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Democracy’s First Coming

OUT OF THE DARK and from very long ago has come a word. Like every word which carries authority for human beings, it began its life somewhere in particular. Today that word reaches out almost everywhere on earth where humans gather together in any numbers. Wherever it goes, it presses a claim for authority and a demand for respect. Everywhere, still, these claims remain sharply contested. In some settings they are brushed effortlessly aside, and all but cowed into silence. In others they are affirmed sonorously enough, but heard by most listeners with a hollow groan. Virtually nowhere any longer, even in the most brutal of autocracies, are they merely unintelligible as claims; and in remarkably few sites by now are they simply and permanently inaudible: excluded or erased from public speech by the sheer ferocity of repression. (Note, for example, what was first to respond even for Iraq in the summer of 2003 when the United Nations Security Council demanded its submission, before America launched its invasion. It was not the tyrant who had ruled the country with such murderous brutality and for so long, and whose image dominated every Iraqi public space, but what passed for a national representative assembly: a Parliament. It was they, not their real master, who showily declined to submit. Within the week, their real master, less showily, had decided quite differently. Or so, at least for a time, it seemed.)

As it travels through time and space, the word democracy never travels all on its own. Increasingly, as the last two centuries have gone by, it has travelled in fine company, alongside freedom, human rights, and perhaps now even, at least in pretension, material prosperity as well. But unlike these companions, democracy stakes a claim which is disconcerting from the outset: the claim to be obeyed. Every right constrains free action. Even freedom necessarily intrudes on the freedom of action of others. But democracy is itself a direct pressure on the will: a demand to accept, abide by, and in the end even submit to, the choices of most of your fellow citizens. There is nothing enticing about that demand, and no guarantee ever that accepting it will avoid fearsome consequences and may not involve hideous complicities. In many ways, and from many different points of view, the authority won by this far-flung word is strange indeed.

This is a story with a beginning. Democracy began in Athens. Not anything whatever which anyone today might reasonably choose to call democracy,1 but something which someone first in fact, as far as we know, did. Today democracy has come to be used, with sufficient gall, to refer to almost any form of rule or decision making. But when it entered human speech, it did so as a description of an already existing and very specific state of affairs, somewhere in particular. That place was Athens.

What exactly did democracy describe when the Athenians first used the term as a description? What did they mean by describing it in this way? To see what was happening in that first act of naming (or labelling), it helps to begin by listening to the Athenians as they addressed one another about the experience which they hoped to capture. Consider two voices, one very much speaking on democracy’s behalf, the other writing of it without enthusiasm and in a more confiding and enquiring fashion.

The first is famous and imposing, the voice of Pericles himself. The grandest celebration of ancient democracy comes not from a poet or philosopher (or even a professional orator),² but from the great political leader who led Athens into the war which all but destroyed her. It evokes, and claims to report, a single momentous historical ceremony, held late in the year 430 BC. True, we do not know that Pericles himself ever spoke a single word of it. But Thucydides, the mesmerizing historian who certainly composed virtually all of it, assures his readers that it, like the many other speeches of his History, conveys not merely what Pericles should have said but also what he would have meant.3 Thucydides, as he tells us himself with some pride, intended his story to last for ever;⁴ and Pericles by that point had led his city state in war and peace for longer than Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill, and done so under conditions which often tested the skills of domestic political leadership as exactingly as America’s devastating Civil War or the grim struggle to withstand and overthrow the Third Reich. He also led it (and could only have led it), to a degree that has never been true in any modern Parliamentary or Presidential regime, by convincing, time after time, a majority of the citizens present on the occasion by the speeches which he made. He held power by oratory,⁵ and did so steadily and tautly enough for Thucydides himself to describe Athens at the time as being ruled by a single person.⁶ We need not be surprised at the lasting power or resonance of this remarkable witness.

It was a speech for a proud sad occasion: a eulogy to the war dead of Athens in the opening year of the long drawn-out Peloponnesian War, delivered, as at every Athenian public funeral of its fallen (with the single exception of the victors of Marathon),⁷ before their common grave beside the loveliest approach road to the city walls. In it, Pericles spoke not at all of the individual exploits or daring of his heroes,⁸ though he left his hearers in little doubt that many had done finely. What he spoke of, incomparably, was Athens itself, the community for which each had made their final sacrifice. He spoke of its singular glories and its unique claim to such ultimate devotion. Thucydides was no sentimentalist, and no one since he wrote has judged the political conduct of the Athenians in those years more searchingly. What he makes Pericles say in praise of Athens at that point, in vindication of the choices of those who went out to die on its behalf, begins from and centres on its political regime, and the political and spiritual lives which it freed and prompted the Athenians to live together:

We live under a form of government which does not emulate the institutions of our neighbours; on the contrary, we are ourselves a model (paradeigma, or paradigm) which some follow, rather than the imitators of other peoples.9

This regime, which is called democracy (demokratia), because it is administered with a view to the interest of the many, not of the few, has not merely made Athens great. It has also rendered its citizens equal before the law in their private disputes, and equally free to compete for public honours by personal merit and exertion, or to seek to lead the city, irrespective of their own wealth or social background.¹⁰ Pericles praises it for the mutual politeness and lack of spite it fostered between those citizens, for the deep respect for law it inculcated, and for drawing to the city the fruits and products of the whole world. He praises it, too, for the military superiority it had mustered, for its determined openness in face of every other people, and the stalwart courage nurtured by its way of life. But he praises it, equally, for its taste and responsiveness to beauty, its sobriety of judgment and respect for wisdom, its pride in its own energy, discretion, and generosity. Athens, he boasted in summary, is an education for the whole of Greece.¹¹

Democracy for the Athenians began (and even acquired its name) before the category itself carried or expressed any clear or special value. Yet within a few decades of picking up the name, it had come to mean for some not just a way of organizing power and political institutions, but a whole way of life and the inspiring qualities which somehow suffused it. At the core of that way of life lay a combination of personal commitment to a community of birth and residence, and a continuing practice of alert public judgment on which that community quite consciously depended for its own security:

For we alone regard the man who takes no part in public affairs, not as one who minds his own business, but as good for nothing; and we Athenians decide public questions for ourselves or at least endeavour to arrive at a sound understanding of them, in the belief that it is not debate which is a hindrance to action, but rather not to be instructed by debate before the time comes for action.12

There has never been a fuller or saner expression of the hope which lies at the very centre of democracy as a political ideal.

The speech which Thucydides gives us is a historian’s presentation of a dutifully partisan and highly political performance. It is also an epitome of the ways in which the citizens of Athens had come to wish to conceive themselves as a community.¹³ To other Athenians at the time, just as earlier and later, democracy naturally meant something very different, as it presumably did to many inhabitants of Attica—slaves, women, metics—who could never become full citizens.¹⁴ With the critics of democracy there is a wider range of voices to listen to, not all of them cultured despisers like Plato.¹⁵ Especially striking is the figure whom British classical scholars, for reasons now largely forgotten, have come to call the Old Oligarch, author of a terse study of The Constitution of Athens, long attributed to Xenophon.¹⁶ For the Old Oligarch, writing in all probability before the Peloponnesian War even began, Athens’s democracy was no occasion for applause;¹⁷ but it certainly was a coherent political order, with many elements well calculated to sustain and strengthen it over time. It gave power to the poor, the unsavoury and the unabashedly popular,¹⁸ and did so quite deliberately at the expense of those of wealth, nobility of birth, or social distinction.¹⁹ This distribution of power²⁰ had entirely natural consequences,²¹ benefiting the former mercilessly at the expense of the latter. What made the distribution viable was the main source of the city’s military power, its citizen navy, drawn overwhelmingly from the poorer sections of Athens’s population, unlike the heavily armed hoplites who dominated its land armies.²² In the eyes of the Old Oligarch, it was true in every country that those of greater distinction23 oppose democracy, seeing themselves as repositories of decorum and respect for justice, and their social inferiors as ignorant, disorderly, and vicious.²⁴ In the face of these attitudes, the poorer majority of Athens’s citizens are very well advised to insist on their opportunity to share the public offices of the city, and their right to address their fellow citizens at will,²⁵ and especially well advised to allocate those public offices on which the safety or danger of the people depended,²⁶ the roles of general or cavalry commander, not randomly across the citizen body but by popular election of those best equipped to hold them (inevitably, the wealthier and more powerful).

For Pericles, as Thucydides makes him speak, the democracy of Athens was a way of living together in political freedom, which ennobled the characters and refined the sensibilities of an entire community. It opened up to them lives rich with interest and gratification, and protected them effectively in living out these lives with one another. It would be hard sanely to ask for more from any set of political institutions or practices. For the Old Oligarch, in stark contrast, the democracy of Athens was a robust but flagrantly unedifying system of power, which subjected the nobler elements of its society to the meaner, transferred wealth purposefully from one to the other, and distributed the means of coercion clear-headedly and determinedly to cement this outcome and keep the nobler elements under control.

For the people do not want a good government under which they themselves are slaves; they want to be free and to rule.²⁷

No one could miss the clash between these two views. What is harder to assess is how far they really conflict in judgment and not merely in taste, and, where they do conflict in judgment, which better conveys the way democratic Athens really was.

Anyone who tries to see that reality for themselves faces three very different obstacles. The first is intrinsic to assessing the politics of anywhere at any time. It comes from the ambiguities of politics itself, above all the permanent tensions between its two principal components.28 Every political community is an elusive and unstable blend of human purposes and the (principally unintended) consequences of human actions. Those purposes can be extremely narrow or very widely shared. They can flicker for a day or two, or congeal into well-defined institutions or rules of action, and carefully interpreted conceptions of why both institutions and rules are or are not appropriate. Any picture of politics which focuses principally on institutions, practices, and values starts off from the official face of a political community, and registers its aspirations and pretensions. A picture which attempts instead to pin down what actually happens as a result of how particular men and women choose to behave is all but certain to present that community in a less sanguine or generous light. It is likely to conclude that the aspirations enunciated on its official occasions are often bogus, its institutions grossly at odds with their official justifications, and the values invoked within it to sanction one line of political conduct against another little more than tools of deception.²⁹ What must be true, however, is that neither picture can ever be adequate on its own and neither, therefore, ever wholly beside the point.³⁰ With Athens, more clearly perhaps than with General Mobutu’s Zaire or the Wahabite Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the need for each is very clear.

The other two impediments to seeing Athenian democracy the way it really was are less intimidating but every bit as inconvenient. The first is the sporadic and often capricious character of the evidence which is still available to us. Much of this does not consist of elaborate descriptive texts.³¹ But all of it is still very much in the shadow of a relatively small number of extremely striking texts, above all works of history, philosophy, drama, or oratory. All of these, in one way or another, press upon us their own picture of that very distant reality, and do so for purposes of their own, many hard, or even impossible, now to identify. We have works of painstaking institutional description, like Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, comedies and tragedies from Aeschylus to Aristophanes, probing histories from Herodotus and Thucydides, passionately engaged speeches by prominent political advocates like Demosthenes or Isocrates, unexcelled enquiries into the meaning of human life and the place of politics within it from Plato and Aristotle. Between them these disparate texts make some things arrestingly clear; but they also leave a great deal which is now wholly out of view. These large gaps in our knowledge do nothing to blur the realities of the distant past,32 or weaken our reasons for straining to grasp them as best we can. But they offer a salutary warning of how easy it will always remain to deceive ourselves about the sources of our own views of those realities: why we see them, and feel about them, the way we do.

The third obstacle is the lengthy and surprisingly continuous history which has led us to see them this way, a history largely carried by the historical transmission of exactly the same texts. There is, as we shall see, little direct relation between the political institutions and practices of ancient Athens and those of any human community today. But there is unmistakably at least one connecting strand, which runs without interruption from the texts of Aeschylus to the present day. What is transmitted along this strand is seldom, if ever, firm structures of power or definite institutional practices. What travels along it, often with great vitality, is conceptions of what to value and aim for, and why and how to act on the basis of those conceptions. Conceptions of this kind (values, ideals, visions of life) never determine the outcome of the politics of any community, and change constantly as they shape and reshape purposes along the way. But no community can exist even fugitively, let alone persist and extend across long spans of time, except by courtesy of just such conceptions, and the complicated tissue of institutions and practices which they inform and sustain. (The law of any society is an ideal setting in which to see the weight of this simple consideration: an endless battleground of contending force, but also and just as necessarily a seamless canvas for enquiry and interpretation, the play of intelligence and even the impact of scruple.³³) As we peer back towards the democracy of Athens, through the murk of history, and quarrel endlessly about what was ever really there, we largely recapitulate Greek arguments. We do so partly because of an obvious continuity in subject matter: because the reality we are trying to grasp was to such a large degree what those arguments were about; and partly too because recapitulating Greek arguments was what for almost two thousand years Europeans, and later North Americans, were tirelessly trained to do. But we also do so because of the enduring power of some of those arguments, itself a testimony to the power of the way of life from which they first came.34

What then was Athenian democracy? Of some things we can be quite certain. For the Athenians themselves what it was remained fiercely contentious from its beginning to its end. It could scarcely have been less like the anodyne political recipe which democracy readily seems today, an almost wholly unreflective formula for how things ought to be politically almost everywhere and almost always (anywhere and any time, at least, at which it does not very urgently matter).³⁵ What the Athenians disagreed about, of course, was what happened in and through and because of their democracy, and what their regime therefore meant. They had far less doubt about what its principal institutions were, or when it had come into existence, or when, eventually, it had come to an end. What divided them, as it divides every human community, was how they saw one another’s political actions, and the purposes which lay behind these, and the forces and interests (conscious or otherwise) which in turn lay behind those purposes.

Throughout its history, the democracy of Athens had bitter enemies as well as committed partisans, both at home and abroad. It may have come to be, as Pericles boasted, a proudly shared way of life in a conspicuously splendid setting; but that way of life itself attracted hatred and scorn as well as love and admiration; and the hatred and the love flowed out over and enveloped the institutions and practices of the democracy itself, and the balance of competing groups, social interests, and political energies which it reflected and secured.

Democracy in Athens arose out of struggles between wealthier landowners and poorer families who had lost, or were in danger of losing, their land, and who therefore risked being forced into unfree labour by their accumulated debts.36 It did not arise, directly and self-consciously, through that struggle itself, by unmistakable victory of the poor over the rich, but through a sequence of political initiatives which reshaped the social geography and institutions of Athens, and endowed it with a political identity, and a system of self-rule which equipped it to express and defend that identity. The most important of these initiatives, the reforms of Solon, were put in place before Athens had in any sense become a democracy.

Solon was an Athenian nobleman (Eupatrid), chosen magistrate (Archon) for the year 594 BC, and given full power to reorganize the basis of land ownership, credit, and personal status amongst the Athenians, and give it lasting legal form. He codified the laws, revised the levels of property on the basis of which wealthier Athenians were eligible to hold public office,³⁷ modified the structure of law courts, greatly improving access for the poor, freed those already enslaved for debt, and abolished debt bondage for the future. He firmly refused to redistribute the land.³⁸

By these means Solon tamed the brutal dynamics of appropriation, land hunger, debt, and potential enslavement amongst the Athenians themselves, and showed them how Athens could hope to conceive itself, and keep itself together as a community, while the world changed round it. What he failed to do was to establish a political mechanism through which the Athenians could act together to realize that hope. His reforms were a remedy for a dire trouble between the Athenians themselves. It was yet to become a remedy in their own hands.

The next key initiative, the conventional date for democracy’s inauguration, came almost a century later and after much intervening political turmoil. Solon was a real historical person; but he was also a figure of legend, one of the two great Lawgivers (Legislators) who haunted the political imagination of Greek communities, and have obsessed their would-be successors ever since.39 What the Lawgiver did was to focus the fundamental challenges facing a particular community clearly in his mind’s eye,⁴⁰ set out a framework which provided a durable solution for those problems, and define this through the medium of law. Kleisthenes, who brought to Athens in 507 BC what the Athenians in due course came to call democracy, was also a historical figure, a nobleman (Eupatrid) like Solon; but he has never become a figure of legend. None of the historical sources presents him as setting out from a clearly articulated conception of the fundamental challenges Athens faced, or carefully selecting democracy for their remedy. Democracy, indeed, was not merely as yet unnamed.⁴¹ It was not even a pre-specified formula, applied to solve a clearly defined problem. What Kleisthenes did, as Solon had done before him, was to reorganize Athenian social geography and institutions to resolve a set of immediate problems and build a stable framework for Athens as a community around that would-be resolution. To do so, he needed to win power in the first place; and democracy, as it turned out, was both an initial means to do so, and in due course a consequence of having done so. What was different about his solution was that the framework he established was from its outset a way of organizing political choice which took it outside the ranks of the well-born and relatively wealthy, and assigned it clearly and unapologetically to the Athenian demos as a whole.

Herodotus presents Kleisthenes’s adoption of this approach, not as an instance of intellectual or moral conviction, but as a practical expedient to muster support against his aristocratic rivals and their Spartan allies.⁴² But even at the time the motives and aspirations which led him to select it may not have greatly mattered, once he had done so. What mattered more even then, and still matters to this day, is that in many ways and for a surprisingly long time the expedient worked.

As it continued to work, it acquired a name of its own (demokratia—rule of, or by, or, more literally, strength or power in the hands of, the demos—the people as a whole, or, in the eyes of its enemies, the common or non-noble (non-Eupatrid) people). It also fashioned a developing institutional form to express that rule, and a steadily deepening sense of its own identity and point. Pericles’s speech was delivered (in some form) some three-quarters of a century after Kleisthenes won power in Athens through and for democracy; and Athens remained a democracy, with two brief but destructive interruptions, for a further century afterwards. When democracy came to an end in the city, what ended it was not Athenian political choices (or even their unintended consequences). It was foreign military power: the armies of the kingdom of Macedon.

Throughout this century and three-quarters, Athens, a community of some third of a million inhabitants with a large and increasingly resplendent urban centre and a substantial rural hinterland, was very often at war, initially against the Persian empire, but usually against other Greek city states (above all, its great rival, the warrior kingdom of Sparta), and eventually and decisively against the only quasi-Greek kingdom of Macedon. There were close ties, as there were in every Greek community, between its military (or naval) organization, its political institutions, and the balance of social groups within it which supported or threatened these institutions. The Athenians liked to think of themselves as more historically continuous and more firmly rooted in their own territory than other Greek city states,43 contrasting the depth of their commitment to the more opportunistic and nomadic attitudes induced by more fertile parts of Hellas.⁴⁴

By the time that Pericles had finished with it Athens had become a rather grand city, full of fine new public buildings (many still there to be admired) and magnificent statuary (much of which, for one reason or another, is now elsewhere). But except when directly threatened in war, when most of its rural inhabitants chose to retreat behind its Long Walls, the majority of Athenian citizens did not live permanently in the city itself but continued to own and farm land elsewhere in Attica. The citizen population of Athens was never very large, perhaps 100,000 in all,⁴⁵ of whom about 30,000 would have been full citizens, all adult males and most of them Athenian by descent for several generations. In addition there were some 40,000 resident aliens (metics), men, women, and children, a few of whom could hope in due course to become citizens themselves, and a much larger number of slaves (perhaps 150,000 in all).46 The full citizens therefore represented little more than a tenth of the population.⁴⁷

Most of these citizens, naturally, did not spend all their time attempting to rule the city, or fighting in its endless naval or military campaigns. Many, for the century after Kleisthenes,⁴⁸ could not conceivably have afforded to, since they did not own slaves themselves, and drew such income as they had, and secured much of their household’s food supply, from the produce of their own small farms. Some lived too far away from Athens to attend the meetings of the Assembly with any frequency. But all had the right to attend whenever the Assembly met, as it did with increasing frequency as the democracy evolved over time, whether at prearranged intervals or to deal with particular eventualities—a diplomatic or military emergency, a major trial.⁴⁹ They also had the right not merely to vote on all proposals coming before it, and thus to determine together its outcome, but also to address it themselves, if they could muster the nerve, on any issue which came under discussion. They held these rights as equals, whatever their own level of personal wealth or education, the social standing of their families, or the prestige of their occupations. We do not know how many mustered the nerve, or just what emboldened them to do so. But we certainly know that a majority of them for nearly a hundred and thirty years remained firmly committed to, and took a deep pride in, the conspicuous core of personal equality which these arrangements expressed and asserted. For success in Athenian politics personal wealth, family background, and even costly education were just as helpful as they are in the United States today (or most other wealthy capitalist countries). As far as we know, no Athenian was surprised that they should have proved so, or embarrassed when they did. What was surprising, and remained disconcerting to some throughout Athens’s history as a democracy, was how robust the assertion of equality eventually became, and how clearly it set the terms on which the pressures of wealth, family background, and educational embellishment could continue to exert themselves.

Besides the Assembly itself, which took all the great decisions of state for the Athenians, made war or peace, despatched armies or navies, and passed or rejected each new law, there were several other key institutions, which kept the main direction of Athenian political life firmly in the hands of its citizens as a whole. There was the Council (the Boule), 500 in number, which drew up the agenda for every Assembly meeting.50 This met each weekday, coordinating other public bodies and effectively conducting the foreign relations of the polis throughout. It was drawn from all the 139 territorial units (the demes) into which Kleisthenes had divided the Athenians for political purposes, its members selected by lot from those who chose to offer themselves for the purpose.⁵¹ Within the Council a tenth of its members served as a continuing executive body, rotating throughout the year, chaired on each occasion by a fresh individual, selected again by lot from the tenth in question for twenty-four hours at a time.⁵²

There were also the popular Law Courts, in effect juries drawn from an annual panel of 6,000 citizens, all of whom had volunteered for the service and sworn a formal oath to do justice within it, and who were paid a modest daily fee for providing it. These courts heard every significant case brought to trial in Athens and decided its outcome by their verdict, without benefit of (or impediment from) professional judicial advice. They held every magistrate to account for the conduct of their office, most decisively of all in the great political trials which any prominent Athenian political leader might have to face at any point, and which often endangered not merely their reputation or personal fortune but their very lives.

It is not hard in this picture to pick up some of the fierce directness of Athenian democracy, and the formidable dispersion of personal power and responsibility across the citizen body which it made possible. What remains hard to see clearly is quite how this startling immediacy in Athenian politics, and the permanent and intensely personal accountability which it enforced, nevertheless fitted with and modified the continuing role of its political leaders. If Pericles ever in any sense ruled Athens as a single person, he certainly did so by continuing courtesy of, and with the clear consent of, most of his fellow citizens who took an active interest in the matter; and even Pericles in due course found himself the target of a menacing prosecution, and sentenced to pay a heavy fine.53 Where the leaders made their mark, and laid themselves open to such acute personal danger, was by setting themselves forward to champion major changes in the law, or defend one line of policy against another, principally in the field of foreign war, and by competing to lead the armies or fleets sent off to fight in these incessant struggles. To do the first, they had to win the consent of the Assembly, and do so without the backing of an organized personal following which could ever have mustered a substantial proportion of the votes required. (Contrast any modern legislature in action.)⁵⁴ To do the second, they had to get themselves elected for the purpose. The election of the Generals, strangely to our eyes, was widely recognized as the least democratic feature of Athens’s political arrangements, a clear concession to the massive importance of warfare, and the dire potential costs of losing at it.

We can picture this political regime most clearly when at its most public and dramatic, in the great set-piece debates in the Assembly at which it took its most momentous decisions. We see it above all, whether we wish to or not, through Thucydides’s glittering portrayal of the trajectory of the Peloponnesian War: in the savage punishment willed upon Mitylene and almost immediately regretted, or the launching of the Sicilian expedition which ensured Athens’s ultimate defeat. We know almost nothing of the ceaseless mustering of influence or flow of persuasion which gave its main leaders their followings and helped them sway their huge audiences. In so far as it did work, we do not really understand why, or quite how, it did so. All that we can plainly see is that in many ways and for a long time it just did.55

Looking at it from today, what we most want to believe is that Athenian democracy somehow worked because it should have done so, because, within its own narrow confines,⁵⁶ it organized power in essentially the right way, assigning it, within those terms, on the right basis, and allocating it in the right way. It is above all that conviction, however confusedly, which we locked into place, when we turned the noun which initially described it into our own name for the sole basis on which it is decent to claim political power over time in any modern political community. Quite how and why we chose to effect that transformation is what this book is about. Most of the answer must lie very far from ancient Athens either in time or in space. It might in principle even be true that none of the answer had any real connection with that vastly distant experience. The passage of the word itself might mean no more than that. It might be just an accident in the patterning of letters or sounds, across languages and territories, over a huge span of time. But that at least we clearly know to be false. The survival of democracy as a word, its penetration from ancient Greek into a wide range of later languages, and still more its enforced translation over a much briefer time-span into the language of every other substantial human population across the globe, came less from its continuing capacity to elicit enthusiasm than from its utility in organizing thought, facilitating argument, and shaping judgment.

This is extraordinarily important. It means that democracy entered the ideological history of the modern world reluctantly and facing backwards. It won its vast following not by evoking a golden past, or reminding its hearers of a glory for which they consciously longed, or with which they already urgently identified. It did so just by referring, and in less than seductive terms, to possibilities now opening up before them. Initially at least, when it did this, it helped them not merely to talk more clearly to one another about these possibilities, and the rewards and hazards which they might carry, but also to think more clearly about whether to pursue these possibilities, and at what prospective cost. Two millennia and more later this is not a role which the term can still readily play. Today the term democracy has become (as the Freudians put it) too highly cathected: saturated with emotion, irradiated by passion, tugged to and fro and ever more overwhelmed by accumulated confusion. To rescue it as an aid in understanding politics, we need to think our way past a mass of history and block our ears to many pressing importunities.

What survived from ancient democracy, for at least the next two thousand years, was not a set of institutions or practical techniques for carrying on political life. It was a body of thinking which its creators certainly envisaged (whatever else they may have also had in mind in fashioning it) as an aid in understanding politics. Its most powerful elements can be found principally in three books, by three separate authors who overlapped with one another in time: the historian Thucydides, and the philosophers Plato and his pupil Aristotle. All three spent an appreciable portion of their lives in Athens itself. None was an open partisan of democracy as a system of rule; and Plato was as harsh a critic as it has ever encountered. But all were evidently more concerned to understand what democracy was and meant than they were to sneer at it or try to subvert it.57

The least explicit of the three in his ultimate judgment, Thucydides, was also in some ways the most informative, and still gives by far the best sense of what the democracy was like in action. (Aristotle’s most informative text on ancient democracy was not his systematic treatise the Politics, but his historical study of the Constitution of Athens, which made little or no attempt to reach an overall assessment of its merits.)⁵⁸ It was Thucydides’s History above all on which the most committed and influential modern interpreters of Greek democracy have drawn for their most evocative evidence of what it was like, from George Grote in mid-nineteenth-century England up till today.⁵⁹ Plato and Aristotle make little attempt to convey anything of the kind. For all their differences with one another, each viewed the democracy at work through an elaborate and enormously ambitious conception of what a political regime is, or should be, for. Each, accordingly, judged the democracy of Athens and found it to some degree wanting, because its principal elements and natural operating dynamics laid it wide open to purposes of which they keenly disapproved, and largely closed it to considerations and forces which they valued far more highly.

Much of the continuing political and moral thought of the western world has been a sequence of arguments about what conclusions to draw from these three writers: naturally about many other matters too, but increasingly over the last two centuries about democracy in particular. What claims should we and should we not accept about it? In what respects should we place our trust in it, or decline to do anything of the kind? For far the larger part of this span of time, the conclusions drawn remained more or less sharply negative. Democracy, on the Athenian evidence, was not a set of institutions or techniques for conducting political life in which any community would be well advised to trust. The experience of Athens, no doubt flamboyantly misreported, was grossly discouraging. It was an experience, too, which had ended in humiliating and permanent defeat. And well before this, less than halfway through its political lifespan, it passed through the long trauma of the Peloponnesian War, staged, by a writer of superlative political intelligence and literary force, as a story of the due punishment of overweening pride, greed, and deeply corrupted judgment.60 Scholars disagree to this day over how far Thucydides was in the end an enemy to democracy itself, and how far he was merely a particularly subtle and clear-sighted analyst of how it operated in Athens over one of its darkest times and in face of its single most unnerving challenge.⁶¹ What is certain is that many later European thinkers read his History, as Thomas Hobbes did as he worked through his translation in the anxious decades before England’s mid-seventeenth-century Civil War,⁶² as the definitive diagnosis of the malignity of democracy as a political regime. To see in Thucydides a case for democracy you had to look for it, as the great Victorian historian George Grote did, with some care. To find that case today is as hard as ever, not least over democracy’s suitability as a way of conducting the foreign relations or choosing the defence strategies for a community in immediate peril, as Athens was, and we are sure to continue to be.

But it was not the text of Thucydides which preserved democracy as a format through which generation after generation of Europeans sought to understand politics. What preserved it for this purpose, and kept it durably available as an instrument of practical thought, were the more politically explicit and intellectually demanding texts of Plato and Aristotle. It is not, of course, because Plato so detested it that we have all become democrats today (however sheepishly, however evasively). To reject democracy today may just be, sooner or later, to write yourself out of politics. It is definitely to write yourself more or less at once out of polite political conversation. But there is a deep connection between Plato’s open scorn and the salience of this term in all our political vocabularies. The connection is not obvious, and it is far from clear what it means. It does not run from democracy, either as an idea or in the forms in which the Athenians institutionalized and realized that idea, to a set of conclusions which the idea or its institutional embodiments simply enforce upon anyone. Instead it runs from the experience of democracy over time, to the occasion which that experience offered them, and the opportunity which it provided them, for reflecting more or less accountably with others on just what it does mean to institutionalize power in one way rather than another, and seek to realize particular political goals through one such institutional form rather than another. More bemusingly, it runs from the drastic force of the conclusions reached about each question by these two remarkable thinkers. When they gravitated back to the vocabulary of ancient Greek classifications of forms of government (democracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, monarchy), what pulled successive generations of Europeans back, time after time, was the imaginative tug of these two political assessments.

At face value, Plato’s Republic is not a book about democracy. Perhaps, as it says itself, it is principally about justice, or acting as one should, or about the nature of goodness and why human beings have sound reasons to try to see that nature clearly and respond to it with all the imagination and energy at their disposal. It certainly discusses good and bad forms of government for a city state (polis) community, ending up by defending the exotic conclusion (as implausible then as it remains to this day) that in the best form of government philosophers would rule. But it at least appears to do so principally in order to clarify the grounds which every individual human being intrinsically possesses for living well rather than badly: as they should, and not as they emphatically shouldn’t.

Except in its physical setting and its cast list, furthermore, the Republic is not obviously even a book about Athens: more a book, in aspiration, for everywhere, as Thucydides’s History was to be a book for all time. But, despite the modest portion of the text devoted to democracy and what it means, it is no distortion to see the Republic as a book against democracy, and at least in part therefore in the last instance against Athens precisely because it was so ebulliently a democracy.

There are many reasons why Plato might have disliked democracy, and held his dislike against his own community of birth and residence. It might have been simply a matter of social background, since Plato himself came from one of the grander Athenian families, forced collectively to surrender power to it over the preceding century, very much against their will. He belonged unmistakably in the ranks of the losers from democracy, as the Old Oligarch saw them: to beltiston (the best bit).63 But this must be too simple, since the same was true of Pericles, as it had been of Kleisthenes before him, by no stretch of the imagination enemies to the democracy. It might have been a more immediate matter of personal milieu, the circle of friends, or even lovers, some of whom proved their enmity towards democracy in all too practical and conspicuous ways. It might, more narrowly still, have been a response to the bitter fate of his great teacher Socrates, sentenced by a democratic court to kill himself for his impiety, and for corrupting the city’s youth (once more drawn principally, if not exclusively, from its grander families). Probably, it was partly all three. But none of these, not even the judicial murder64 of Socrates, that primal stain on democracy’s honour, does much to explain what Plato held against democracy, what he saw as ineliminably wrong with it.

Socrates himself had been a deliberately disturbing presence at Athens for many decades, before the Athenians at last turned on him and chose to kill him. He disturbed by challenging the terms in which his fellow citizens thought, above all about how and how not to live. As a citizen he carried out every duty required of him (above all on the battlefield) over the course of a long life; and at the end, when only deserting Athens could still save that life, he elected to stay in prison instead and kill himself as ordered, because he had no wish to go on living anywhere else, and saw the very idea of taking flight as the betrayal of a lifetime’s commitment to a place, a group of fellow citizens, and his deep respect for the community to which he had belonged throughout that life and striven to serve to the utmost of his own courage and imagination.⁶⁵

This proud choice was the clearest message which Socrates left behind him; and Plato turned it, with whatever embellishments, into a text of singular power, the Apology.⁶⁶ In so far as Plato’s case against democracy was merely a denunciation of the killing of Socrates, that denunciation is carried far more clearly and directly in the Apology and the Crito than in the Republic itself. The Athenians chose to kill Socrates, as far as we can tell, for a number of different reasons. One was the affront which he gave to their religious sensibilities in the hectic conditions at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Another, almost certainly, was his intimate relations with some of those who most harmed Athens during those terrible years: above all with Alkibiades and Kritias. Alkibiades was the glittering, haughty, ruthless orator and general most responsible for launching the disastrous invasion of Sicily, who eventually betrayed his fellow citizens most flamboyantly by deserting to the enemy. Kritias was the most brutal and domineering of the oligarchic leaders who crushed the democracy at the war’s close and tyrannized over their fellow citizens, until they too were overthrown in outrage in their turn. These were not, in retrospect, friendships which it was easy to excuse. But Socrates himself was no advocate of tyranny or treason. When Plato set out the lessons which he had drawn himself, in the more elaborate and searching explorations of the Republic, what he too offered was in no sense a defence of tyranny,67 or even of the social, political, or economic privileges of the loftier elements in any existing society.

In all its elusiveness and power, that offer centred on a defence of the need for rule and order, and the steady recognition of what genuinely is good, and on an uncompromising rejection of the democracy’s claims to provide any of these, except by sporadic and fleeting accident. The Republic is a book with many morals. It is also a deliberately teasing book, and open to an endless range of interpretations. But no serious reader could fail to recognize that it comes down firmly against democracy.⁶⁸

Plato makes many charges against democratic rule, and the way of life which forms around it and arises out of it. He sees it in essence as an all but demented solvent of value, decency, and good judgment, as the rule of the foolish, vicious, and always potentially brutal, and a frontal assault on the possibility of a good life, lived with others on the scale of a community. The principle of democratic rule is equality, the presumption that, when it comes to shaping a community and exercising power, everyone’s judgment deserves as much weight as everyone else’s. That presumption in turn implies that there can be no lasting shape to a democratic community, and nothing reliable about the ways in which power is exercised within it. What this means, as Thomas Hobbes pointed out two thousand years later, is that in a democratic community there can be no real security for anyone or anything except by sheer fluke.69

Exactly the same principle applies, with equally calamitous effects, within the individual personality and in the individual life.⁷⁰ For the democratic man (the individual personality formed by and appropriate to a democracy) there is neither order nor compulsion (taxis oute anagke) in his life.⁷¹ For him it is precisely this shapeless unconstraint which makes a life free and sweet and blessed (makarion: the key word of the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount).⁷² Plato acknowledges the vitality of this way of life, and sees how enviable its colour and diversity can readily make it.⁷³ But for him the rage for liberty⁷⁴ which accompanies and corresponds to its commitment to equality (‘Anyone free by nature could see only a democratic polis as fit to live in’)⁷⁵ will infallibly undermine democratic rule and dissolve every form of authority within it. It disrupts and in the end destroys the ties between teacher and taught, father and son, children and parents, young and old, foreigners (metics) and citizens, free persons and slaves, even human beings and animals.⁷⁶ Any constraint at all comes to be seen as slavery.⁷⁷ The chaos which this unleashes must end ineluctably in arbitrary rule (tyranny): a precipitous descent from democracy, the height of liberty, to the fullest and harshest slavery.⁷⁸

Plato’s assault was not an astute prediction of the democracy’s future over the next two generations. It captured nothing of what in due course brought democracy to an end in Athens itself. But it raised the stakes in assessing political regimes to an unprecedented height. Democratic Athens shrugged Plato himself aside without discernible effort. But the challenge which he levelled at the democracy’s preferred conception of what it meant remains as potent as ever today, in a world which has chosen to embrace at least the word and some aspects of the idea in preference to any of its innumerable competitors across the ages. How can this of all political ideas in the end make any stable sense? How can it claim allegiance and win loyalty, while it endlessly takes to pieces every other form of order or basis of inhibition around which groups of human beings have tried to organize their lives?

Plato saw democracy above all as a presumptuous and grossly ugly idea, whose demerits could be read clearly in its erratic passage through the Greek world. The chaos of the idea itself was realized in the political disruptions of the communities to which it came, and the disorder of the ways of life which it sanctioned. While not a reliable recipe for the worst life, as tyranny was,79 it all but guaranteed a bad life to any community that chose to adopt it, and effortlessly subverted every attempt to lead a good life together in close association with a community of others. This was an extreme view, and clearly derived not from careful study of what did or did not occur in many places over a long period of time, but from brooding on the idea itself.

Aristotle, Plato’s most gifted and least dependent pupil, had far less confidence in what can be judged about the human world merely by considering ideas in themselves. He set himself as well to assess the merits of contending political formulae by identifying what did and did not occur in most cases in the human world when they were applied to it. The lessons about democracy which he drew from these enquiries were far more extensive and complicated than Plato’s verdict in the Republic.⁸⁰ They are also far less conclusive in their ultimate implications. Plato loathed democracy and did so without inhibition. Some have seen, in his entire conception of knowledge, a systematization of that overwhelming distaste. Aristotle was more sober, less carried away by his feelings and more open to the judgments of others in the conclusions which he eventually drew. For him democracy (demokratia) was not itself one of the good forms of rule,⁸¹ since it amounted to government not in the interest of the community as a whole but merely of the poor (ton aporon). But government by the many (to plethos)⁸² could nevertheless prove a good form of government, provided only that it was exercised for the common good. When he thought it was, Aristotle himself chose to call it not democracy but politeia (polity or, more informatively, constitutional government). Politeia was distinguished from democracy not merely by a difference in purpose and disposition (a commitment to collective good rather than group advantage), but also by a different and more elaborate institutional structure. The purpose of this structure was not to enforce the will of some upon others at the latter’s expense (like oligarchy, or at the extreme tyranny), but to distribute powers and responsibilities as far as possible in accordance with capacities, and thus draw on a far wider range of energies and skills, and elicit a correspondingly broad range of sympathy and loyalty by doing so.

Politeia is not the only form of government which aims at the common advantage83 and is therefore compatible with justice. Monarchy and aristocracy, the government of a single person or a superior group, might in principle set themselves the same goal and vindicate their claim to justice in so far as they contrived to reach it. But their success or failure depended quite directly on the virtue, discernment, and luck of the rulers themselves. Only in the case of politeia, Aristotle suggests strongly, does the prospect for realizing justice in practice in the government of a community depend largely on the institutional organization of power and the resulting division of responsibilities within it.

Aristotle does not seem ever to have supposed, as later followers of Thomas Hobbes or Jeremy Bentham often did, that the institutional organization of power, or the predictable workings of individual interest within it, might somehow furnish dependably just outcomes, without the need to pass through and engage the purposes of human agents, who took justice for their own goal and accepted the constraints which it inevitably imposed upon them. He did not think of political institutions as a substitute for personal virtue, but more as a way of eliciting and sustaining it, and a means for economizing on what might always prove a very scarce good.

Aristotle, it seems clear, did not draw the distinction between democracy and politeia from current common usage. He developed it to bring into focus a key contrast. The point of that contrast was to answer two large and pregnant questions: what is the point of human beings living together in substantial numbers? And how exactly must they organize their lives together to best secure that point? The point, as he saw it, was to explore and define together compelling conceptions of how it does and does not make good sense to live, a search that depended profoundly upon language, imagination, and the balance of sympathy and antipathy between human beings; and then, to realize the more compelling of these conceptions to the highest degree possible in the living of real lives. Even as Aristotle himself envisaged it, this proved an open-ended and somewhat centrifugal task.84 It has lost greatly in imaginative force, and ceded much ground in recent centuries to the very different enticements of the quest to enhance material comforts and multiply personal amusements. But, like the latter, the principal dynamic of our own economic energies, Aristotle’s goal too can, without mistranslation, be described as the pursuit of happiness.⁸⁵ What is striking for us in how Aristotle saw that quest is not the value he attached to experience and the will to shape a life, but the extent to which he viewed a system of participatory self-government as an aid in its pursuit, and the peculiarities of the Greek polis as a special opportunity for attaining it.

Because of the massive impact of his book The Politics on the thought of Europe, and then the world, both idiosyncrasies have proved to matter. The special eligibility of the polis as a setting in which to pursue the good life together is an elusive and confusing theme⁸⁶ which need not concern us. But the idea that a system of participatory self-government will aid its pursuit provides the central strand of the story we need to follow for most of the next two thousand years. Two elements in Aristotle’s view are especially important. One is the far juster and more careful assessment of the merits of government by the multitude, where this is based on the acceptance of a common good, and on some willingness to pursue it together, and where it is also organized in a way that uses the capacities of its citizens and restrains their more malevolent and dangerous characteristics in an effective way. The second, in the end less decisively, but for a very long time every bit as consequentially, was Aristotle’s decision not merely to contrast a healthy with a pathological version of rule by the multitude, but also to reserve the term demokratia for the pathological version.

The Greek champions of democracy praised and fought for rule by the multitude (to plethos), by a broad array of political arrangements. But, unlike Aristotle, they either did not choose to write books, or failed to ensure the preservation of any books which they did write. Their picture and their case have largely passed from the earth, leaving the scantiest traces behind.87 Politeia for Aristotle we might say (using a device of Hobbes) was simply democracy liked, while demokratia (democracy to you and me) was democracy keenly misliked. Not only was the word itself marked negatively; still more insistently, it was marked in a way and through a set of thoughts that explained all too evocatively just why it deserved such suspicion.

Democracy in Aristotle’s final vocabulary, the vocabulary he eventually handed on to medieval Europe and thus to modern understandings of politics, was a form of government which simply did not aim at a common good. It was a regime of naked group interest, unapologetically devoted to serving the many at the expense of the wealthier, the better, the more elevated, the more fastidious or virtuous. As they took their bearings through the vocabulary which Aristotle had passed on to them, it is not hard to see why generation after generation of European thinkers shied away from this word. Not only was democracy violent, unstable, and menacing to those who already held wealth, power, or even pretension, it was, Aristotle taught many centuries of European speakers to mean, ill-intentioned and disreputable in itself through and through.

Why then have we now, so recently and yet so completely, changed our mind? (Or, if not our mind, at least our verbal habits, and the feelings which we attach to them?) The first of those questions is blunt, and perhaps not too difficult to answer (though it is hard to pluck a plausible answer off the library shelf). But the second—just what lies behind our selection of the term democracy itself as privileged vector for political legitimacy and decency across the globe—is more elusive. To grasp this, we need to see a good deal more than how and why we have reversed the values attached to that word, shifting it back from pejorative to neutral, and then, more tentatively, onward to all but untrammelled enthusiasm. Such shifts in the evaluative connotations of political words occur during most protracted political struggles and often serve to register their outcomes.88 The real question is not why we feel more warmly towards democracy today, or why our greater warmth has crept into our vocabulary choices. It is why we have chosen, somehow, out of the entire prior history of human speech, this single, for so long so baleful, Greek noun to carry this huge weight of political hope and commitment. Why should we have chosen a Greek word at all? Why should we (that large majority of us who are not Europeans) have chosen a European word? Why should it be this of all Greek words? Why is it this set of letters and this loose blur of sound on which we have come to place this vast gamble?

No doubt, if we see the matter quite like this, we must be grossly in error, either in understanding what we are doing, or in placing the bet itself. It cannot possibly be sane to entrust the destiny of the species⁸⁹ to an arrangement of letters or a set of sounds. But that, of course, is not what we suppose ourselves to be doing. What we believe ourselves to be doing (no doubt correctly enough) is to place our trust in what that word picks out, however vaguely, in the world: in a more or less coherent approach to assigning power and acknowledging responsibility within the ever more complicated network of political, economic, social, and legal communities to which we belong and on which we have no real option but to depend.

Democracy has come to be our preferred name for the sole basis on which we accept either our belonging or our dependence. We may not embrace either with joy, or even ease; but, at least on this proviso, these might be communities which on balance we can accept rather than repudiate. It is, above all, our term for political identification: we, the people. What the term means (even now, when that so clearly is not how matters are in the outside world)90 is that the people (we) hold power and exercise rule. That was what it meant at Athens, where the claim bore some relation to the truth. That is what it means today, when it very much appears a thumping falsehood: a bare-faced lie. Much of the history of modern politics has been a long, slow, resentful reconciliation to this obvious falsehood, a process within which democracy has often proved a far from preferred term for political identification.⁹¹ Across this struggle, with all its swirls and eddies, and stagnant backwaters, the vicissitudes of democracy have often been of negligible importance. There is no special reason to believe that to focus on it will give either clear or economical guidance on what exactly has been at stake or why the battles have come out as they have. Where there has proved to be something very special about democracy is in the lonely eminence it has now won. In that outcome, however temporary or precarious it may prove, we can see quite clearly, there is something of immense importance which we reasonably can (and perhaps now must) set ourselves to try to understand.

One side of the story, the embrace of this one word, has, for all its intricacy, a single relatively clear shape in space and time. It is, we have already noted, a story with a beginning. It is, too, a story with a single heroine. (Demokratia is a feminine noun.) Or, if that seems too literal-minded a way of putting it, a story with a single collective hero, the demos, first of Athens and now, potentially, of anywhere in the world where a set of human beings cares to think of themselves as belonging together by right and responsibility, and through and because of who they are.

The other side of the story, the words not chosen, has no shape at all. It has no discernible beginning and no self-identifying sites: not even a definite cast list, let alone a manageable array of heroes or heroines. Much of it, obviously, is too unheroic and inconsequential to bear telling. There cannot be a story of all the myriads upon myriads of unchosen words which fall by the wayside.

We cannot think about the casting aside of potential rivals, or passing them by on the other side, all at once and through a single evidently appropriate structure. Still less can we sift consecutively through all these interminable rejections or evasions in any coherent way. All we can readily do is to recognize the different shapes of enquiry appropriate to these three questions we have already raised. Why firstly a European word? Why secondly a Greek word at all? Why thirdly this of all Greek words?

The main brunt of the answers to the first and third of these questions falls clearly on the last two centuries or so of world history. They are facets of the answer to a very different type of question: why is it that one way of organizing and competing for power, the capitalist representative democracy, has had such overwhelming competitive success over the last sixty years? It was this Greek word, of all Greek words, because it names something about that now dominant political format which is closely (if perhaps misleadingly) tied to what gave it that awesome competitive edge. It was a European word because, in the end, it was European powers and not China which forged the world capitalist economy, and built the successive empires within and through which that economy was largely shaped, and because, once their power had ebbed, it was the United States of America, very much an heir to the language of European politics, and in no small part built through that language, which stepped commandingly into their abandoned shoes.

To get beneath this somewhat glib level of understanding, we would need to view the history of human life on earth as a single blind amorphous struggle between human beings to get their own way, and see right across it and with steady detachment why exactly the balance of advantage has tilted endlessly towards some and against others along the way. It is not hard to see why the global name for legitimate political authority does not come from the language of the San Bushmen or Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer in the Southern Sudan,92 their homeland now seared by decades of repression. But there is no crisply convincing way to see why it should have been Europe rather than China⁹³ which made the world a single crowded painful common habitat for our species, and so made Europe’s bigotries and parochialisms a global world-historical force, instead of a mere local deformity or a continental stigma. To see the place of the words not chosen we must take many things as given, above all the densely overlapping histories of capitalism and imperialism, the shapers of the world in which we all now belong.

The odd one out in these three questions is why the privileged European word which has come to enjoy this startling world-historical destiny should have been a Greek word at all. It might have come instead from further north or further east, from a Norse or Teutonic or Turkish language. It might, still more plainly, have come from slightly further west, from the language of Greece’s Roman conquerors, or the later Romance languages which in due course stemmed from these. All of these languages recognize some form of authorization through popular political choice. Some for a time loomed large within Europe itself, and even beyond it in the global struggle for wealth and power. But, whatever would have happened by now if the Third Reich had somehow won the Second World War, only one of these languages looks today like a truly formidable rival, the Latin language of Rome’s great empire. That language still gives us a large proportion of our vocabulary of political evaluation: citizenship, legality, liberty, public and private, constitution, republic, union, federation, perhaps, directly or at one remove, state itself.

What it does not give us is the word democracy. And that, not because democracy does not happen to be a word which the Romans themselves went to the trouble of borrowing. Not only is democracy not a classical Latin word. It is not a Roman way of thought. It does not express how the Romans (any of them, as far as we know) envisaged politics. It is not that the Latin word populus (people) is at all a bad translation for the Greek word demos. Nor is it that the Romans in no sense conceived the Roman populus as the ultimate source of Rome’s law, and hence of political authority within Rome. It is simply that they never conceived that populus as ruling directly itself, unimpeded, and within a framework of authority which it was permanently free to revise for itself.94 The unit of political authority in Roman public inscriptions (of which there were many) was the Senate and People of Rome (Senatus Populusque Romanus: SPQR). In that formula (and by no means only in that formula), the Senate came first.

There is much else to say on this question, some of it powerfully argued over the last few decades in Oxford and elsewhere.⁹⁵ There were, perhaps, other possible futures for the Roman Republic than the military subversion and imperial subjection in which it came to its bitter end.⁹⁶ There could perhaps have been another outcome to the struggles of the champions of the populus, the brother Tribunes, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, than the political murders to which they succumbed. Perhaps it might even have been possible to keep the Republic in being, alongside the armies with which it conquered most of the world it knew, and for Rome’s empire to have been an empire only for the rulers whom it over-threw.⁹⁷ For almost fifteen hundred years the political thinking of European communities repeatedly circled back to brood on these possibilities, and try to summon them back into life.⁹⁸ But that was not the history which in fact occurred. It was not the history that forged the world in which we live. It has nothing to tell us about why democracy should now be our name for duly exercised political power.

The Romans themselves, as far as we know, never used the term democracy to interpret or assess their own political arrangements,⁹⁹ or indeed anyone else’s. It was, however, used about them by at least two sophisticated Greek analysts of Rome’s historical development as a political community, Polybius and Cassius Dio.¹⁰⁰ Of these two, Polybius was the loftier thinker. He drew systematically on the accumulated resources of Greek political thought to analyse the basis of Rome’s rise to mastery over the Mediterranean world and explore its future prospects.101 In many ways his Histories remained, for well over a thousand years, the most systematic attempt to grasp the dynamics of Rome’s remarkable rise. In it, Polybius also made some effort to grasp the relations between the basis of this extraordinary ascent and the internal vulnerabilities to which, many centuries later, it, like any other human community, was eventually bound to succumb.

Polybius saw Rome from a singularly instructive angle. Born and raised in a leading political family in Megalopolis, the effective capital of the Achaean League, he was brought back to Italy as a hostage in his youth, following the Roman conquest of Greece in 168 BC by the Consul Aemilius Paullus, and lived for decades in close contact with his conqueror’s household, for at least part of the time as tutor to one of his sons. That son, Scipio Aemilianus, more than twenty years later, was to be the Roman general who finally defeated and sacked the city of Carthage, Rome’s leading rival for Mediterranean domination for a full century beforehand, and half a century earlier, under its own great general Hannibal, very close indeed to being its final destroyer. Amongst other qualities, Polybius had a fine sense of historical occasion and records with some éclat the tearful response of his distinguished pupil, looking down over Carthage in flames, to the recognition that one day (as it happened over five hundred years later), Rome too would fall for ever.¹⁰²

In some ways the picture which Polybius painted of Rome’s political order is now hard to read. Large parts of his text have not come down to us. His book was composed over an extended period of time and, like Aristotle’s Politics, it probably changed significantly in its central subject matter from the author’s point of view in the course of composition. As far as we can judge today, it is also reasonable to conclude that some aspects of his thinking never became entirely clear or coherent. But what is unmistakable is that it seems never to have occurred to him that Rome in the period after it ceased to be a monarchy, several centuries earlier, had at any point become a democracy. Viewed from one of the city’s principal political families, suppliers of Consuls for generation after generation, this was not surprising. Like Aristotle, if a trifle less clear-headedly, Polybius fully acknowledged the practical value of a democratic element in the organization of a political community, and in his case more particularly in the organization of Rome’s Republic. But, again like Aristotle, he was at pains to insist that this value depended strictly upon its firm restraint by two further elements, aristocratic and monarchical, which restricted power of initiative over many issues, in the Roman case above all to the Senate and Consuls.103 It would have been extremely odd for a client of Scipio’s family to see Rome as a democracy, even if the prospects for its male members to win high political office continued to depend on their capacity to get elected by citizen assemblies.¹⁰⁴

A simple comparison between the composition, authorization, and practical powers of the Athenian Council (Boule) and Rome’s Senate shows just how implausible any such equation is,¹⁰⁵ as it plainly was to Polybius himself. What is striking, however, was Polybius’s judgment, not that Rome already was (or could readily be conceived by anyone as being) a democracy, but that in the long run, and disastrously, it might in due course become one. If and when it did, Polybius warned, that condition could not last long, and must inevitably destroy the city itself.¹⁰⁶ If the flames of Carthage were the portent of a final foreign conquest, a sack of Rome, like Alaric the Goth’s, Polybius himself also contemplated the possibility of a purely domestic end to Rome’s great journey: the coming of democracy.

At this point in his analysis, Polybius’s vocabulary muddied somewhat, and democracy was retitled, following a Platonic precedent, ochlocracy¹⁰⁷ (the very worst sort of democracy, the rule of the lowest and most disorderly component of the demos or, as the English later put it, the mob). But this was more the deepening of an insult than a refinement in diagnosis. The political structures (politeia) which had enabled Rome to conquer most of the world it knew, with its deft, if wholly unplanned,108 balance of contending elements, might all too readily end in the unrestricted exercise of power by just one of these elements, with a loss not merely of all external restraints upon that power, but also of every internal inhibition amongst those who then exerted it.

Polybius’s portrait of Rome disappeared from view completely for a millennium and a half. But before it did so, and when it came back into view in the aftermath of the Renaissance, it could hardly have done less to recommend democracy as a promising regime form to the world at large. Seen through his eyes, democracy was the worst nightmare or the final ruin of by far the most imposing historical model of which any European was even aware: both a symbol and a potential mechanism for the doom of an entire civilization. Who would have thought that this word, of all words, was due to conquer the world?

The word demokratia entered the Latin language, as far as we know, in the 1260s, in the translation by the Dominican Friar William of Moerbeke of Aristotle’s Politics,¹⁰⁹ the most systematic analysis of politics as a practical activity which survived from the ancient world. (It is important for the intellectual history of Islam and the political history of the modern Middle East that it had not already entered the Arabic language, with the very elaborate and substantially earlier reception of Aristotle’s thought in the great centres of Islamic civilization.)¹¹⁰ Once duly latinized, it became available, and has remained so ever since, as an aid in assessing political practices and possibilities. In this guise, it soon proved its utility, less because there was a throng of sovereign democracies to hand to consider, than because, as Aristotle had carefully noted, very different sorts of political regimes may each have some democratic aspects. The self-governing city states of a thirteenth-century Italy had their own conceptions of the purpose of their internal organization and used the Roman language of republican liberty extensively to explain and commend it in all its turbulent variety.¹¹¹ Some cities combined relatively broad citizen bodies with elective magistrates and a clear legal framework for the exercise of power. But none of these chose to adopt the new-fangled Greek vocabulary of Moerbeke to vindicate the merits of its own regime. Ptolemy of Lucca, the continuator of St Thomas Aquinas’s book The Rule of Princes,112 recognized the second-century BC creation of the office of Tribune at Rome as adding an element of democratic primacy (democraticus principatus) to the unmistakably aristocratic primacy in its republican regime, epitomized by the Senate and Consuls.¹¹³ Bartolus of Sassoferrato, a leading civil lawyer writing at much the same time about city regimes (De Regimine Civium) and with his eye very much upon contemporary Italy, distinguished, as Aristotle enjoined, between good and bad versions of the rule of a few (aristocratia and oligarchia) and good and bad versions of the rule of the many (politia or democratia).¹¹⁴ But no medieval or early modern Italian writer bluntly described any Italian city government of which we know as a democracy; and anyone deploying Aristotle’s vocabulary in Latin (or any other language into which it came to be imported) could only have been insulting the city in question, by doing so.

It took a good three centuries for the term to recapture some of its Greek descriptive neutrality and simplicity, and shake off the stigmatizing company of its more respectable Aristotelian twin politeia. Even once it had begun to do so, politeia (polity) at least retained its strong positive connotations: not merely a mixed form of government, which somehow combined the best of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, but a structure which contrived to constrain democracy in ways which could reasonably hope to keep it on its best behaviour.

Only in the seventeenth century does the term at last begin to shake off these negative connotations and be used, slowly and with much hesitation, to defend and justify existing political arrangements or insist on the urgent need for new ones. It does so in several different settings. The opportunity was clearly there for a Catalan early in the seventeenth century. The Perpignan lawyer Andreu Bosch firmly insisted that Catalonia under its existing constitution with the two core institutions, the Cortes and the Generalitet, was in fact governed on a democratic basis, as, according ‘to common law, in all republics and towns, the government simply is the people’ (es lo govern lo poble).115 On this occasion the opportunity to describe the regime itself roundly as a democracy does not seem to have been taken up. But, as the century went by, it at last began to be so, most strikingly in the powerful, commercially dynamic, and quasi-republican regime of the United Netherlands, in stray places in the tough, disabused writings of Johan and Pieter de la Court,¹¹⁶ in Franciscus Van den Enden’s The Free Political Propositions and Considerations of State in 1665,¹¹⁷ and above all in the deep but obscure reflections of the dissident Jew Benedict de Spinoza.¹¹⁸

Even at this point the term democracy was far from serving as a rallying cry. In the great seventeenth-century struggles which it is natural for us to see as blazing a trail for democracy, and most of all in the Leveller drive to use a greatly broadened franchise to hold England’s government to the active consent of its subjects,¹¹⁹ the term democracy plays no public role. Where it does begin to appear, more and more insistently, is in anxious conservative responses to the great seething mass of rebellion which shook England’s state to its foundations. Thomas Hobbes himself placed the blame for the Great Rebellion and the regicide itself on many different factors, not least the translation of the Christian Bible into the vernacular,¹²⁰ the development of Protestant theology, and the endless proliferation of priestly ambitions. But pride of place amongst his villains falls to the ‘democratical gentlemen’ of the House of Commons, puffed up with the cheap and silly learning of the Universities,¹²¹ and giddy with the republican indiscretions of the ancient world.¹²²

When Hobbes described the Members of the Long Parliament as ‘democratical’, he was certainly not using their word, and scarcely providing a fair description of any beliefs which they actually held. But in the long run he was perhaps right to be so confident that he could see more clearly than they did, not merely into the sources of the beliefs and attitudes which they held, but also into the political implications which ultimately followed from them. Perhaps by the time of the English Civil War, and certainly by the time that it became available for recollection in anything but tranquillity, the potential of this pejorative analytical term to pick out potent sources of allegiance was at last in clear view. From then on, its rise to world mastery, at least at a verbal level,123 was to be just a matter of time. In the centuries since the printing of Hobbes’s Behemoth (1676), allegiances have come and gone and regimes have risen and fallen. But all the time, and ever more insistently, one word has worked its way forward. It has shaken off its esoteric and shame-ridden past and claimed an open and proud future. This is much more than its due, and a very poor description of the real basis of its triumph. But it is a striking and consequential enough shift in human experience to require recognition in its own right.

By the beginning of the next century this shift in its apparent powers of attraction becomes easier to pick up. It appears first very much in private self-description. We find, for example, the still relatively youthful Irish Deist John Toland, illegitimate son of a Catholic priest and already author of the widely execrated Christianity not Mysterious (1696), boasting in 1705 of his exploits in publicizing the lives and editing the works of James Harrington, John Milton, and other advocates of ‘democratical schemes of government’.¹²⁴ But this was firmly in the context of a private letter, and far from frank even in its own terms. Toland was a figure of disorientating charm and legendary indiscretion, who maddened everyone who had to deal with him, from the loftiest aristocratic patrons to the grubbiest fellow hacks. He was also indefatigable in his own self-advancement and notably unfastidious in the techniques which he was willing to deploy in promoting it. Yet even Toland would have hesitated to proclaim his political allegiances in public with such unflinching clarity.

To see what made the shift possible, we need steadier and franker views. For these, it is hard to do better than turn back to two of the seventeenth century’s greatest political thinkers, Hobbes and Spinoza. Hobbes wrote at some length against democracy and did his pungent best to pin down its principal demerits once and for all. He saw it, as his ancient sources encouraged him to do, as disorderly, unstable, and intensely dangerous. But he also saw it very much in his own way, as combining much of the insecurity of the state of nature (a condition of comprehensive and standing peril) with a level of mutual offence only conceivable in a setting in which human beings were expected to listen to one another patiently and at undue length. It was a paradise, especially, for orators (or those who fancied themselves as such), and also in effect a form of tyranny by orators: of subjection against one’s will to the force for others, not of the better argument, but of the more potent speech.125 Hobbes captured better than anyone before or since the pain of oratorical defeat, and the centrality of these feelings within democratic participation for anyone who cares about what is at stake but has no particular oratorical flair:

Some will say, That a Popular State is much to be preferr’d before a Monarchicall; because that, where all men have a hand in publique businesses, there all have an opportunity to shew their wisedome, knowledge, and eloquence, in deliberating matters of the greatest difficulty and moment; which by reason of that desire of praise which is bred in humane nature, is to them who excell in such like faculties, and seeme to themselves to exceed others, the most delightfull of all things. But in a Monarchy, this same way to obtain praise, and honour, is shut up to the greatest part of Subjects; and what is a grievance, if this be none? Ile tell you: To see his opinion whom we scorne, preferr’d before ours; to have our wisedome undervalued before our own faces; by an uncertain tryall of a little vaine glory, to undergoe most certaine enmities (for this cannot be avoided, whether we have the better, or the worse); to hate, and to be hated, by reason of the disagreement of opinions; to lay open our secret Counsells, and advises to all, to no purpose, and without any benefit; to neglect the affaires of our own Family: These, I say, are grievances. But to be absent from a triall of wits, although those trialls are pleasant to the Eloquent is not therefore a grievance to them, unlesse we will say, that it is a grievance to valiant men to be restrained from fighting, because they delight in it.126

The key egalitarian prerogative of the Athenian demos, the equal right to address one’s fellow citizens as they take their sovereign decisions (isegoria), has always been offset by the less agreeable (but accompanying) duty to hear out the persuasions of every fellow citizen who chooses to exercise it, and by the still more painful duty to accept whatever these fellow citizens together then proceed to decide. Under the conditions of a modern commercial society, the rewards of this egalitarian prerogative were not merely offset but effortlessly outweighed by its evident inconsequentiality for the great majority and by the ever more prohibitive opportunity costs of exercising it. Modern liberty (as Benjamin Constant assured the audience at the Athénée Royale in 1817 in the wake of Napoleon’s fall and the Bourbon Restoration), the liberty to do what you like for at least a substantial proportion of your life, now made almost everyone an offer it was all but impossible to refuse. Ancient liberty, the opportunity to do your best to bend the sovereign judgment of your fellows to your own will by pressing your views upon them in public, promised almost nothing in practice. But in the nightmare months of the Terror, the ghost of that ancient promise had raised the temperature of politics to fever pitch.¹²⁷ Better a quiet and enjoyable life, even under a monarchy of some absurdity. To pursue ancient liberty under the conditions of modern commerce was to clutch at a mirage, to suffer in return a penal weight of irritation and ineffectuality, and to run in addition a considerable and pointless risk of extreme danger.

As Constant pressed the point in the wake of the Jacobin Terror, it came out as a demonstration of the superiority of modern representative democracy over ancient participatory democracy. In Hobbes’s hands, however, the main thrust of the case was still against the dispersion of political power across the adult membership of a political community and in favour, by contrast, of the superiority of monarchy over every other form of regime. Even Hobbes, though, conceded not merely that democracy was a plausible basis on which for political society to have begun, but also that it was in a sense equivalent to the establishment of a political order in the first place. Since a political order can only be created through the choices of individual human beings, it must at its inception simply be their own personal agreement to accept a common structure of authority over themselves. It was that agreement which made them into a People, a single entity, capable of ruling and exerting authority, and not a mere multitude of quarrelsome individuals.128

Once converted into a People and rendered capable of ruling, any People could choose to rule itself,¹²⁹ through a ‘Councell’ of all the citizens with equal rights to vote (a Democraty), or to have its rule done for it by ‘Councells’, where the right to vote was more narrowly restricted (an Aristocraty), or by a single person (a Monarch). In each of these, Hobbes strikingly insists, the People and the Multitude remain quite distinct.

The People rules in all Governments, for even in Monarchies the People Commands; for the People wills by the will of one man; but the Multitude are Citizens, that is to say, Subjects. In a Democraty, and Aristocraty, the Citizens are the Multitude, but the Court is the People. And in a Monarchy, the Subjects are the Multitude and (however it seeme a Paradox) the King is the People.

For his contemporaries it certainly was a paradox to equate King with People, and a paradox viewed either way round. The equation incensed Charles I well before the People (or those who claimed to act in its name) placed him on trial for his life and took it on the scaffold.¹³⁰

Hobbes was too eccentric a thinker and too independent a person to find tact easy; but he viewed the turmoil of mid-seventeenth-century England from a highly privileged angle, as tutor briefly to the young Charles II at his exiled court in Paris, on tour with a miscellany of young aristocrats of varying educational susceptibility, and as long-term tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family.131 No one could have mistaken him for an advocate of ‘democratical schemes of government’. Spinoza was distinctly less well connected (except with other intellectual luminaries),¹³² but, as even Hobbes noticed, if anything was even less disposed to tact.¹³³ He was the second son of a prosperous Portuguese Jewish family in a fine merchant house in the centre of Amsterdam,¹³⁴ but his worldly prospects were transformed for the worse by the destruction of its extensive foreign business by English maritime predators and Barbary pirates, and ensuing bankruptcy¹³⁵ and his own vituperative excommunication from the Sephardic community at the age of twenty-three, for his evil opinions and acts, his abominable heresies, and his monstrous deeds.¹³⁶ The philosophical basis for these heterodoxies seems to have been laid remarkably early; and it gave him a considerable underground reputation for intellectual originality and incisiveness, which lasted from his late twenties until his death and well beyond. He appears from that time onwards to have lived principally on earnings from grinding optical lenses, with some pecuniary help from his friends,¹³⁷ and to have devoted the bulk of his energies to developing a remarkable intellectual system, which set the life of human beings as a whole within the order of nature with unique steadiness and resolution.

The political implications of this system were summarized in two works, the scandalous Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published surreptitiously in 1670 (which cemented his reputation as an atheist by offending every extant religious confession within range), and the Tractatus Politicus, left unfinished at his death and published only posthumously.¹³⁸ Both texts say many appreciative things about democracy (as well as some less appreciative things). The Tractatus Politicus breaks off with a brief (and notably perfunctory) defence of the view that there is no pressing occasion to treat women as political equals. (They have less physical strength; and treating them as equals will aggravate men’s already dismaying tendency to inane sexual competition.) But before it does so,139 it certainly appears on the point of settling down to defend an egalitarian and participatory democracy as the ideal political order. It is not clear quite how this defence would have run, nor how it would have fitted with his earlier acknowledgement that no states have proved less lasting than popular or democratic ones, and none as apt to be disrupted by sedition.¹⁴⁰ What is clear, however, is that Spinoza abhorred political disorder and fought hard and consistently throughout his life for the primacy of the human need for freedom of thought and expression. This commitment was clearly central to both his major political works; and he was at pains to insist that the need could be satisfied as readily and securely under a sound monarchy or aristocracy as in a democracy, and would pose no more threat to the viability of the former than to that of the latter. Human beings need to think freely and express their thoughts without fear. They also need a clear and effective framework of authority to protect the lives which they live together. Neither need necessarily encroaches on the other, and neither has any clear priority over the other.

Democracy is a state in which sovereignty (the authority to make and repeal laws and decide on war or peace, the key prerequisite for every commonwealth) is exercised by a Council composed of the common multitude.¹⁴¹ A commonwealth holds and exerts the power of a multitude led as though by a single mind,¹⁴² a union of minds (animorum unio) which does not make sense unless the commonwealth itself (civitas) aims to the highest degree at what seems, to sound reason, useful for all men.¹⁴³ If democratic commonwealths are shorter lived and more disrupted than their aristocratic or monarchical counterparts, the overwhelming verdict of the tradition on which Spinoza drew, this union of minds was scarcely more likely to persist in a democracy. Nor was there any obvious reason why Spinoza should have seen democracies as wedded any more dependably to freedom of thought or expression. All he clearly believed in this respect, like Hobbes and virtually all other natural law thinkers, was that democracy was closest in structure to the basis of all political authority, the universal agreement, whether historical or presumptively rational, of the human beings over whom it was to be exercised. In this sense democracy was, as Spinoza insists in several places, the ultimate source of all political regimes,144 and in just the same sense the most natural of all regimes. Democracy, the Tractatus Politicus concludes, is the third and completely absolute type of state.¹⁴⁵ In it all children of citizens, all native born inhabitants, and anyone else whom the laws choose to recognize, have a natural right to vote in the supreme council of the state and hold public office, a right which they can lose only through personal crime or infamy.¹⁴⁶ Democracy in this sense is¹⁴⁷ the most natural of regimes. It comes closest to preserving the freedom which nature allows to each human being. No one transfers their natural rights to anyone else so completely that they are never consulted again; but each transfers these rights to a majority of the community to which they belong. ‘And so all remain, as they previously were in the state of nature, equal.¹⁴⁸ In both works the potential disadvantages of transferring these rights to smaller numbers of people or to a single individual are explored in a variety of ways.

Spinoza at no point played a public role in the politics of the Netherlands. The exiguousness of his means and the notoriety of his opinions would scarcely have permitted him to do so even had he wished to. But he was for a time a clear partisan and may even have been a personal acquaintance and potential client of Holland’s greatest seventeenth-century statesman, the Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt. On the day when the two de Witt brothers were dragged from prison and lynched by their fellow citizens, an ochlocratic moment if ever there was one,¹⁴⁹ Spinoza himself was living just across the town in the Hague. Four years later, he confided in person to the philosopher Leibniz that only his Lutheran landlord’s understandable insistence on locking the house up had prevented him from sallying forth the same day to put up a placard denouncing the murderers as utter barbarians, and being promptly torn to pieces himself.150 Some intellectuals can stretch a point in retrospective accounts of their own heroism on such occasions; but everything we know about Spinoza suggests that, if he said this at all, he can only have been telling the simple truth.

What exactly was he trying to tell his contemporaries about democracy? He was not, quite certainly, seeking to assure them that liberty of thought and expression, for him the most urgent of all distinctively human needs,¹⁵¹ was any safer in a democracy than anywhere else.¹⁵² He cannot have been telling them that democracy gave them any more solid guarantee of their individual physical security than its more potent rivals. He was scarcely telling them that democracy was a particularly effective form of state in face of armed threats from foreign enemies,¹⁵³ let alone boasting, like the English republican Algernon Sidney,¹⁵⁴ of the superior capacity of any form of republic, democratic or otherwise, to level armed threats of its own at everyone else. The clearest practical merits which he ascribed to it were in direct comparison with the competing state forms which had supplanted it throughout the civilized world: aristocracy and monarchy. While no inhabitant of the Netherlands during Spinoza’s lifetime as an adult could have seen his judgment that democracy was more at home in peacetime as a practical advantage,¹⁵⁵ they could perhaps have seen some connection between the military advantages of its more successful competitors and their uglier domestic political consequences. Spinoza was no rhapsodist of democracy’s edifying spiritual impact on the ruling demos; but he was an acute and forthright critic of the corrupting effects of personal power upon aristocrats and monarchs, a subject matter on which there was then considerably more extensive and recent evidence. It is hard to see in his ultimate verdict, broken off abruptly,¹⁵⁶ any clear claim for the superiority of democracy on grounds of security or liberty (then, as now, the most evocative bases on which to vindicate a political regime). What there is, and what can only have disconcerted as cool a political judge as Johan de Witt,157 was a consistently disabused view of the limitations of every form of government and a sharp assertion of the special tie between democracy and equality.

The significance of that tie is still as hard to judge after over three centuries of practical exploration. But the tie itself goes back to the beginning and lay at the heart of the vision and practices which the Athenians evolved to realise and secure democracy.¹⁵⁸ The relation of freedom or liberty to any state form can be specious (at the mercy of persuasive definition, or brazen mendacity). In every state, freedom and liberty by necessity must be defined in the end, however intricately and courteously, on the state’s terms and by the state itself.¹⁵⁹ But equality, whatever equality lurks in nature itself (the way we simply are, irrespective of what subsequently happens to us) does sound like an external limit to the state’s claims, and perhaps even ultimately to its powers. If democracy expresses human equality (whatever equality comes with simply being human) better than any other regime could, then that might well prove, sooner or later, a comparative advantage of some weight. Perhaps in the end it might come to seem a decisive advantage?

But can a state really express equality? Is not a state the most decisive and, at least in aspiration, the most permanent erasure of equality? And one backed, too, by an effective monopoly of the means of legitimate violence? How can whatever equality lurks in nature itself survive within a structure of uniform and relatively effective subjection, in which some in the end will always be deciding who is to be coerced by whom, and others in due course carrying out the coercion required? How can equality be more than a cruel dream in a world in which some own and control and consume vastly more resources than others? How can it be so when they own and control these resources on a basis which, unless ceaselessly and skilfully overridden, ensures that the inequality re-creates and magnifies itself into an indefinite future?

What we affirm today, when we align ourselves with democracy, is hesitant, confused, and often in bad faith. It becomes less convincing, almost always, the more clearly we bring out the premisses which lie beneath our own values and the more openly we acknowledge the realities which make up the institutions which we take them to commend. Where we have become clearer, more frank, and more confident as time has gone by is in what we deny when we take our stand on democracy. Above all what we deny is that any set of human beings, because of who or what they simply are, deserve and can be trusted with political authority. We reject, in the great Leveller formula, redolent of England’s seventeenth-century Civil War, the claim (or judgment) that any human being comes into the world with a saddle on their back, or any other booted and spurred to ride them.160