested example of a political system which can be clearly, and by popular usage must be, characterized as democratic. But even here it is necessary to remind oneself that the word came to be applied very late to the system as a whole, rather than to those parts of it which were uniquely and from the beginning democratic – the franchise (with the great Negro exception) and what was, certainly by comparison with any other country, the broad equality of social conditions. Not until this century have all Americans, except political eccentrics, called American government unequivocally a democracy. The old Aristotelian distinction, well understood by the Founding Fathers, between democracy as a force on its own and democracy as one element in mixed-government, long survived the attacks of democratic rhetoric. And the situation was complicated by Party names which had little to do with the case at hand. The Democratic Party was, after all, throughout most of the nineteenth century the anti-national party. The words ‘Republic’ and ‘Republican’ were more often used in those times (which is why ‘Republican’ was seized to name a new party). The word had not yet lost its Roman overtones of simplicity, civic virtue, and even small proprietorship as the typical estate of a true citizen. The word ‘Republic’, for all its growing vagueness, avoided the majoritarian overtones of ‘democracy’. Perhaps only when the original democratic social condition of America became called into question did the word become adapted to stand for the whole instead of some of the vital parts. Andrew Carnegie’s Triumphant Democracy of 1886 may well mark this polemical turning point. When democratic forces in America were beginning to protest at some of the effects of capitalism, Carnegie wrote a triumphant hymn of praise to the material success of the Republic which systematically identified capitalism and democracy. They were not different forces. They were the same thing! Democracy meant equality of opportunity, not equality of condition: democracy enabled the most able, by a process of natural selection, ‘the survival of the fittest’ and all that, to rise to the top direction of material affairs. And, to Carnegie, it was part of the genius of American life that the best talents were drawn into business and not, as in England, into the wasteful channels of politics. Such men saw politics as ‘mere politics’: the unproductive pastime of an aristocratic oligarchy. But, in contrast, James Bryce’s great work on American politics, published two years later, took deliberate refuge in the almost meaningless title, The American Commonwealth. Bryce in the Preface explicitly criticized Tocqueville for making his Democracy in America the account of an ‘idea’ rather than of an actual system of government. But by 1949, when Harold Laski tried to surpass both Tocqueville and Bryce, it was inevitable that the title would be The American Democracy.

Whatever the name, however, the dispute continues between those Americans who regard their system as too democratic to provide effective government – if not in the domestic field, at least in the great jungle of foreign affairs – and those who regard it as not democratic enough – popular democracy is still frustrated by the checks and balances of the Constitution, the division of powers, particularly the Senate, on occasion the Supreme Court. American writers can still be found in abundance who are simply naive democrats. The business of government to them is simply to find out the wishes of the people. ‘Democracy,’ as Justice Holmes said sarcastically, ‘is what the crowd wants.’ ‘Populist’ direct democracy is one of the great animating myths of American politics for both left and right. Nearly half the States of the American Union, for instance, have provision in their constitutions for popular initiative, referendum, and recall. They forget that the first business of government is to govern – which may at times, even in America, call for the deliberate endurance of unpopularity. ‘The politician,’ said Churchill at his last Washington Press Conference, at a time when President Eisenhower was trying not to make up his mind what to do about the late Senator McCarthy, ‘who cannot stand unpopularity is not worth his salt.’ They forget that issues fit for a plebiscite, or the questions put into public opinion polls, are inherently predigested. Such issues and questions are frequently artificial in the sense that there may not be a public opinion on any question, or that the answers to such questions have to be seen in the context of all other questions, some of which may be mutually exclusive, all of which have to be weighed against each other by someone – so long as we live in a world in which life is short and resources are limited. Government alone can establish priorities of real social effort and actual policies. Democracy can only advise and consent, and then only in an indirect and spasmodic manner. Representatives must be politicians: if they all simply represent their immediate constituents and did not mediate, compromise, and occasionally think of the interests of government, they might survive, but it is unlikely that the Republic would.

More and more, however, American writers will argue just these things themselves: that ‘government by the people’ is misleading because impossible, or can only be one element in government and politics. But too often they then say that therefore ‘democracy’ must be made to mean strong and effective government, even a responsible two-party system (a very specific piece of business indeed), checks and balances, the liberty of the subject even against public opinion, etc. The lack of history for this generous usage need not worry us too much: meanings change both as levers and as mirrors of reality. But it hides the primacy of political values. It does lead to false expectations about other systems which also call themselves democratic. It may lead people to expect too much – and the disillusionment of unreal ideals is an occupational hazard of free politics. For instance, Ghana, of which we (good Pharisees) hoped so much (and new candidates for such comparisons arise almost monthly), is seen to be plainly not ‘democratic’. It is rapidly becoming what former ages would have called a ‘benevolent despotism’. Much of the opposition is in prison and so not very effective. Former colonial régimes and underdeveloped areas claim to be democratic and then we learn that they are not, American-wise, democracies at all. We lose heart and we wonder whether there is any hope for liberty. But the real worry is not that Ghana is not a democracy, which it plainly is not, but that with the intolerance of the government to opposition even as criticism, it may not even be political. And however popular or democratic the régime, if political opposition (however unpopular) is not allowed, the State may be free but its inhabitants will remain servile. One must hope for politics at all before one can hope for democracy in the American liberal sense. Equally, the liberal use of the concept democracy can lead people to expect too little. If some democratic institutions may seem overdeveloped in America, they can seem underdeveloped in Britain. Britain does not need democratic reforms because she is supposed to be democratic already. But one does not need to be a Jacobin or an American to think that English life could endure considerably more democracy of manners and methods without endangering political order. Indeed, the British constraint and conceit of class might seem, in American eyes, to be the very factor limiting national energy and more open to remedy by a whiff of democratic spirit than by the present tortuous economic programmes of any of the political parties. And it is indeed a platitude to say that if the American executive is too much subject to democratic control, yet in Britain there is too little Parliamentary or popular control of the executive. Strong government needs strong opposition if it is to be free and effective government.

So if democracy is best understood as one element in free government, not as a characteristic of the whole system, then it will always be possible to argue that more or less democratic institutions or democratic spirit is needed in any particular circumstance. Once again, Aristotle more clearly defined the relationship between politics and democracy than the usually over-complicated, or purely ideological, writings of modern authors. The best form of government was to him political rule – ‘polity’ or mixed-government. Such a government combined the aristocratic principle and the democratic; good government is a matter of experience, skill, and knowledge – not just opinion, but is subject to the consent of the governed. If there is no democratic element, a state will be oligarchic or despotic; if democracy alone prevails, the result is anarchy – the opportunity of demagogues to become despots. Democracy, then, is to be appreciated not as a principle of government on its own, but as a political principle, or an element within politics. As an intellectual principle, the belief that because men are equal in some things they are equal in all, it can be disastrous to the skill and judgement needed to preserve any order at all, let alone the special difficulties of a conciliatory political order.

Perhaps the worst danger from the democratic dogmas in free régimes can occur, as in the United States, not in the formal political institutions at all, but in the educational system. The idea is still deeply rooted in the American Public High School that it is ‘undemocratic’ (and therefore bad) to teach children of unequal ability unequally. This idea is now being challenged, spontaneously and fiercely, from many different quarters, not through any reactionary love of teaching a ‘subject’ rather than a ‘child’, as the cant has it, but largely on political grounds of worry that the schools are not furnishing people of sufficient talent and abilities to serve and maintain the national life. This argument has its own dangers. But at least it is combating a situation where many believe (always with complete sincerity) that the schools have the task of teaching not merely ‘citizenship’ (which has been debatable), but ‘democracy’ in a very specific form. This is an obvious, but now quite unnecessary, hangover from the days of mass immigration. ‘A legitimate aim of education,’ a Professor of Political Science writes, ‘is to seek to promote the major values of a democratic society and to reduce the number of moral mavericks who do not share the democratic preferences.’⁵ Politics will be richer in the United States when more people come to insist that it is a legitimate aim of education to educate, not indoctrinate. Within a free system there is a place both for democracy and authority. In the formal political institutions one assumes that democracy will normally outweigh but not exclude authority; but perhaps in education the converse should be the case. Political democracy does not imply intellectual democracy; intellectual democracy can make political democracy all but unworkable. Democracy, once again, cannot be the whole; it can only be a part in whatever activity it touches.

It comes to this very simply. That no government or authority can govern and survive unless it is based on consent – be it only the consent of the praetorian guard or the officer corps. But grant the social circumstances of modern industrial states, or of states wishing to industrialize, then the technical skills of manual workers become necessary for economic survival, to say nothing of progress. To govern such societies any government must govern to the general welfare. This means that it either has to enforce some single idea of what that general welfare is, or it has to find out what people think it is – and reconcile the divergent results as well as possible. And how does one find out what people think except by giving them real choices to discuss and real freedom to criticize and choose their government?

Democracy, then, if we give the word the fairest meaning we may want to give it – if we value liberty, free choice, discussion, opposition, popular government, all of these things together – is still but one form of politics, not something to be hoped for at every stage of a country’s development or in every circumstance. Politics is often settling for less than what we want, because we also want to live without violence or perpetual fear of violence from other people who want other things. But democracy, in its clearest historical and sociological sense, is simply a characteristic of modern governments both free and unfree. If industrial societies need governments of unparalleled strength, activity, and energy, they must be based upon active consent.

So while democracy can be compatible with politics, indeed politics can now scarcely hope to exist without it, yet politics does need defending on many occasions against the exclusive claims of many concepts of democracy which can lead to either the despotism of People’s Democracies or the anarchy of the Congo. But perhaps it needs most of all that most unpopular of defences: historical analysis applied against the vagueness of popular rhetoric. Democracy is one element in politics; if it seeks to be everything, it destroys politics, turning ‘harmony into mere unison’, reducing ‘a theme to a single beat’.

¹The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York 1951) – a remarkable and neglected book.

²Phillips Bradley’s edition of the Democracy in America (New York 1948), Vol. II, p. 318.

³Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789, translated by Henry Reeve (London 1888), p. 140.

⁴Yet there was always some mordant scepticism. Even in the Second World War, British soldiers sang a song which ended:

And as the kicks get harder

The poor private, you can see,

Gets kicked to bloody hell

To save de-moc-ra-cy.

⁵Harold Lasswell, The World Revolution of Our Times (Stanford 1951), p. 31.