3

The Long Shadow of Thermidor

ROBESPIERRE IS STILL A FIGURE of reptilian fascination. But what matters for us is not the man himself, nor the role he played within the Revolution’s lurid political intrigues. It is the words and ideas which blew through him. In that awesome speech, he saw something which has proved overwhelmingly important, and he expressed a judgment which most of us now in some form confidently presume to be valid. Just as certainly, however, he failed utterly throughout his life to bring whatever he did see into sharp and steady focus, let alone communicate it dependably to anyone else; and we, in our turn, are still straining to capture just where the valid element in the judgment that democracy is the mandatory form for legitimate rule really lies. It is quite possible that we are still at such a loss because there simply is no clear form in which the judgment is valid,1 just a hurricane of abusive or seductive verbiage, and a blind shapeless human struggle which those words serve to shroud more than illuminate.

We do not need to decide whether in democracy Robespierre himself saw clearly something which was and remains genuinely politically compelling (how a state must be to fully earn the devotion of its citizens, the Form of the Modern Political Good), or whether what he saw, through a haze of blood, was no better than a shimmering mirage. You can read his speech even now as a conscious projection of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s answer to the central question of the Contrat Social: what can render legitimate the bonds of political authority (those bonds which everywhere bind humans each of whom was born free)?2 You can also hear it, every bit as plausibly, as a desperate plea to his fellow citizens, in face of all the evidence, to feel and act as though the demands of their temporary and shaky rulers were fully legitimate—less a claim to truth than a bid for loyalty very much in extremis.

The democracy which Robespierre affirms is synonymous with the republic as a form of state. By 1794 it made some sense to insist that a republic, the reluctant political product of France’s turmoil, could no more be an aristocracy than it could a monarchy. That was a lesson which no one could have drawn solely from the record of history, in which very many republics, from the grandest of all (ancient Rome) to the longest lived and most politically effective of its modern successors (Venice), had been ostentatiously aristocratic. France had begun its Revolution by declaring war on aristocracy; and its efforts to re-educate its monarch into dependable enmity towards its own aristocracy had been a conspicuous failure. The quest to combine democracy with monarchy in varying proportions persisted in France itself at intervals for almost a century, with at least one notable triumph along the way in the person of Napoleon. It was emulated widely elsewhere for quite some time, and is still not wholly discredited in some settings (Morocco, Thailand, Holland, Sweden, Britain, and in future perhaps even Saudi Arabia). But even today the very term republic (respublica—the public thing in contrast to the private thing)³ is more a claim to enjoy the quality of legitimacy than an explanation of what that legitimacy might consist in, or an account of what could validly confer it. Heard clearly, it is far closer to a flat, indistinct, ideological boast than an effective structure of ideological justification. By 1794 a republic claiming legitimacy could hope to vindicate its claim by setting itself against aristocracy, and could use democracy, without further explanation, to express and authenticate its categorical opposition to aristocracy.

What it could not do was to use the same category to settle the questions of how exactly its own rule should be organized, what if anything should limit its powers in practice, or who should acquire the opportunity to exercise that rule for how long and by just what means. Ancient democracy was the name of a set of relatively definite political arrangements, worked out to preclude the continuing rule of aristocrats, or self-appointed and permanent monarchs (tyrants, as the Greeks called them). It was also, however, the name of the goal of avoiding either type of subjection, a goal which could be, and was, adopted as a shared purpose by a very active community of citizens. Robespierre was clearly appealing to this aspect of the term’s history when he invoked it on behalf of himself and his political collaborators. In doing so, he faced the immediate political inconvenience that the practical arrangements to which it had referred in the ancient world differed so starkly from the unnerving routines of the Committee of Public Safety.

When he assured the Convention, in that Committee’s name, that ‘democracy was not a state in which the people continuously assembled regulates by itself all public affairs’,4 he was underlining something salient and evidently important about the term’s history. A ‘state in which the people continuously assembled regulates by itself all public affairs’ was an excellent, if selective, description of what ancient democracy had aimed at with some determination and at times largely achieved.⁵ It was a wholly implausible description of France’s Revolution at any point along its turbulent way. Even the people of Paris, the menu peuple who formed the angry crowds which drove the Revolution forwards, storming the Bastille or the Tuileries Palace, or even surging into the Assembly itself, were in no position to assemble continuously, and never entertained the fantasy that they might truly be ruling France.⁶ They intervened, in the great revolutionary journées, not as rulers themselves, but as citizens deeply affronted by the actions or inaction of those who genuinely were ruling France (or at least should have been), to force them into bolder courses, sharply restrict their future freedom of action, or change the cast drastically. To acknowledge that, even in Revolution, France was no democracy in that clear and serviceable sense was merely to acknowledge, as Sieyes and Madison had done before him, that a territorial state on the scale of France, if it was to be democratic at all, would have to be made and kept so by a system of representation. It would have to be, in a phrase casually coined over a decade earlier by Alexander Hamilton, a representative democracy.7

A representative democracy was no system of direct citizen self-rule. Instead, what it offered was a system of highly indirect rule by representatives chosen for the purpose by the people. To acknowledge this indirection was merely to recognize the obvious. In insisting on applying the category of democracy to France’s revolutionary state in this way, Robespierre was not arguing against committed enemies so much as deploying the term in a mildly eccentric manner of his own. What was less obvious was the basis of his urgent repudiation of the second possible interpretation of what democracy might still now mean: ‘one in which a hundred thousand fractions of the people, by isolated, precipitate and contradictory measures, would decide the destiny of the entire society’.⁸ In this guise, democracy was no unreal dream of political community somewhere else very long ago. It was an all too real nightmare of the chaos into which France had often threatened to descend in the course of the previous five years. The hundred thousand fractions, although a numerical exaggeration, were the local sites and units of revolutionary agitation, the Section meetings of Paris itself, the political clubs across the nation, the Sans-culottes gatherings which endlessly frustrated every attempt to cool the Revolution down and bring it to a steady and reassuring close. In the opening years of the Revolution, while Robespierre was establishing his reputation and forging the structures of identification and political support which for a time gave him such power, these sites and their occupants formed his main political resource. With the Terror, the strains of war and the worsening challenge of provisioning Paris with food which most of its inhabitants could afford to eat, his erstwhile friends turned increasingly against him. Their multiplicity, disorganization, and practical indiscretion no longer afforded an endless array of opportunities to disrupt the governmental strategies of his ruling enemies. Instead, they became an increasingly perturbing and infuriating obstacle to his own attempts to rule France coherently and effectively in the face of its deadly peril.

In February 1794, if ever, France desperately needed a government. The alternative of dissolving into anarchy had no open champions. But at each setting throughout France, the ‘hundred thousand’ fractions of the people naturally viewed their own purposes very differently; and, even in retrospect, they and their self-conscious descendants saw the closing down of this seething disorder less as a belated recognition of the requirements of political reality than as a crushing defeat in conditions of overwhelming external menace. Two years after Robespierre’s death a handful of these former friends plotted clumsily to overthrow the new rulers who had taken power from Robespierre on the Ninth of Thermidor and unleash the second and greater Revolution, which was also to be the last of all Revolutions.9 The plot itself may have been largely a confused and defiant dream; and most of its participants (real or supposed) were picked up effortlessly by the police.¹⁰ But one of the few who certainly did belong to it, a spoiled and intemperate Tuscan aristocrat, Filippo Michele Buonarroti,¹¹ lived long enough to immortalize them over thirty years later by publishing in Brussels exile his own stirring account of the Conspiracy, a text from which Karl Marx later drew much of his sense of the Revolution’s political and social dynamics.¹²

It was the leading figure in the Conspiracy of the Equals, Gracchus Babeuf, who provided it in retrospect with its name. In his defence before the tribunal of Vendôme he gave it an outline far sharper than the muddled reality of the conspiracy itself, and led promptly to his own execution. The main motif in Buonarroti’s account was his insistence on equality as the Revolution’s deepest and most transformative goal, and on the profound gulf between the true defenders of equality and their sly and all too politically effective adversaries, the partisans of the order of egoism, or ‘the english doctrine of the economists’,¹³ who had struggled against them throughout its course, and ended by triumphing over them. The Revolution had marked an ever-growing discord between the partisans of opulence and distinctions, and those of equality or of the numerous class of workers.14 The partisans of egoism saw national prosperity as lying in the multiplicity of needs, the ever-growing diversity of material enjoyments, in an immense industry, a limitless commerce, a rapid circulation of coined money, and, in the last instance, in the anxious and insatiable cupidity of the citizens.¹⁵ Once the happiness and strength of a society is placed in riches, the exercise of political rights must necessarily be denied to those whose fortune provides no guarantee of their attachment to the creation and defence of wealth. In any such social system, the great majority of citizens is constantly subjected to painful labour, and condemned in practice to languish in poverty, ignorance, and slavery.¹⁶

The fundamental struggle on which the Revolution had turned, in the eyes of both Babeuf and Buonarroti, was the struggle between the order of egoism and the order of equality. In the order of egoism, the sole ressort of the feelings and actions of the citizens was purely personal interest, independent of any relation to the general good.¹⁷ For its partisans, Rousseau’s party, equality formed the basis of sociability and furnished the consolation of the wretched. For their opponents, depraved by the love of wealth and power, it was merely a chimera.

The order of egoism was aristocratic in substance because it inevitably generated inequality, and because it both required and ensured the exercise of sovereign power by one part of the nation over the rest. The freedom of a nation is the product of two elements: the equality which its laws create in the conditions and enjoyments of the citizens, and the fullest extension of their political rights.¹⁸ The second is no substitute for the first; and the friends of equality clearly recognized the destructiveness of concentrating on constitutional reconstruction at the expense of real equality of condition. They saw their more constitutionally preoccupied opponents, the Girondins, as a branch of the vast conspiracy against the natural rights of man.

Throughout Buonarroti’s story, ‘Democrat’ appears as a party label, the political form of the partisans of the order of equality. It was the expression of democratic ideas which shows the partisans of the order of equality re-entering politics after the crushing blow of Robespierre’s fall, democrats who carried their campaign forward over the next year, democrats whom the conspiracy’s Secret Directory must ensure were elected to the new national government by the people of Paris, one for each département, once tyranny was overthrown.19 What had lost France both democracy and liberty even before Thermidor was the diversity of views, the conflict of interests, the lack of virtue, unity, and perseverance in the National Convention.²⁰ The new, and carefully vetted, National Assembly at which the conspirators aimed, democrats to a man, would display none of these vices and weaknesses. The point of the vetting, and the grounds for operating not merely in secret but as a tightly organized body bound together in shared conviction, was precisely to eliminate them.

One reason why democracy remained such a fiercely divisive political category in Europe for the next fifty years was that Buonarroti’s conception of what it meant continued to strike a deeper chord than the very different view worked out in practice at the same time in the United States. In America, once the Constitution was firmly in place, democracy soon became the undisputed political framework and expression of the order of egoism. It also developed, in retrospect quite rapidly, a rich understanding of its own character, centring, as Tocqueville in due course showed,²¹ on the idea of equality, interpreted in terms fundamentally different from those of Babeuf or Buonarroti. American equality was above all an equality of standing, and a comprehensive rejection of all overt forms of political condescension. It arose from and endorsed a society both self-consciously and actually in rapid motion, expanding in territory, growing in wealth, and looking forward to a future of permanent and all but limitless change. Even aside from the long and ineffectively repressed trauma of slavery, it was sometimes a society ill at ease with many aspects of itself; and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it continued to harbour its own partisans of the order of equality, understood in much the Babouviste manner. But no American partisan of equality who wished to deny its compatibility with the order of egoism could afford to offer their followers or potential supporters a political access less open than the rowdy rituals of electoral competition already provided. They might fight long and hard on other terrain, for a time win many battles, and accumulate, as at points with the labour unions, a considerable amount of local defensive power. But in the long run, and on the terrain where they must secure their victory in the end, in elections to Congress and to the Presidency, they were always to find themselves heavily out-spent and out-voted.

In America, therefore, the story of democracy has blended indistinguishably into the political history of the country as a whole. It has remained a potent political counter within the ideological struggles which defined that history, as a goal and as an instrument for hastening (or impeding) movement towards that goal. At points too, often courtesy of the most purposefully anti-democratic element of the Constitution, the well-protected autonomy of the Supreme Court, it helped to break through dense barriers to equality: slavery, segregation, dismally effective political exclusion. In the long run it has ensured that the great majority of America’s adult citizens now enjoy political rights which they can exercise, if they choose to.22 (A growing number in practice, no doubt for their own good reasons, now often choose not to.)

You can see that outcome at least two ways, as a comprehensive practical refutation of Babeuf’s and Buonarroti’s somewhat rudimentary understanding of political and economic possibilities, or a crushing historical defeat for the ideals to which they clung. But it is still far from evident that there is anything wrong or confused in seeing the same outcome both ways at once. The order of egoism always had ample reason to rely upon the adequacy of its motivational support.23 In democracy in America it discovered how to combine the abandonment of distinction as an organizing principle in politics or social form with its uninhibited efflorescence in economic and social reality. America today remains a society uncomfortable with every surviving vestige of explicit privilege, but remarkably blithe in the face of the most vertiginous of economic gulfs, and comprehensively reconciled to the most obtrusive privileges of wealth as such. Behind this outcome lies the continuing vitality of its economy, the real source of the victory of the partisans of ‘distinction, or the english doctrine of the economists’. Not all the economists, of course, did promise America or anywhere else permanent prosperity, let alone ever-growing prosperity. But the context in which American democracy has developed as it has was given, above all, by the extent to which those who assured their readers that long-term growth in the wealth of nations was to be expected have so far proved to be right, at least in the case of America itself. It has also been shored up quite effectively by the extent to which other economists, who cast varying degrees of doubt on that prospect, and insisted instead that equal or greater prosperity, and on more prepossessing terms, could be provided there or elsewhere on some wholly different basis, have proved more or less catastrophically wrong.

James Madison, as we have seen, provides no explanation of why the form of state which now dominates the world should have come to call itself a democracy. For him, as for most of his American contemporaries who were even acquainted with the word, democracy was something altogether different and distinctly unenticing. What his brilliant analysis in the Federalist papers does offer, alongside Alexander Hamilton, is a sound explanation of why a state of broadly this form should have proved so successful. It is above all that this form of state alone can hope to represent its own people effectively over time. It, and perhaps in the very long run, only it, can unite immediate practical viability with a convincing claim to act on behalf of and by courtesy of the body of its own citizens. To delegate government to relatively small numbers of citizens but also insist that they be chosen by most, if not all, of their fellows was a cunning mixture of equality and inequality. It could not guarantee sustained victory in practice to the partisans of opulence and distinction. But it could and did open up an arena in which that victory could be sought and won time and time again, and won through the judgments and by the choices of the citizens themselves. By doing so, and by leaving their victory apparently permanently at the mercy of reconsideration, in the long run, it also won them the war.

Unsurprisingly, this has proved a very considerable service to the patrons of opulence and distinctions. But it has done so over time, of course, only because opulence and distinctions (the combination offered) have struck more citizens on balance as collectively beneficial than as simply malign.24 What gives the formula such strength over time is its elasticity in settings where opulence has duly grown. It could scarcely work for long anywhere where distinction must be sustained through stagnant or diminishing wealth, and has been widely and understandably abandoned, often with very little hesitation, in circumstances of this kind: in Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, in Latin America sometimes for decade after decade, in East or South East Asia, in Sub-Saharan Africa, sooner or later, almost everywhere but in the post-Apartheid Republic of South Africa itself.

The elasticity never provides a perfect shield. The balance of benefit and revulsion shifts everywhere all the time. But it is hard to exaggerate the political advantage of the protection it does provide. You can see why that advantage is so huge by setting Madison’s misgivings about democracy side by side with Babeuf’s and Buonarroti’s picture of what democracy requires. For Madison what made democracy clearly impracticable was above all its scale. The United States simply could not be governed as a democracy. But its blatant impracticality did not render democracy any less alarming as a political idea. In that guise even Madison had no difficulty in recognizing its disruptive appeal. It was the appeal, above all, of immediacy and directness, with its deliberate openness to the most erratic of judgment, to unrestricted factional passion and to swirling intrigue. At the limit, he noted, it suggested irresistibly to its admirers a remaking of society and a reconstitution of property relations, to render the citizens as equal in other aspects of their lives as they strove to be in the activity of governing themselves.

For Babeuf and Buonarroti the point of democracy was to attain just such a comprehensive equality, the only undelusive and uncorrupting condition in which human beings could live together with one another on any substantial scale. The appeal of that goal has naturally varied dramatically across time and space, at its most acute whenever, as in the aftermath of Thermidor, the partisans of distinction and opulence are unmistakably in the saddle, and very many must live alongside them in misery. What in the long run has blunted equality’s appeal as a goal is the unpromising instruments for realizing it and the rigidities inherent in its pursuit. (Had it been reached, the goal would no doubt have proved to harbour further repulsions of its very own; but these, thus far, remain a matter of theoretical speculation, not a truth of experience.) These rigidities come in effect from the goal itself. Conspiracy, of course, was not an instantly plausible political form for democrats to adopt. Still less so was its successor form, fine-tuned for the next three decades by Buonarroti himself, the closed conspiratorial secret society, of which in some cases he appears to have been the sole member.25 But anyone in political adversity may have to choose between stealth and surrender; and Babeuf and Buonarroti hoped to conspire briefly, in order to live and act freely and more or less openly, into an indefinite future. The outcome of the conspiracy, such as it was,²⁶ certainly showed they had every reason for stealth. Under less dangerous and flustered conditions, the goal of equality proved less alluring to most citizens than either had hoped, easily set aside in favour of modest material gains and a quieter life. Wherever the opportunity to vote freely has been extended across an entire adult population, the majority has found it unattractive to vote explicitly for the establishment of equality. (The closest to a counterexample has been the remarkable governmental dominance of Swedish Social Democracy, which has made Sweden a very different country to live in from any of its European counterparts, but even today is clearly widening the room for distinctions as well as opulence.) What Babeuf and Buonarroti hoped for in democracy’s triumph has been as far from coming true as what Madison feared from the same outcome. Democracy’s real triumph has been a triumph for their word, as much as for Pericles’s; but its practical political and economic consequences have proved far more a triumph for Madison’s idea.

As soon as it became a word, democracy very clearly implied a form of government. For us it has come to name not merely a form of government, but also, and every bit as much, a political value. In retrospect this extension of meaning must have been quite rapid. By the time that the Old Oligarch set himself to diagnose its political appeals, or Pericles spoke so glowingly in praise of it, it had come to be just as much a political value for the Greeks themselves, as admired or even loved by some, as it was despised and detested by others. For most of its history as a word, as we have seen, far more of those to whom it meant anything at all viewed it with scorn or suspicion than felt any trace of admiration for it. Today, things could scarcely be more different. In practice, such scorn and hatred are still often every bit as intense as they ever were. But in most settings at most times they now find it prudent to express themselves considerably more surreptitiously. Democracy does still retain principled opponents in some quarters. Iran’s Guardianship Council, for example, seldom hesitates to express its contempt for the liberal reformers voted in with President Hassan Rouhani, and still does all it can to place them beyond reach of popular election in the future. But even in Iran, the advantages of staging elections are implicitly accepted by those who most fear to lose them; and the principled rejection of elections has become very much a minority taste.

The historical momentum of the term democracy from 1796 up to today leaves us two very different elements which we plainly need to understand. One is a matter of the fate of political institutions: the diffusion of a variety of forms of state increasingly eager to describe themselves as democracies, and the relatively sudden and widespread victory of one type of claimant to the title over all its extant competitors. The second may at first sight seem simply verbal, the ever more pervasive diffusion of the term democracy as a ground of political commendation, a way of capturing the supposed or real merits not just of one set of political institutions against another, but of almost any features in the organization of our lives together, organized as we would like them to be, and not as we would emphatically wish they were not.

If we keep these two targets for potential understanding firmly apart, we would expect to find very different ingredients to their explanations. The fate of forms of government must turn on the capacity to create and defend wealth and enforce compliance, all of which can be assessed with some confidence, at least in retrospect. But it also turns on the sustained capacity to persuade, which is far harder to judge with any accuracy, before, during, or after its exercise.

The creation and defence of wealth, too, and even the capacity to enforce compliance, under scrutiny, turn out to require a sustained capacity to persuade (what David Hume called ‘opinion’).27 Over the last century and more, the commendatory force of the idea of democracy has proved a key element within the intensely competitive process of sustained persuasion which makes up so much of the political life of every human community. If we try to follow the historical vicissitudes of the state forms and verbal commendations which have implicated the term democracy from 1796 to the present day, we shall certainly find the two stories merging inextricably with one another over much of the time and distance which we need to cover. We shall also find, whenever we can keep them apart for a moment or two, each affecting the other quite brusquely and almost at once.

The distinction between being persuaded and being coerced, as every child, spouse, or colleague knows, is not necessarily a sharp one within human experience. But there is scarcely another contrast to which most human beings attach greater importance. Undisguised coercion is frequently dismaying; and coercion ineffectually disguised as persuasion can be acutely offensive. A large part of the story which leads from 1796 up to today (the story of modern politics)28 has been the record of a continuing rise in the practical importance of persuasion in shaping the terms on which human beings live with one another, and the forms within which they seek to do so. As a modern political term, democracy is above all the name for political authority exercised solely through the persuasion of the greater number, or for other sorts of authority in other spheres supposedly exercised solely on a basis acceptable to those subjected to it.

Persuasion, of course, had been central to the practice of democracy in Athens itself.²⁹ It was by the direct force of persuasion, exercised on innumerable and overwhelmingly public occasions, that the political leaders of Athens held or lost control over the city’s political decisions. It was by persuasion, exercised in the last instance in the Assembly itself and against all comers, that Pericles for a time, in Thucydides’s eyes, turned Athens effectively into a monarchy, the rule of a single man by continuing consent of the people.³⁰ Democracy is a far more insinuating name than republic for a politics openly centred on persuasion. It recognizes the people not merely as notional bearers of ultimate authority, but also as a site of power in themselves, with a capacity to act and exert force on their own behalf. There may be a large element of unreality in that recognition, a stilted and insincere courtesy which veils a sometimes all too authentic contempt. If democracy today, as the Austrian expatriate Joseph Schumpeter bluntly assured his Harvard audiences and in due course the world, is ‘the rule of the politician’,³¹ it is at least the rule of politicians under real pressure to address their subjects politely and solicit their endorsement, and refrain from reconstituting their rule as an informal aristocracy or monarchy of their own. Even in the hands of the shiftiest of career politicians, democracy has not proved a compelling name for styles of government which are openly autocratic, authoritarian, or tyrannical. The Big Lie can succeed remarkably as a short-term political tactic; but it has failed to show itself in the long run a potent formula for securing political authority.

As the title of a form of government, in the key ideological outcome of the last two centuries of an ever more global politics, the partisans of the order of egoism have captured the word of the Equals. The Equals, in the meantime, have largely been driven from the political field. But neither their scattered remnants, nor even their more sophisticated intellectual admirers,32 have felt inclined to surrender a word they still find irresistibly compelling. To them, the capture, even now, seems not a conquest in a just war, but an unabashed theft, secured by expedients they still do not really understand. Even fifty years ago the outcome of that war was very far from obvious to anyone; and the failure to anticipate it no more surprising in the case of those who loathed it than it was in the case of those who longed for little else. By now, however, the incomprehension of the losers is no testimony to their political intelligence. Once a war is well and truly lost, it is seldom hard to see quite why it has come out as it has.

What is far harder to understand is why the partisans of the order of egoism should have bothered to capture the Equals’ word. It was not a word commended to them by their wisest intellectual advisers, by Madison, or Sieyes, or even Adam Smith. It was not a word which appealed to the ruling authorities or military commanders who, for more than the next century, ensured across Europe that the partisans of equality were defeated time and time again: in the revolutions of 1848, in 1871, in 1918. Today, by contrast, no serious partisan of the order of egoism would deny themselves the political advantages of democratic authorization, as anything more than a temporary expedient, an enforced and mildly humiliating departure from the demands of political decorum. In embracing the term democracy so steadily and so purposefully, the political leaders of capitalism’s overwhelming advance have not been juggling idly with empty symbols. They have recognized, and done their best to appropriate and tap, a deep reservoir of political power.

This is the vital judgment. If it was wrong, then politics would have no special place in the story of democracy’s triumph, and that triumph might well have no real political significance. The sources and mechanisms of the triumph would have had to come from somewhere quite different, above all, no doubt, from the laws of economics and the crushing weight of weapons of ever more massive destruction. The real stories which we needed to follow would be stories of economic organization and technical change, and of armaments and their deployment. Those stories would be insulated and self-contained. They would carry within them the prerequisites for their own passage through time and space, and owe nothing of consequence to the efforts, whether on their behalf or against them, of rulers or politicians. Or, if they owed anything at all, they would owe it solely to the decisions which rulers or politicians make, for better or worse, over the shaping of economies and the acquisition or use of the tools of war.

There have been striking attempts to see human history in these terms, of which Karl Marx’s was much the most inspiring, and for a time had by far the greatest historical impact: not least on the development of economies and the deployment of weapons systems. But in the end these pictures are not merely misleading; they are simply incoherent. The ideas which give them their shape and their air of force, seen clearly, do not even make sense. Economies are permanently at the mercy of rulers. Private property, the foundation on which a capitalist economy operates, is sustained or cancelled at political will. Money, the medium through which it operates, must be nurtured by political prudence, and can be jeopardized or even dissolved by the clumsiness or dishonesty of rulers or public officials. Currencies rise and fall, and economies thrive or disintegrate, through the good sense and scruple, or the cynicism and folly, of those who govern. No government can make a country prosper; but any government can ruin one; and most today are in a position to do so very rapidly and extremely thoroughly.33 Democracy’s real triumph, its victory over the last three-quarters of a century, has come in an epoch where the powers of rulers to damage an economy and harm the lives of entire populations have shown themselves greater than they have ever proved before.

Once we recognize democracy’s triumph as a political outcome, many things fall into place. We can grasp that it was not, and could never have been, an automatic concomitant of something quite different, beneath, above, or beyond politics. We can see at once both how recent and how extraordinary that triumph really is, everywhere beyond the United States itself. We can see that what has triumphed is not merely an exceedingly vague word, and a form of state associated, perhaps somewhat speciously, with that word, but above and beyond both, a pressing and engaging political agenda. An agenda is a summary listing of what is to be done; and every government requires such a list sooner or later. What is special to democracy’s agenda is its assertion that in the end it must be the people that decides what is to be done. This is never a good description of what determines what is done, still less of who takes the decision. What it is is a permanent reminder of the terms in which governmental decisions must now be vindicated, and the breadth of the audience that is entitled to assess whether or not they have been vindicated. Until democracy’s triumph, the rightful scale of that audience was always seen as pretty narrow. It was defined by a layering of exclusions: those without the standing, those without the knowledge or ability, those without a stake in the country, the dependent, foreigners, the unfree or even enslaved, the blatantly untrustworthy or menacing, the criminal, the insane, women, children. Democracy’s triumph has been the collapse of one exclusion after another, in ever-greater indignity, with the collapse of the exclusion of women the most recent, hastiest, and most abashed of all. Today only the child remains excluded everywhere, openly and without much embarrassment; and even for them, the age at which childhood ends is creeping steadily down.

For most of human history it has been above all dependence and exclusion which have given structure to human societies. With the coming of literacy, and the formalization of many aspects of the relations between human beings over most of the world’s inhabited surface,34 both dependence and exclusion were converted increasingly into self-conscious principles of social order. Democracy’s triumph has been above all the backwash from this great movement of subordination. It signals and reinforces the steadily rising pressure to break the sway of these two principles and refashion the relations between human beings on softer and less offensive lines. Democratization is the working through of their prospective successors, the imposition of the apparent requirements of equality on the endlessly resistant material of human lives. No one today could mistake it, as Babeuf and Buonarroti each plainly did, for movement towards a known and clearly defined destination. But for all its open-endedness and untransparency, it shows unmistakably the continuing force of the Equals’ word, even buried deep inside the order of egoism itself.

The market economy is the most powerful mechanism for dismantling equality that humans have ever fashioned. But it is not simply equality’s enemy, as Babeuf and Buonarroti confidently supposed. Instead, two centuries later and after much considered thought and many confused struggles, that economy has settled with growing resolution on a single political form and a particular image of society. Each grounds itself directly on the claim to recognize the ways in which humans are equal and to protect them equally in living as they choose. You do not need to accept the validity of that claim (or even its sincerity) to see what a momentous shift the claim represents.

This great choice has been a single story. In all its complexity and opacity, it has also been very much democracy’s story. As stories go, it lacks a clear narrative line and conspicuously fails to carry its own meaning clearly on the surface. Its massive silences weigh just as heavily as its loudest choruses. Most prominent on its surface has been the spectacular diffusion of a word, but a word which, on examination, carries no clear or fixed meaning. Almost as obtrusive has been the staccato passage of several competing forms of government, each claiming to embody that word, from one geographical setting to another. The story of the word’s diffusion has also been the story of an endless enquiry into what it does or should mean (how it may or may not justifiably be employed). The passage of forms of government has been at the same time an uninterrupted struggle over who exactly is entitled to act in the people’s name, and on what grounds, over which forms of inequality, dependence or exclusion are to survive, be suppressed or recreated, and over who is to be subject to whom over what.

If we view the story fastidiously and from a great distance, we can see it above all as the quest for a secular grail: a clear sight of the Form of Equality, which must also be the Form of the Good and the Just.35 In this guise it is as unclear as ever whether what has made the quest so forlorn has been the overwhelming imaginative inroads of the order of egoism,³⁶ or the deeper blindness of gender, reaching back far further in the past, or whether the quest itself has been throughout a hunt for a chimera: a treasure which was never there to find, the Form of something which from the outset simply never had a form.

If we view it more companionably, however, it must surely look very different, and in many settings altogether more encouraging. Not a quest for anything at all, but a stumbling, myopic blend of quarrelling and shared exploration of the inescapable issue of how to sustain everyday lives together as agreeably as possible. This is an eminently democratic perspective on the story, a view not from above, before or after, but simply from within. You could see it as a democratic practical enquiry into what democracy as a political value turns out to mean, as one people after another explores it together in the space that history and their enemies leave open to them.

We have followed the story of democracy as word over the two thousand years and more that separates its departure from the country of its birth from the point when it comes back to life in the fashioning and defence of political arrangements at the centre of a great state. There is no clear reason why it should have survived that lengthy passage. All we know is that, sometimes by the narrowest of margins, it somehow just did. No one knows what, if anything, will come after democracy. What we can hope to grasp, if we concentrate our minds on the issue, is four things about democracy as it now is. We can see why the word has changed so sharply in meaning between the days of Babeuf and those of Donald Trump or Angela Merkel. We can see why the form of government to which it now principally applies should be so different both from its distant Greek originals and from any political practices which Robespierre or Babeuf can have had in mind. We can also see why the form of government which now comes so close to monopolising its application should have won such astonishing power across the world so rapidly and so recently. More intriguingly, if perhaps a shade less clearly, we can see, too, why this victorious regime should have picked this old Greek word of all words for its political banner. The contours of the history of a word, the fashioning of a novel form of state, the outcome of a global struggle for power, are all well-defined targets for understanding. Only the last question—the choice of a label by a type of state—may seem at first sight both elusive and relatively trivial.

This is a reasonable intellectual suspicion; but it is also deeply undemocratic. If we see these two hundred years and more as a single sequence of political choice, taking in an ever-widening cast list, the adoption of democracy as preferred label for the winning form of state must emerge as anything but an arbitrary quirk of taste. The history of the word will simply express that political choice as legibly as the clarity of the choice permitted in the first place. The state form can be seen to have won, not through its exquisite adjustment to something altogether different (the requirements for the competitive flourishing across the world of vast corporations of dubious local allegiance), but principally through the changing balance of preference, and in many settings and more directly, the allegiance through the harshest of ordeals, of that ever-widening cast list.

The history of democracy’s triumph since Babeuf’s head fell from the guillotine has been above all a history of political choice. That one vast overarching choice has been composed in turn of myriads and myriads of other choices, swelling in number, surging out across the continents of the world, but each in the end made by a single partially self-aware living human actor. To make sense out of that story, we need to grasp the contexts in which those myriads of choices were made and register the fierce external pressures which drove huge numbers of persons in one direction rather than another—in the great stampedes into and out of communist rule, or the vast convulsions of the two World Wars. To grasp those contexts and recognize those pressures will to some degree safeguard us against the temptation to romanticize our sense of what has been in play, or draw it too ingenuously from our own parochial horizon of experience. It will not exempt us from the responsibility to take a political attitude of our own to what the story means. Here democracy imposes an odd and austere requirement. On a democratic view, everywhere’s political history must be equally valuable and equally significant (also, equally likely to prove silly, ludicrous, or disgraceful). Its ordinary everyday squabbles and bemusements must carry just the same weight whenever and wherever they occur. None of it has any claim to privileged attention; and none can justifiably be discounted or ignored. There can be no elect nations, or continents, or even civilizations.

With democracy’s triumph, this is a most disconcerting demand. It dissolves the pretensions of intellectuals and corrodes the claims to authority of all who happen at the time to exercise political authority anywhere in particular. It also decisively undermines any assumption that historical priority in the story could give privileged insight into its meaning (as though the Greeks, or the French, or the Americans, or for that matter the Belgians or the Swiss, might have understood democracy better than those who came later and so be in a position to determine whether or not their successors, or even imitators, have met or fallen short of standards already set once and for all).37

When America’s President, George W. Bush, assured the world that ‘The global expansion of democracy is the ultimate force in rolling back terrorism and tyranny’,³⁸ he was drawing on deep convictions as well as expressing a devout hope for his own short-term political prospects. He was also expressing a political judgment on the record of America’s role in the world over the last three-quarters of a century, in which its victories over Germany and Japan, and its triumph with the fall of the Soviet empire and the disintegration of the USSR, were alike testimony to its own political excellence, and the ever more irresistible recognition of that excellence across the world. More edgily, he was announcing too, the shape, if not the timing, of a local political strategy for the use of American military and economic power inside a still imperfectly subdued Iraq. The core of the strategy was to install in due course new institutions of government in Iraq, with at least some family resemblance to those of countries which the United States views as democracies, manned with dependable enemies of terrorism and tyranny as the United States elects to define them. This is not a process, rather evidently, which has ever been under firm control. Perhaps more importantly, it is also one which could remain under firm control for any length of time only by continuing miracle, or careful repudiation of its own core pretensions. Under democracy, it must be the people of Iraq who decide whom or what they wish to befriend or oppose. They prove to differ bitterly with one another over the question; and very few of them seem drawn to American views on the matter. If democracy does in the end triumph in Iraq, even in the limited sense of establishing a continuing electoral basis for acquiring new governments, it will do so by a sequence of Iraqi choices, and with abundant mutual odium. It will also do so less by spontaneous imitation of the admired practices of an exemplary model, graciously offered by the occupying powers, than through grudging acceptance of imposed terms of peace. Terrorism and tyranny lie in the eye of the beholder; and under democracy each beholder not only will perceive them for themselves, but is explicitly entitled to do so.

In its own terms, and by its own standards, the story of democracy’s triumph is a story that cannot be told. To tell it as a single story, you must stand outside it, and claim to stand above it, define terms, and apply standards to it, which can be vindicated in their own right, and independently of its bemusing struggles. This is a very bold claim; and there is no reason whatever for anyone else to accept its validity. But if none of us can hope to tell the story itself with any adequacy, we can readily recognize that it has occurred, and try to answer some of the more salient questions which it raises.

Democracy’s triumph, in the first place, has been the triumph of a word. What triumphs along with that word is a particular way of thinking (and refusing to think) about the authority to govern, and a range of institutions for selecting and restraining governments which claim to fit with that way of thinking. The way of thinking is never wholly convincing, since it equates ruler with ruled, while everywhere, as Joseph de Maistre noted, ruler and ruled remain stubbornly apart: ‘the people who command are different from the people who obey.’39 But for all its insubstantiality (and often its gross implausibility), it serves admirably to define the central challenge to rulers in the world which capitalism has refashioned. That challenge is to show the ruled that the authority which confronts them simply is their own: that it is their will which stands behind it, and their interests which it is compelled in the end to serve. To close that gap is a forlorn task, in logic, in psychology, in politics. But the acknowledgement that the gap should not be there, that no government has the right to rule anyone simply against their own will, is a vast concession. It marks a whole new world from the days when King Charles I of England on the scaffold, with stubborn confidence, assured his people in his dying address that ‘a subject and a sovereign are clear different things’.40 Only two months earlier Charles himself had picked out a term for that world, accusing his parliamentary enemies and the armies which they had unleashed of labouring ‘to bring in democracy’.⁴¹ It was not a word which attracted most of his enemies; and it made remarkably little political headway for at least the next century and a half. But, in the long run, it is the word which has stuck.

What makes it so adhesive is the posture of involuntary self-abasement which it imposes on any ruler who uses it. Self-abasement is neither a natural nor an agreeable posture for most rulers. Many, inevitably, continue to refuse it with some asperity. But it has proved a far more insinuating ground from which to claim authority than every other less dutiful expression of humility (let alone all the open expressions of arrogance or contempt).

For much of the time between 1796 and today there was little agreement over what sorts of institutions of government best met the term’s demands. The task of differentiating true democracy from the many impostors which competed with it proved difficult as well as contentious. Today, the outcome of that competition looks suspiciously clear cut: more natural, or even inevitable, than it very probably should. It is not that the losers did not richly deserve to lose: just that it is still far from clear how far or why the present winner deserved to win and, if it did, quite what enabled it to do so. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the regime of Kim Jong Un, now seems as exotic as the world of Kubla Khan.⁴² As almost the last surviving relic of a lengthy and potent challenger for the term’s monopoly, it dramatizes in a particularly extreme way both the arbitrariness with which it can be invoked, and the implausibility of using it at all to describe the institutions of any modern state. Here the people rules twice over for good measure, and is ruled in response with as little apology or recourse as anywhere else on earth.

On a grim but plausible view, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the terminus ad quem of the Conspiracy of the Equals: not what Babeuf and Buonarroti wanted, but what in the end they were always going to get. It is not, of course, the sole candidate for that destination. Others with equally little enduring appeal have been the period of War Communism, which succeeded the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge.43 In these later episodes, in all their desolation, the rage for equality becomes for a time something very close to a rage against the reality of other human beings or the very idea of a society. Each made a certain kind of sense for a small group of overweeningly ambitious politicians, and a very different kind of sense for varying numbers of other groups to whom these politicians could appeal, and on whose support they relied. Each was made possible at all by extreme and mercifully unusual circumstances. No one is less equal, at the point of death, than murderer and victim. But what these episodes show is how far the principle of equality can carry, if left without impediment from any other principles, left to structure the lives of human beings all on its own. By equality’s own standard, they may seem no more than a brutal caricature. But they show something far more instructive than the openness to abuse of a beguiling idea. They show that that idea is bound to prove self-contradictory if it ever comes to be treated as the unique structuring principle for the relations between human beings. Elevated to this lonely eminence, it both foments and licenses a deep impatience with the tastes, loyalties, and commitments of the existing inhabitants of every real society. Between 1789 and 1796 a great many of the French population were made to ask themselves, sooner or later, whether they were in the end friend or enemy to the ancien régime. By 1796, a more select handful had come to recognize that they must side for or against the order of egoism, the global commercial civilization, founded on an ever-deepening division of labour and an endless proliferation of novel tastes. Some of this far smaller number were very clear that the answer to the second question followed from the answer to the first: that any enemy of the ancien régime must be an enemy, too, to the order of egoism. But in the long run this handful turned out to be wrong, if not indisputably in taste, at least unmistakably in expectation. Since 1789, throughout the world, the great majority of those who have had the chance have turned against the ancien régime in their own habitats. In ever more such habitats, sooner or later, it has proved impossible for their rulers to prevent them from doing so. Rule itself has certainly gone on virtually everywhere more or less throughout, very often on a far more intrusive basis, and sometimes with vastly greater brutality. But in ever more settings also, sooner or later, it has had to make terms with the principle of equality. What it has stalwartly refused to do is to make at all the kinds of terms which the Equals expected. It has chosen their word (perhaps even stolen it). But the subjects over whom it rules, and who permit it to rule them, have insisted for their own part, ever more pervasively, on embracing alongside it, and with at least equal passion and conviction, the order of egoism.

Placed within the order of egoism, equality faces more impediments, with greater powers of resistance, than it could have faced in any earlier form of human association. To Babeuf or Buonarroti, in this deeply inhospitable setting, equality would seem not so much confined, as tamed, or even neutered. But they may not be the best judges. Equality has not simply struck its colours, or abandoned its appeals to the passion and intelligence of its human audience. What permits the rulers to rule, in ever more settings and in the long run, is the response of that audience: the terms which it will accept. The key element in those terms has come to be the offer of a certain degree of equality, extended, as Plato long ago complained, to equals and unequals alike.44

This may sound a trifle fanciful. If inequality persists, and still more if it is regenerated ceaselessly by the central dynamic of the order of egoism, why should the proffered equality matter at all? Why should anyone even think it worth insisting on? There are three elements to the answer. In the first place, it matters because some recognition is better than none. Other things being equal, more recognition would plainly be better than less. But other things are far from equal. The Conspirators of 1796, in so far as they assumed anything definite, assumed that only full recognition could be either just or worth having. Only untrammelled and complete equality could bring the last Revolution, and reconcile human beings finally to one another over time. But untrammelled and complete equality is not even coherent as an idea; and the route towards it has always proved savagely divisive. It appeals to too few human emotions, for much too little of the time, and is swamped, rapidly and fatally, by the immediacy and impact of its incessant collisions with far too many other emotions. As a goal for rule it requires of any ruler who tries to implement it extreme and permanent coercion; and it guarantees to their subjects nothing but recognition (if indeed that). Certainly neither ease, nor comfort, nor amusement, and for the recalcitrant amongst them (those with opinions, tastes, and wills of their own) not even much in the way of security. As Benjamin Constant saw it, early in the nineteenth century, it offers ancient liberty, the delusory rewards of a notional share in rule, in exchange for the surrender of modern liberty, the real rewards of living as they please, within the bounds of the criminal law and their own incomes.45 It then turns this offer into a doctrinaire programme which suppresses the order of egoism en bloc.

In the long run, this last suppression proves simply unsustainable. Ease, comfort, amusement, and most of all security attract too many too strongly for far too much of the time. Highly coercive rule seldom proves a plausible form of recognition. The order of egoism has no difficulty in generating overwhelming coercive power, and little difficulty in protecting itself, if not everywhere always, at least in more and more settings for more and more of the time, against the many enemies it ceaselessly evokes. The winning offer from rulers to ruled is not a fixed sum, but a highly plastic, and always partially opaque, formula. It blends minimal recognition with quite extensive protection of the institutional requirements of the order of egoism. It ensures property law, commercial regulation, and a due balance between taxing enough to provide the protection and protecting enough against all forms of expropriation (very much including taxation itself) for the order of egoism to proceed buoyantly on its way. The scope of recognition offered and the degree of protection provided are each renegotiated endlessly.

The offer matters in the first place because some degree of recognition (recognition as an equal, if necessary in the teeth of the evidence) carries a very deep appeal, enough appeal for huge masses of human beings to be prepared to fight for it long and hard, and fight with particular bitterness to retain or recapture it, when they are threatened with its withdrawal. It matters too, in the second place, just because the content of that recognition is always open to reinterpretation; and anyone can therefore hope at any point to deepen or consolidate what it has already given them. It offers a field of aspiration and an arena for struggle. It matters, lastly, because the recognition offered, while it may always threaten in practice the fluent operation of the order of egoism, is at least not openly contemptuous of, or hostile to, that order and its requirements. The equal citizens of a modern democracy may not listen very attentively or prove especially practically wise. But any of them can be importuned at any time, through their equal citizenship, to pay some heed to the requirements of the way of economic life on which they depend, and from which they draw the modern liberties they most prize. In this setting, it offers those who volunteer to rule them (and whom they then select for the purpose) at least a set of terms on which to address them on the requirements of collective prudence over time: above all, the need not to starve the goose that lays their golden eggs.