NOTES

Preface and Acknowledgements to the Second Edition

1. W. B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1956, LVI, 167–98; W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), 157–91.

2. John Dunn, Breaking Democracy’s Spell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

Preface: Why Democracy?

1. This movement of transliteration and translation across the languages and societies of the world is a piece of genuinely global intellectual and political history which has yet to be traced with any care. Until we know why and how it has happened, we cannot hope to understand one of the central features of modern politics (or perhaps simply to understand modern politics?). For a stimulating comparative study centring on concepts and practices of freedom see Robert H. Taylor (ed), The Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), especially Sudipta Kaviraj’s superb analysis of India’s experience. The most ambitious attempt to assess the significance of its impact in the key case of China (oldest, densest, most defiantly autonomous of the world’s cultures, and globalizer in its own right and in its own terms very long ago) has been made over the last thirty years by Thomas A. Metzger. See conveniently his ‘The Western Concept of Civil Society in the Context of Chinese History’, Sudipta Kaviraj & Sunil Khilnani (eds), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 204–31. For classic studies of parts of the journey, see Hao Chang, Liang Ch’I-Chao and Intellectual Transition in China 1890–1907 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), and Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (New York: Harper, 1964). For Japan, see chapters by Kenneth B. Pyle (on ‘Meiji Conservatism’), Peter Duus & Irwin Scheiner (on ‘Socialism, Liberalism, Marxism’), and Andrew E. Barshay (on ‘Postwar Social and Political Thought 1945–1990’) in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (ed), Modern Japanese Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp 122–25, 297–98 and 326–27; Andrew Barshay, ‘Imagining Democracy in Postwar Japan: Reflections on Maruyama Masao and Modernism’, Journal of Japanese Studies, 18, 1992; Nobutaka Ike, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950). For transliteration into Arabic, see, for example, James L. Gelvin, ‘Developmentalism, Revolution and Freedom in the Arab East’, in Taylor (ed), Idea of Freedom, especially (for Gamal Abdul Nasser) 85–86; or into Wolof, in Senegal, Frederick Schaffer’s exemplary Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

2. It is important to underline how recently this has become a well-secured judgment. Even now, the relative scale of China’s population means that only the countervailing weight of India’s numbers makes it obviously true. Even twenty-five years ago the presumption that India was as likely to remain democratic as Holland would have seemed (and perhaps been) quixotic.

Chapter 1

1. Since we have come by now to mean so many different things by it, and since there is so much about the past of which we are blankly ignorant, you cannot really say when democracy in that sense began, or even, in any interesting sense, when it might have done so.

2. Someone who earned their living from composing speeches or teaching others how to do so. For all three of these roles Athens, at the time and later, offered preeminent examples, figures who still tower over the entire history of western culture: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes. Some were more friend than enemy of the democracy. But even these did not take the trouble, or see the occasion, to praise Athens’s political regime and way of life with the same zest and amplitude in any text which has come down to us. One, at least, went out of his way to do exactly the opposite.

3. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War Books I & II, tr Charles Forster Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1928), Bk I, xxii, 1, pp 38–39. For the novelty and self-consciousness of Thucydides’s method at this point, see Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, Vol 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 59–61.

4. Thucydides, History, I, xxii, 4, pp 40–41. Thucydides’s claim was to have composed it as a possession for all time, rather than a prize essay to be heard for the moment (Hornblower, Commentary, 61–62).

5. Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). He did not, of course, hold power solely by making speeches (cf M. I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Finley, ‘Athenian Demagogues’, Past and Present, 21, 1962, 3–24), but the speeches were essential to his capacity to hold it. The principal sources for the career of Pericles are Thucydides’s History and Plutarch’s Life. For an excellent brief summary, see the article by David Lewis, Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed, 1974.

6. Thucydides, History, II, lxv, 9, pp 376–77: Athens ‘became something that was a democracy by name, but actually a rule by the first man’. (See Hornblower, Commentary, 346, and for critical assessment of the claim, 344–47.)

7. Buried where they fell, on the battlefield where Athens, standing virtually alone, saved Greece from the massive land forces of the first great Persian invasion in 490 BC.

8. For Pericles’s speech, see Thucydides, History, II, xxxv–xlvi, pp 318–41. For the significance of the funeral oration as a public ceremony, and its determined use in defining Athens as a political community, both to itself and to others, see Nicole Loraux’s impressive The Invention of Athens, tr Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

9. Thucydides, History, II, xxxviii, 1, pp 322–23.

10. Thucydides, History, II, xxxvii, 1–2, pp 322–23. The translation is disputed, see Hornblower, Commentary, 298–99.

11. Thucydides, History, II, xli, 1, pp 330–31: ‘In a word, then, I say that our city as a whole is the school (paideusin) of Hellas.’ Hornblower (Commentary, 307–8) has a thoughtful discussion of what Thucydides intended Pericles to convey, and commends the translation as ‘a living lesson’.

12. Thucydides, History, II, xl, 2, pp 328–29. Hornblower, Commentary, 305–6 & 77–78, citing L. B. Carter, The Quiet Athenian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 45. Note the balance between committed public concern and the levels of mutual respect and civility which Pericles emphasizes alongside it.

13. As Loraux’s work shows excellently.

14. Metics (metoikoi) were resident aliens.

15. For the range of intellectual criticism prompted by Athens’s democratic experience, see especially Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

16. Pseudo-Xenophon, The Constitution of Athens, tr G. Bowersock (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). No doubt the main reason for continuing so to call him is, as Mogens Hansen says (Mogens H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 5), because that is what he sounds like. See too: A. W. Gomme, ‘The Old Oligarch’, in More Essays in Greek History and Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 38–69.

17. Cf his repeated formula: ‘I do not praise (ouk epaino) ….’ (Pseudo-Xenophon, I, 1, pp 474–75; III, 1, pp 498–99 etc).

18. Pseudo-Xenophon, I, 4, pp 476–77.

19. Pseudo-Xenophon, I, 2, pp 474–75.

20. Pseudo-Xenophon, I, 4, pp 476–77.

21. Pseudo-Xenophon, I, 1, pp 474–75; ‘in making their choice they have chosen to let the worst people be better off than the good (chrestous). Therefore on this account I do not think well of their constitution. But since they have decided to have it so, I intend to point out how well they preserve their constitution and accomplish those things for which the rest of the Greeks criticize them.’

22. Pseudo-Xenophon, I, 2, pp 474–75.

23. Pseudo-Xenophon, I, 5, pp 476–77: to beltiston—literally, the best bit.

24. Pseudo-Xenophon, I, 5, pp 476–77.

25. Pseudo-Xenophon, I, 6–8, pp 478–79.

26. Pseudo-Xenophon, I, 3, pp 476–77.

27. Pseudo-Xenophon, I, 7, pp 478–79.

28. Cf John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (London: HarperCollins/New York: Basic Books, 2000).

29. Compare the status of ‘spin’ in assessments of the political merits and limitations of the Blair government.

30. Compare, to take distasteful recent examples, the task of capturing the political realities of Taliban Afghanistan, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

31. Cf A.H.M. Jones, Athenian Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957); M. I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern, 2nd ed (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985) & Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Hansen, The Athenian Democracy; Robin Osborne, ‘Athenian Democracy: something to celebrate?’, Dialogos, 1, 1994, 48–58; ‘The Demos and its Divisions in classical Athens’, Oswyn Murray & S.R.F. Price (eds), The Greek City (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 265–93; ‘Ritual, finance, politics: an account of Athenian democracy’, R. Osborne & S. Hornblower (eds), Ritual, Finance, Politics: Athenian Democratic Accounts Presented to David Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 1–21.

32. They do not make those realities unreal (somehow cancel them), still less render them inconsequential. They merely make them, in many respects and for many purposes, inaccessible to us.

33. Compare three classic pictures: H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (London: Fontana, 1986); Michel Foucault, Power (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 2001).

34. Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens.

35. Compare the reactions of Western Europe and North America to the military suspension of elections in Algeria in 1991, and the hideous consequences which followed from that suspension.

36. Hansen, Athenian Democracy, 29–32; Simon Hornblower, ‘Creation and Development of Democratic Institutions in Ancient Greece’, J. Dunn (ed), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1–16.

37. Only wealthier (and invariably male) Athenians continued, for almost a century, to be eligible to hold such office.

38. Hansen, Athenian Democracy, 29–32. G.E.M. de Sainte Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981), is the most ambitious modern attempt to place the Athenian experience in the perspective of the history of the Greek world as a whole; but he does not offer a systematic assessment of Solon’s purposes or achievements.

39. Plato, Machiavelli, James Harrington, Rousseau, James Madison, Sieyes, Robespierre, Jeremy Bentham, even, as it turned out, somewhat self-contradictorily, Lenin.

40. All Lawgivers/Legislators were men. Contrast, according to Plato (who blandly credited Pericles’s to his mistress Aspasia), the real authors of funeral orations (Plato, Menexenus, tr R. G. Bury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929), 329–81, 336–39, 380–81).

41. As far as we now know. But compare the argument of Hansen, Athenian Democracy, 69–70.

42. Herodotus, History, tr A. D. Godley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1922), V, 66, 2, pp 72–73; Hansen, 33–34.

43. Thucydides, History, II, xxxvi, 1–2, pp 320–21; Loraux, Invention of Athens.

44. Thucydides, History, I, ii, 3–6, pp 4–7.

45. Hansen, Athenian Democracy, 92–93. Hansen’s outstanding book provides the best contemporary account of the institutions of the democracy at work.

46. Hansen, Athenian Democracy, 90–94.

47. Hansen, Athenian Democracy, 94.

48. In the fourth century BC this may have ceased to be so, at least for some, because of the institution of the misthos, a daily rate of pay not merely for acting as a juror on the popular courts but also for attending the Assembly itself. The members of the Council, serving in effect throughout an entire year, had always needed to have their own meals provided for them at public expense. The misthos was loathed by critics of the democracy for coarsening the social composition of its principal institutions, supplementing the motives for political participation by grossly material incentives, and altering the democracy’s natural political balance by so doing: precisely the consequences which appealed to the citizen majority who opted for it.

49. Hansen, Athenian Democracy, chapter 6.

50. Hansen, Athenian Democracy, chapter 10.

51. With some of the smaller units there may have been an element of duress in the volunteering (Hansen, Athenian Democracy, 249), as there often still is in small political units to this day.

52. This was not a position which could be held twice by the same person in any given year (Hansen, Athenian Democracy, 250), perhaps ever.

53. Plutarch, Lives, Vol 2, tr Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1916); Pericles, 32, pp 92–95; 35, p 103; Thucydides, History, II. lxv, 3–5, pp 374–75.

54. Although modern historians have sometimes employed the term to analyse aspects of Athenian politics, the Athenians had nothing which distantly resembled a modern political party.

55. See, especially, Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, & W. Robert Connor, The New Politicians of Fifth-Century Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). We can certainly assume, as all the finest historians of Athens always have, that this hard political labour of co-ordination, persuasion, reward, and threat must have gone on all the time.

56. Slave-dependent, women-excluding, unabashedly ethnocentric. No one any longer would care to defend these confines openly.

57. In the case of Plato this remains a partisan judgment. He certainly had personal and family links with men who did try to subvert it; and no one could fail to recognize that he viewed many aspects of it with visceral revulsion. But the reason we still read him today is that he understood some features of it all too well, and can still help us to understand them too, should we happen to wish to.

58. Aristotle, Politics, tr H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932); The Athenian Constitution, tr H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935).

59. George Grote, A History of Greece from the Earliest Period to the Generation Contemporary with Alexander the Great (London, 1846–56): and for the longer-term historical context, see Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

60. Which are the words we reach for when we try hardest to steady ourselves intellectually and politically in face of the greatest trauma of modern history? Cf the volume subtitles chosen by Ian Kershaw for his magisterial study of Hitler’s impact: Hitler: A Life, Vol 1 Hubris; Vol 2 Nemesis (London: Allen Lane, 1998 & 2000).

61. Cf Cynthia Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

62. Thomas Hobbes, Hobbes’s Thucydides, ed Richard Schlatter (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975).

63. Pseudo-Xenophon, I, 5, pp 476–77.

64. It would be more accurate to say jury murder. But this is too odd a phrase in modern English to introduce, without explaining it at the same time. The mass juries of the Athenian courts were one of the most potent instruments of its democracy in action. When they voted for Socrates’s death, they were making as definite a political choice as when they voted in the Assembly to savage Mitylene, or voted again, a few hours later, to reprieve it (Thucydides, History, III, xxxvi, i–xlix, 4, pp 54–87).

65. Plato, Crito, tr H. N. Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), 150–91.

66. Plato, Apology, tr H. N. Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), 68–145.

67. Whatever his own personal flirtations with incumbents of that role (cf Plato, Epistles, tr R. G. Bury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929), Seventh Letter, 476–565).

68. Just what practical conclusions to draw from this (or even what practical conclusions Plato himself went on to draw from it) remains far from obvious—far enough from obvious to provide the main intellectual stock in trade for an entire school of political thought, the extended clientela of Leo Strauss, an important element in American (and hence in world) politics over the last three decades: Ann Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

69. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (1642) & Leviathan (1651).

70. Plato, The Republic, tr Paul Shorey, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930–35), 559D–562, Vol 2, 295–303.

71. Republic, 561D, 302–03.

72. Republic, 561D, 302–03.

73. Republic, 561C–E, 300–03.

74. Republic, 562B–C, 304–05.

75. Republic, 562C, 304–05.

76. Republic, 562D–563 D, 304–11.

77. Republic, 563D, 310–11

78. Republic, 564A, 312–13.

79. Republic, 564A, 312–13, 566D–580C, 322–69.

80. Plato’s later political writings, The Laws and The Politicus (or Statesman), have less to say about democracy and left far less imprint on subsequent political perception or judgment.

81. Aristotle, Politics, 1279b, II 19–20, pp 208–09.

82. Aristotle, Politics, 1279a, II 37–39, pp 206–07.

83. Aristotle, Politics, 1279a, I 18, 1279b, I 10, 204–07.

84. Cf, helpfully, Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Pt 3, 235–394.

85. Cf David Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

86. Compare Hegel’s dazzling portrait, ‘The Political Work of Art’, in The Philosophy of History, Pt II, chapter 3, tr J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 250–76; E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935). Contrast the findings on the classical Greek polis itself of Mogens Hansen’s massive collaborative study of the city state form across time and space: ‘95 Theses about the Greek Polis in the Archaic and Classical Periods’, Historia, 52 (2003), 257–82.

87. Cf Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, with Farrar, Origins of Democratic Thinking.

88. Cf e.g. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Vol 1, chapters 8–10.

89. Cf Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason.

90. Cf John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future 2nd ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter 1.

91. Cf Neil Harding, ‘The Marxist-Leninist Detour’, in John Dunn (ed), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 155–87.

92. For the fate of the San Bushmen (a periphery of the periphery), see Leonard Thompson, Survival in Two Worlds: Moshoeshoe of Lesotho (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), chapter 1, esp 13 & 19, or C. W. de Kiewiet, A History of South Africa: Social and Economic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), chapter 1, 19–20; for the Nuer as British anthropologists liked to think of them, see E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). For their more recent fate, see Douglas H. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (London: James Currey & Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

93. One of the bravest attempts to do so is Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972). See also G.E.R. Lloyd & N. Sivin, The Way and the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), and, in more breathless outline, Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), chapter 16, ‘How China became Chinese’, 322–33.

94. Mogens Hansen (The Athenian Democracy) claims something close to this for fourth-century Athens, but as a political outcome, and certainly not as a verbal implication of the term demokratia itself.

95. See particularly Fergus Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), & The Roman Republic in Political Thought (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2002), an exceptionally illuminating study of the development of Roman political thought and its historical impact.

96. Though see, still, Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), or Christian Meier, Caesar, tr David McLintock (London: Fontana, 1996).

97. Though Vergil’s adamantine formula—Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento: Remember, O Roman, that it is for you to rule peoples with empire (Vergil, Aeneid, VI, 851)—scarcely suggests the latter.

98. The great historian of this endless circling back is John Pocock. See, especially, J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), and his recent magnum opus on the context of Edward Gibbon’s late-eighteenth-century masterpiece, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2016).

99. Millar, The Roman Republic.

100. Millar, The Roman Republic, 48–49.

101. Millar, The Roman Republic, 23–36; F. W. Walbank, Polybius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Kurt von Fritz, The Mixed Constitution in Antiquity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954); Claude Nicolet, ‘Polybe et les institutions romaines’, E. Gabba (ed), Polybe (Geneva, 1973), 209–58. There is an interesting study of Polybius’s acutely ambivalent attitude to Roman power and Roman culture by Craige B. Champion, Cultural Politics in Polybius’s Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

102. Polybius, The Histories, tr W. R. Paton, 6 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1922–27), XXXVIII, 22, Vol 6, 438–39: ‘Scipio, when he looked upon the city as it was utterly perishing and in the last throes of its complete destruction, is said to have shed tears and wept openly for his enemies. After being wrapped in thought for long, and realizing that all cities, nations, and authorities must, like men, meet their doom; that this happened to Ilium, once a prosperous city, to the empires of Assyria, Media, and Persia, the greatest of their time, and to Macedonia itself, the brilliance of which was so recent, either deliberately, or the verses escaping him, he said:

A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish

And Priam and his people shall be slain.

(Homer, Iliad VI, 448–9)

And when Polybius speaking with freedom to him, for he was his teacher, asked him what he meant by the words, they say that without any attempt at concealment he named his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all things human. Polybius actually heard him and recalls it in his history.’

(This fragment survives only in Appian, Punica, 132, though see also Histories, XXXVIII, 21, 436–37.) Walbank is sceptical of the significance of this fulsome passage (Polybius, 11). There is a careful discussion of the grounds for doubt in A. E. Astin, Scipio Aemilianus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 282–87.

103. Aristotle, Politics, esp 1281b–1284a, 220–24 cf Polybius, Histories, VI, 10–18, Vol 3, 292–311. For his central aim see Histories, I, 5–6, Vol 1, 2–5: ‘For who is so worthless or indolent as not to wish to know by what means and under what system of polity the Romans in less than fifty-three years have succeeded in subjecting the whole inhabited world to their sole government—a thing unique in history?’ A good sense of how far the category of democracy was from suggesting itself as an immediate description of Rome’s politics can be derived from Andrew Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and Claude Nicolet, The World of the Citizen in Republican Rome, tr P. S. Falla (London: Batsford, 1980).

104. Millar, Roman Republic, 170.

105. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy; compare Millar, Roman Republic, 166–67; Polybius, Histories, VI, 13, Vol 3, 298–301 (on Senate and diplomacy).

106. Polybius, Histories, VI, 57, 396–99: esp ‘When this happens, the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democracy (demokratia), but will change its nature to the worst thing of all, mob-rule (ochlokratia).’ Millar insists, convincingly, that Polybius at this point can only have had Rome in mind, Roman Republic, 30, 35–36.

107. Polybius, Histories, VI, 57, 398–99.

108. Polybius, Histories, VI, 10, 12–14, 292–93.

109. Millar, Roman Republic, 55–58; Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1996), 125–26; Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 62; Coleman, 50–80, is excellent on the background of educational practice into which Aristotle’s Politics was absorbed; Anthony Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 20–21.

110. Coleman, History of Political Thought, 55. There proved to be effective demand at the apogee of Islamic civilization for many aspects of Aristotle’s thinking. But nothing about the political organization of any Islamic society gave pressing occasion for addressing his exploration of the significance of politics. (Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (London: Routledge, 1998); Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Muhsin Mahdi, ‘Avicenna’, Encyclopedia Iranica, Vol 3 (London: Routledge, 1989), 66–110; Richard Walzer, Greek into Arabic (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1962), chapter 14, ‘Platonism in Islamic Philosophy’.

111. Quentin Skinner, ‘The Italian City-Republics’, in J. Dunn (ed), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 57–69; Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, revised ed (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Philip Jones, The Italian City State: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

112. Millar, Roman Republic, 58–59.

113. Millar, Roman Republic, 60–61.

114. Millar, Roman Republic, 62–63.

115. Andreu Bosch, Summari, index o epitome des admirables y nobilissims titols de honor de Cathalunya, Rossello I Cerdanya (1628), facsimile Barcelona 1974, cited by Xavier Gil, ‘Republican Politics in Early Modern Spain: the Castilian and Catalano-Aragonese Traditions’, in Martin Van Gelderen & Quentin Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Vol 1, 263–88 at p 280.

116. Wyger R. E. Velema, ‘“That a Republic Is Better than a Monarchy”: Anti-Monarchism in Early Modern Dutch Political Thought’, in Skinner & Van Gelderen, Republicanism, Vol 1, 9–25, esp 13–19; Martin Van Gelderen, Aristotelians, Monarchomachs: Sovereignty and respublica mixta in Dutch and German Political Thought, 1580–1650’, Skinner & Van Gelderen, Republicanism, Vol 1, 195–217.

117. Vrye Politijke Stellingen en Consideratien van Staat, 172–73, ed Wim Klever, Amsterdam 1974, cited by Martin Van Gelderen, ‘Aristotelians, Monarchomachs and Republics’, Skinner & Van Gelderen (eds), Republicanism, Vol 1, 195–217, at 215–16.

118. Hans Erich Bödeker, ‘Debating the respublica mixta: German and Dutch Political Discourses around 1700’, in Skinner & Van Gelderen (eds), Republicanism, Vol 1, 219–46, esp 222–28; Jonathan Scott, ‘Classical Republicanism in Seventeenth-Century England and the Netherlands’, in Skinner & Van Gelderen, Republicanism, Vol 1, 61–81, esp 76–80; Warren Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries (London: Verso, 1999); Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Hans Blom, Morality and Causality in Politics: the Rise of Materialism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Political Thought (Utrecht: University of Utrecht Press, 1995).

119. The key setting was the Putney debates inside the parliamentary armies: A.S.P. Woodhouse (ed), Puritanism and Liberty, 2nd ed (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1950); David Wootton, ‘The Levellers’, in Dunn (ed), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 71–89, & ‘Leveller Democracy and the English Revolution’, in J. H. Burns & Mark Goldie (eds), Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 412–42. The best overall study of the movement remains H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, 2nd ed (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1976).

120. Hobbes, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament, 2nd ed, F. Toennies (London: Frank Cass, 1969), 21: ‘For after the Bible was translated into English, every man, nay every boy and wench, that could read English, thought they spoke with God Almighty, and understood what he said.’

121. Hobbes, Behemoth, 26–44.

122. Hobbes, Behemoth, 43; De Cive: the English Version, ed Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

123. Cf Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, chapter 1.

124. Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations (London: Penguin, 2002), 100. Worden gives a spirited portrait of Toland in action, 95–120, stressing above all his youthful ebullience and manipulative opportunism (p 119). See also Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), and Chiara Giuntini, Panteismo e ideologia repubblicana: John Toland (1676–1722) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979); Blair Worden, ‘Republicanism and the Restoration 1660–1683’, in David Wootton (ed), Republicanism and Commercial Society 1649–1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 139–93; and Israel, Radical Enlightenment.

125. The contemporary translation, Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version, captures the flavour of Hobbes’s writing better, despite some inaccuracy. For a more analytically and historically reliable version, see Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed Richard Tuck & tr Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For the centrality of Hobbes’s engagement with classical rhetoric, see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in Hobbes’s Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

126. Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version, X, ix, p 136.

127. Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 313–28.

128. Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version, chapter VII, 1, and 5–7: pp 106–07, 109–10; chapter XII, 8: pp 151–52. Richard Tuck has emphasized the importance of this judgment in shaping Hobbes’s vision of politics from the beginning: Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 310–11).

129. Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version, chapter VII, 1: pp 106–07.

130. C.V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (London: Fontana, 1964), 71.

131. See particularly The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed Noel Malcolm, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). There is a striking picture of his work fanning out amongst Europe’s intelligentsia in Malcolm’s Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), chapter 14, 457–545, but as yet no especially illuminating biography. The biography to wait for, once again, is Noel Malcolm’s, in preparation for the Clarendon Press.

132. There are two interesting recent biographies of Spinoza by Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Margaret Gullan-Whur, Within Reason: A Life of Spinoza (London: Pimlico, 2000). Much the most ambitious and learned presentation of his impact on European thought and feeling at large is Israel’s remarkable Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), always interesting but not invariably convincing in its judgments. Contrast, for example, on the impact of Hobbes, Malcolm’s chapter in his Aspects of Hobbes.

133. His biographer John Aubrey records Hobbes as saying of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that he had ‘cut through him a bar’s length, for he durst not write so boldly’. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed Andrew Clark, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), I, 357.

134. Nadler, Spinoza, 44.

135. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 166.

136. Nadler, Spinoza, chapter 6, esp 127–29.

137. Nadler, Spinoza, 182–83.

138. Spinoza, Political Works, ed & tr A. G. Wernham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). For helpful assessments of Spinoza’s political thought, see especially Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 40–52; Wernham’s Introduction; and Theo Verbeek, Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise: Exploring ‘The Will of God’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). For the Dutch background to Spinoza’s political thought, see, besides Israel’s Radical Enlightenment, also his ‘The Intellectual Origins of Modern Democratic Republicanism’, European Journal of Political Theory, 3 (2004), 7–36.

139. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus), chapter XI, 440–43.

140. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus), 316–17.

141. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus), 276–78. Compare Hobbes, De Cive, VII, 1, 106–07.

142. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus), 284.

143. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus), 288.

144. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus Politicus), 376.

145. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus Politicus), chapter X, 440: ‘tertium et omnino absolutum imperium’. It is not clear what the intended force of this formula is. For Spinoza all sovereignty is by definition absolute. The sovereign is entitled to (and potentially needs to) judge everything about how human beings should or should not act: Tractatus Politicus, IV, 2, pp 300–01. It sometimes appears that he wishes to argue that democracy differs from monarchy and aristocracy in that it will never be (or is incapable of proving) self-frustrating or self-undermining (Tractatus Politicus, VIII, 3, 4, 6 & 7, pp 370–73: ‘If there is such a thing as absolute sovereignty, it is in reality what is held by the entire multitude’). But in practice democratic sovereigns are every bit as capable of misjudging their own interests or even their future tastes as aristocracies or monarchs. At no point does Spinoza offer any grounds for denying this; nor is there any evidence that he felt the least inclination to deny it. Under a democracy, there is indeed nothing but the demos itself to stop the state doing whatever it then chooses. But this gives no guarantee that the demos will judge coherently or accurately, nor that it will appreciate over time the consequences of its own actions. Did Spinoza not see this? Did he wish to deny it? I cannot see that we know.

146. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus Politicus), 440, 442.

147. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus), 136.

148. Atque hac ratione omnes manent ut antea in statu naturali aequales (Spinoza, Political Writings (Tractatus Politicus), 135–36).

149. Polybius, Histories, VI, 57, 398–99; Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, chapters 10 & 11.

150. Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, 306.

151. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus), XX, pp 240–43: ‘I have thus shown: I. That it is impossible to deprive men of the freedom to say what they think. II. That this freedom can be granted to everyone without infringing the right and authority of the sovereign; and that everyone can keep it without infringing that right as long as he does not use it as a licence to introduce anything into the state as a law, or to do anything contrary to the accepted laws. III. That it is no danger to the peace of the state; and that all troubles arising from it can easily be checked. IV. That it is no danger to piety either. V. That laws passed about speculative matters are utterly useless; and finally, VI. That this freedom not only can be granted without danger to public peace, piety, and the right of the sovereign, but actually must be granted if all are to be preserved.’

152. Compare Hobbes, De Cive, X, 8: p 135: ‘although the word liberty, may in large, and ample letters be written over the gates of any City whatsoever, yet it is not meant the Subjects, but the Cities liberty, neither can that word with better Right be inscribed on a City which is governed by the people, then that which is ruled by a Monarch.’ The city which Hobbes had in mind was Lucca (Hobbes, Leviathan, ed Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chapter 21, 149: ‘there is writ on the Turrets of the city of Luca in great Characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS; yet no man can thence inferre, that a particular man has more Libertie, or Immunitie from the service of the Commonwealth there, than in Constantinople.’ The inscription still stands. But contrast Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), for the tradition of political understanding which Hobbes sought to overthrow. For the substantial degree of overlap between Spinoza’s views and this judgment of Hobbes, see Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus), XVI, the lengthy penultimate sentence of p 136. As Spinoza himself concludes: ‘Nec his plura addere opus est.’ There is no need to say more.

153. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus Politicus), VII, 5, p 338–39, insists stoutly that it is stupid to be willing to live as slaves in peace in order to wage war more effectively: ‘inscitia sane est, nimirum quod, ut bellum felicius gerant, in pace servire.’ But he does not choose to dispute the common charge against democracy that its virtue is far more effective in peace than it is in war ‘ejus virtus multo magis in pace quam in bello valet’.

154. Algernon Sidney, Discourses on Government, 2nd ed (London: J. Darby, 1704), 146: ‘That is the best Government, which best provides for war.’

155. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus Politicus), VII, 338–39. This was a judgment in itself which would have astounded any Athenian.

156. Spinoza, Political Works (Tractatus Politicus), chapter XI, 440–41: ‘Reliqua desiderantur’. The rest is missing.

157. The diary of the Leiden scholar Gronovius records that Spinoza requested an audience with Johan de Witt to discuss the latter’s (rumoured) negative reactions to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and that de Witt responded, unambiguously enough, that he ‘did not want to see him pass his threshold’ (W.N.A. Klever, ‘A New Document on De Witt’s Attitude to Spinoza’, Studia Spinoziana, 9 (1993), 379–88; Nadler, Spinoza, 256.)

158. See especially Hansen, Athenian Democracy; 71–2, 228–29, 266–68 (on ho boulomenos), 81–85 (on isonomia and isegoria); Finley, Politics in the Ancient World; and cf Martin Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to Sovereignty of Law: Law, Sovereignty and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

159. The political significance of this is well captured by Quentin Skinner in ‘From the State of Princes to the Person of the State’, Visions of Politics, Vol 2, 368–413. For its longer-term implications, see especially Istvan Hont, ‘The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind’, in J. Dunn (ed), Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 166–231.

160. This great phrase comes from the dying speech (a more individualist genre than the funeral oration) of an unreconstructed Leveller leader, Colonel Richard Rumbold, decades after the movement itself had been crushed by Oliver Cromwell. He delivered the speech (as much of it as he was permitted to, and in the face of considerable resistance from his captors) at the Market Cross in Edinburgh in June 1685, shortly before he was hung, drawn, and quartered for designing the death of the King in the Rye House Plot against Charles II. (The Dying Speeches of Several Excellent Persons who Suffered for their Zeal against Popery and Arbitrary Government, London, 1689 (Wing 2957), 24): ‘I am sure there was no Man born marked of God above another; for none comes into the World with a Saddle on his Back, neither any Booted and Spurred to ride him.’ The plot itself drew its name from its intended setting, Rumbold’s own house in the Kentish town of Rye, with its conveniently high garden wall, ideal for an ambush: Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 352–71, esp 364.

Chapter 2

1. Franco Venturi, Saggi sull’Europa Illuminista, Vol 1, Alberto Radicati di Passerano (Turin: Einaudi, 1954), ‘Deismo, cristianesimo e democrazia perfetta’, 248–69; Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). For a notable example earlier in the seventeenth century (expressed in Latin, as far as we know in strict seclusion, and not yet reliably dated), see the resolute rejection of Hobbes’s critique of democracy by William Petty, as a young man a close acquaintance and admirer of Hobbes: Frank Amati & Tony Aspromourgos, ‘Petty contra Hobbes: a previously untranslated manuscript’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 46 (1985), 127–32, esp 130, ‘Whether it is more pleasant to human nature to transfer their power forever into the hands of a single person (that is, for those who hold power to give it away) or whether it is better to serve the very same person but only appointing him to office after a gradual process and for a brief period? I propose that power should be shaped and drawn up by the people themselves; otherwise the monarch will be susceptible to the daily change of affairs and to his temperament.’ A cogent line of thought.

2. Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003).

3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, tr & ed Harvey C. Mansfield & Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

4. Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

5. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). For the variations in political structure and culture from one colony (or State) to another, see helpfully Richard Beeman, The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

6. Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2003), 106.

7. Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew; Jack N. Rakove, James Madison and the Founding of the American Republic, 2nd ed (New York: Longman, 2002); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).

8. Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew, 106.

9. Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew, 107.

10. Wood, Creation of the American Republic; Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution 1781–1788 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964).

11. Jacob E. Cooke (ed), The Federalist (Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, & James Madison) (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1961), Introduction, xix–xxx.

12. Rakove, James Madison, 11. Besides Rakove’s clear and thoughtful study, and his rich analysis of the intellectual and political background to the Constitution, Original Meanings (New York: Vintage, 1997), see especially Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). One month earlier, in April 1787, Madison had summarized his conclusions in a striking diagnosis of ‘The Vices of the Political System of the United States’ (Papers of James Madison, ed Robert A. Rutland et al, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1975), IX, 345–58, esp 354–57).

13. Rakove, James Madison, 64–65.

14. Rakove, Madison, 61–62.

15. Rakove, Madison, 63.

16. Cooke (ed), Federalist, 56. Jefferson was Ambassador in Paris at the time. For Madison’s letter of 24 October 1787, see Papers of James Madison, ed Rutland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), X, 205–20. Like its two predecessors (p 206), it was delayed by the difficulties of finding a reliable transatlantic carrier and the pressing concerns of America’s leading naval officer, John Paul Jones (pp 218–19). On the relation of democracy to America’s political predicament see especially 212–13: ‘Those who contend for a simple Democracy, or a pure republic, activated by the sense of the majority, and operating within narrow limits, assume or suppose a case which is altogether fictitious. They found their reasoning on the idea, that the people composing the Society, enjoy not only an equality of political rights; but that they have all precisely the same interests, and the same feelings in every respect. Were this in reality the case, their reasoning would be conclusive…. The interest of the majority would be that of the minority also; the decision could only turn on mere opinion concerning the good of the whole, of which the major voice would be the safest criterion; and within a small sphere, this voice could be most easily collected, and the public affairs most accurately managed. We know however that no Society ever did or can consist of so homogeneous a mass of Citizens. In the savage State indeed, an approach is made towards it; but in that State little or no Government is necessary. In all civilized Societies, distinctions are various and unavoidable. A distinction of property results from that very protection which a free Government gives to unequal faculties of acquiring it. There will be rich and poor; creditors and debtors; a landed interest, a mercantile interest, a manufacturing interest.’ etc.

17. Federalist, 59.

18. Federalist, 60.

19. Federalist, 60–61.

20. Federalist, 61.

21. Federalist, 65.

22. Federalist, 65.

23. Federalist (Number 63), p 427.

24. Federalist, 427.

25. Federalist, 428.

26. Federalist (Number 48), p 333.

27. Federalist, 335–36. Compare Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Harper, 1964), 113–24: ‘An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.’

28. Wood, The American Revolution, 62.

29. Wood, American Revolution, 67.

30. Wood, American Revolution, 66

31. Wood, American Revolution, 40–41.

32. Madison to Edward Everett, 14 November 1831: Drew R. McCoy The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 133.

33. McCoy, Last of the Fathers, 116–17. Madison to Thomas Ritchie, 18 December 1825: ‘All power in human hands is liable to be abused. In Governments independent of the people, the rights and interests of the whole may be sacrificed to the views of the Government. In Republics, where the people govern themselves, and where, of course, the majority govern, a danger to the minority arises from opportunities tempting a sacrifice of their rights to the interests, real or supposed, of the majority. No form of government, therefore, can be a perfect guard against the abuse of power. The recommendation of the republican form is, that the danger of abuse is less than in any other; and the superior recommendation of the federo-republican system is, that while it provides more effectually against external danger, it involves a greater security to the minority against the hasty formation of oppressive majorities.’ [James Madison, Letters & Other Writings, ed William C. Rives & Philip R. Fendall (Philadelphia, 1865), III, 507.

34. McCoy Last of the Fathers, 193–206: James Madison, Notes on Suffrage c 1821.

35. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993), 270.

36. McCoy, Last of the Fathers, 195.

37. McCoy Last of the Fathers, 195

38. Wood, Radicalism, 295–96.

39. Wood, Radicalism, 296.

40. Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators (London: Fontana, 1992); R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, Vol 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959). There is an incisive analysis of the trajectory of the Dutch Republic from the Patriot Revolt through to the creation and fall of the Batavian Republic in Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), chapters 42–44. For the very limited Dutch zest for democracy as a regime form earlier in the century see Leonard Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 114, 132, 144–45, etc.

41. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 80–135.

42. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 94

43. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 81.

44. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 94.

45. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 127.

46. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 94–95.

47. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 95.

48. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 2.

49. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, Vol 1, 17; and see further R. R. Palmer, ‘Notes on the Use of the Word “Democracy” 1789–1799’, Political Science Quarterly, LXVIII, 1953, 203–26.

50. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 15.

51. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 127.

52. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 630–48.

53. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 341.

54. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 342.

55. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 345–46.

56. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 346.

57. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 347.

58. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 347–57.

59. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 479–502.

60. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 349.

61. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 349–50.

62. This is the summary of Suzanne Tassier, the leading Belgian historian of the revolt (Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1934, 453, cited by Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 350).

63. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 351.

64. Suzanne Tassier, Les Démocrates Belges de 1789: étude sur le Vonckisme et la Révolution brabançonne (Brussels: Mémoires de l’Academie royale de Belgique, classe des lettres, 2nd ser, XXVIII), 190.

65. Arno J. Mayer, The Furies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 323–70.

66. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, I, 355–56. See also Janet Polasky, ‘The Success of a Counter-Revolution in Revolutionary Europe: the Brabant Revolution of 1789’, Tijdschrift fur Geschiednis, 102, 1989, 413–21; her Revolution in Brussels (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1985). J. Craeybeckx, ‘The Brabant Revolution: a conservative revolt in a backward country?’, Acta Historiae Neerlandica, 4 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970), 49–83, disputes the emphasis on Belgium’s relative economic and social backwardness.

67. Frederic Volpi, Islam and Democracy: The Failure of Dialogue in Algeria (London: Pluto Press, 2003).

68. Richard Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford: Berg, 2002).

69. René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d’Argenson, Considérations sur le gouvernment ancien et présent de la France, 2nd ed (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1784).

70. Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 376.

71. D’Argenson, Considérations 1784; Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 377.

72. D’Argenson, Considérations 1784, iv–v. The son saw fit to interpolate a considerable amount of material apparently of his own into this (officially) second edition.

73. Franklin L. Ford, Sword and Robe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), chapter 12.

74. Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 376.

75. Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 390.

76. Roger Tisserand (ed), Les Concurrents de J. J. Rousseau à l’Académie de Dijon (Paris, 1936), 130–31.

77. D’Argenson, Considérations 1784, chapter 7, 192–297. The first edition (1764), 215–328, is much sparser.

78. D’Argenson, Considérations 1784, 195. Cf first edition, 303–04. ‘Le Roi ne peut-il régner sur des Citoyens sans dominer sur des esclaves?’ Can the King not reign over Citizens without dominating slaves?

79. D’Argenson, Considérations 1784, 272. Cf 1764 ed, 305–10. Compare Montesquieu’s classic defence of intermediary powers as devices through which one power can obstruct another throughout L’Esprit des Loix (1748) (esp Bk XI, chapter 6), and the defence of the delaying function of the separation of powers in the Federalist. Cf Bernard Manin, ‘Checks, Balances and Boundaries: the Separation of Powers in the Constitutional Debate of 1787’, Biancamaria Fontana (ed), The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 27–62.

80. D’Argenson, Considérations 1784, 296. D’Argenson’s original formulation (1764 ed, 314) was considerably more tactful towards the monarch’s own authority, but just as confident of the indispensability of the people as a source of information, both to the monarch and to one another, about the real scope of their interests.

81. Michael Sonenscher, ‘The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic’, History of Political Thought, 18, 1997, 64–103 & 267–325. For the pressures behind this, see especially John Brewer, The Sinews of War: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

82. D’Argenson, Considérations 1784, 199. None of these details appears in the 1764 edition.

83. D’Argenson, Considérations 1784, 199. This phrase does not appear in the 1764 edition. The galvanizing effects of his Plan on rural productivity and prosperity figure prominently in the original edition (1764, 274–95).

84. D’Argenson, Considérations 1764, 7; the 1784 edition, 12, adds emphasis on the common interest in the good government of the kingdom.

85. D’Argenson, Considérations 1764, 7–8; 1784, 15.

86. D’Argenson, Considérations 1764, 8; 1784, 15. The original edition (p 12) does note that Switzerland is a pure Democracy, since, although the Nobility enjoys a measure of distinction, this furnishes it with no governmental authority. There is no compelling synoptic view of the scale, distribution, or quality of Swiss democracy from canton to canton in the eighteenth century. For an assessment of an individual canton, see Benjamin Barber, The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). For Geneva, a far from democratic instance, see two chapters by Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe: The First Crisis, tr R. B. Litchfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 340–50, and The End of the Old Regime in Europe: Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 459–96; Linda Kirk, ‘Genevan Republicanism’, David Wootton (ed), Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society 1649–1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 270–309; and Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the ‘First Discourse’ to the ‘Social Contract’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). D’Argenson’s assumption that Switzerland provided the only protracted modern European experience of democracy in action was still compelling enough a hundred years later for George Grote, the great Victorian historian of Athenian democracy, to make ‘an excursion to Switzerland, in order to observe, close at hand, the nearest modern analogue of the Grecian republics’, to draw conscious lessons from its experience in interpreting Athenian democracy in action, and to publish his conclusions in Letters on Switzerland. (See Alexander Bain, ‘The Intellectual Character and Writings of George Grote’, The Minor Works of George Grote (London: John Murray, 1873), 102–03.)

87. Franklin L. Ford, Sword and Robe, chapter 12. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, hereditary Président à Mortier of the Parlement of Bordeaux and author of the great L’Esprit des Loix (1748), is a classic instance.

88. Charles-René D’Argenson (ed), Mémoires du Marquis d’Argenson (Paris: P. Jannet, 1857–58), V, 129, Reading note on Lettres historiques sur le Parlement. See also the amplification in 1756, pp 349–50, etc., and cf Considérations 1784, 272.

89. An exception amongst its foreign admirers should perhaps be made in the case of Tom Paine. Cf The Rights of Man Pt II (London: J. M. Dent, 1916), 176–77, etc.

90. For Sieyes see especially his Political Writings, ed Michael Sonenscher (Indianopolis: Hackett, 2003); Murray Forsyth, Reason and Revolution: the Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyes (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987); and Pasquale Pasquino, Sieyes et l’Invention de la Constitution en France (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998).

91. D’Argenson, Considérations 1764, 7; 1784, 15.

92. The most vivid and economical synoptic picture of France’s movement towards revolution remains Georges Lefebvre’s pre-war The Coming of the French Revolution, tr R. R. Palmer (New York: Vintage, 1957). See also Jacques Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille, July 14th 1789, tr Jean Stewart (London: Faber, 1970), and more recently Simon Schama’s swashbuckling Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989). There are well-balanced treatments in two books by William Doyle, The Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) and The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and in Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 2002), 395–580.

93. On the cahiers, see the classic analysis by Beatrice Hyslop, Guide to the General Cahiers of 1789 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), and George V. Taylor, ‘Revolutionary and Non-revolutionary Content in the Cahiers’, French Historical Studies, 7, 1972, 479–502.

94. Goya’s Disasters of War. And see Arno J. Mayer, The Furies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

95. Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches, Vol VIII The French Revolution 1790–1794, ed L. J. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

96. Despite the fact that he is often credited with just this contribution, for drawing the young General, Napoleon Bonaparte, to the centre of Parisian politics and collaborating with him in killing off the First Republic. For Sieyes’s life, see Jean-Denis Bredin, Sieyes: la Clé de la Révolution française (Paris: Éditions du Fallois, 1988). For his ideas, see Murray Forsyth, Reason and Revolution. The most accessible English-language version of his political works is now Michael Sonenscher’s edition of his Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), which contains all three of the key pamphlets written in 1788, along with a very subtle and suggestive Introduction. For French originals of these, see Marcel Dorigny (ed), Oeuvres de Sieyes (Paris: Éditions d’Histoire Sociale, 1989), Vol 1.

97. Forsyth, Reason and Revolution, 2.

98. Vues sur les moyens d’exécution, 2 (Oeuvres, ed Dorigny, Vol 1) Political Writings, ed Sonenscher, 5.

99. Plato, Republic, tr Paul Shorey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 558C, Vol 2, 290–91: ‘assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike’.

100. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, & P. G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), esp 311–30, 401–04, 433–36. John Dunn, Rethinking Modern Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chapter 3.

101. Vues, 127 (Oeuvres, ed Dorigny, Vol 1); Political Writings, 54.

102. Vues, 124–29 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 53–55. I have modified the translation here, and elsewhere, to make it more literal.

103. Vues, 112–13 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 48

104. Vues, 114 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 49

105. Vues, 3; 1 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 4

106. Vues, 3–4 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 5.

107. Essai sur les privilèges, 1–2 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 69. The Essai was an essay on the idea of privilege; but it was also very much an assault on the highly particular array of privileges which dominated the status system of ancien régime France. The definite article, in this case, carries both senses.

108. Essai, 2 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 70.

109. Essai, 1–5 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 69–71.

110. Essai, 14 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 76. Sieyes cites as evidence the shocked complaint of the Order of Nobility from the last preceding meeting of the Estates General in 1614 that the Third Estate, ‘almost all the vassals of the first orders’ should have had the temerity to describe themselves as younger siblings of their superiors (Political Writings, 90).

111. Essai, 53 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 74–75.

112. Essai, 18–25 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 76–78.

113. Essai, 29 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 80. This is, of course, equally true of the inheritance of wealth in a capitalist economy and has remained an element of ideological vulnerability (or, at the very least, of implausibility).

114. Essai, 37 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 84.

115. Essai, 40 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 85.

116. Qu’est-ce que le tiers état?, 1, 6, 9 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); What Is the Third Estate? (Political Writings, 94, 96, 98). See Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction (Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 184–85).

117. George V. Taylor, ‘Non-capitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution’, American Historical Review, 62, 1967, 429–96; Colin Lucas, ‘Nobles, Bourgeois and the Origins of the French Revolution’, Past and Present, 60, 1973, 84–126; Patrice Higonnet, Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to the Enlightenment, tr William Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For a powerful presentation of the realities of the First Estate in its eighteenth-century setting, see John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), summarizing a lifetime’s research.

118. Sieyes, Essai, 53 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 90.

119. Sieyes, Tiers état, 1 (Oeuvres, Vol 1); Political Writings, 94.

120. Sieyes, Tiers état, 1; Political Writings, 94.

121. Sieyes, Tiers état, 2; Political Writings, 94.

122. Sieyes, Tiers état, 2–3; Political Writings, 95.

123. Sieyes, Tiers état, 6; Political Writings, 96.

124. Sieyes, Tiers état, 4; Political Writings, 95.

125. Sieyes, Tiers état, 10; Political Writings, 98.

126. Sieyes, Tiers état, 10; Political Writings, 99.

127. Sieyes, Tiers état, 98; Political Writings, 147.

128. Sieyes, Tiers état, 6–9; Political Writings, 97.

129. Sieyes, Tiers état, 9; Political Writings, 98.

130. Sieyes, Tiers état, 16; Political Writings, 102.

131. Sieyes, Tiers état, 27; Political Writings, 107. As the bloodshed of the next twenty-five years placed beyond reasonable doubt, this was not a comparison to take lightly. (Cf R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution (New York: Athenaeum, 1965), 218).

132. Sieyes, Tiers état, 110; Political Writings, 158.

133. What Is the Third Estate?, ed S. E. Finer (London: Pall Mall, 1963), 177. The note does not appear in the Dorigny edition.

134. Sieyes, Political Writings, 147n. The note does not appear in the Dorigny edition.

135. Sieyes, Political Writings, 147n. Finer, Third Estate, 196–97, translates vividly.

136. Sieyes, Tiers état, 51; again Finer’s translation: Third Estate, 96.

137. R. R. Palmer, Political Science Quarterly, 1953.

138. A. Dufourcq, Le Régime Jacobin en Italie: étude sur la République romaine 1798–99 (Paris: Perrin, 1900), 30; Palmer, Political Science Quarterly, 1953, 221, translates more of the relevant text.

139. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, 176–77.

140. Bredin, Sieyes, 525

141. M. Crook, Elections in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 11. On the development of elections during the Revolution, see, in addition to Crook, Patrice Gueniffey, Le Nombre et la Raison: la révolution française et les élections (Paris: Gallimard, 1993).

142. Forsyth, Reason and Revolution, 162–65; E.-J. Sieyes, Écrits politiques, ed R. Zappéri (Paris: Archives Contemporaines, 1985), 189–206; Crook, Elections, 30.

143. Crook, Elections, 31.

144. Crook, Elections, 33.

145. Crook, Elections, 33.

146. Crook, Elections, 34

147. Maximilien Robespierre, Discours et rapports à la Convention (Paris: Union Générale des Éditions, 1965), 213.

148. Robespierre, Discours, 214.

149. Robespierre, Discours, 216.

150. Robespierre, Discours, 218.

151. Robespierre, Discours, 221.

152. Robespierre, Discours, 222.

153. Robespierre, Discours, 223.

154. Robespierre, Discours, 227. For a spirited but impressively levelheaded analysis of this government in action, see Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled.

155. Robespierre, Discours, 236.

Chapter 3

1. Cf John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk 1, chapter 1: ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.’ (The Social Contract and Discourses, tr G.D.H. Cole (London: J. M. Dent), 5; Political Writings, ed C. E. Vaughan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).

3. Raymond Geuss, Public Goods, Private Goods (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), chapter 3 Res Publica. For the historical trajectory of the distinction between public and private law see Peter Stein, Roman Law in European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21 etc.

4. Maximilien Robespierre, Discours et rapports à la Convention (Paris: Union Générale des Éditions, 1965), 213.

5. M. I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern (London: Hogarth Press, 1985); Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); M. H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

6. George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959); Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution 1793–94, tr G. Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).

7. Alexander Hamilton, Letter to Gouverneur Morris, 19 May 1777 (Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Vol 1, ed Harold C. Syrett & Jacob E. Cooke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 255): ‘When the deliberative or judicial powers are vested wholly or partly in the collective body of the people, you must expect error, confusion and instability. But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.’ Not a bad judgment as prophecies go.

8. Robespierre, Discours, 213.

9. Sylvain Maréchal, Manifesto of the Equals (Filippo Michele Buonarroti, Conspiration pour l’égalité, dite de Babeuf (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1957), Vol 2, 94–95: ‘The French Revolution is only the precursor of another revolution, far greater, far more solemn, which will be the last.’

10. Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest 1789–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 3–81.

11. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959).

12. Jean Bruhat, ‘La Révolution Française et la Formation de la Pensée de Marx’, Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, 48, 1966, 125–70.

13. Buonarroti, Conspiration, 26.

14. Buonarroti, Conspiration, 25.

15. Buonarroti, Conspiration, 26.

16. Buonarroti, Conspiration, 26–27.

17. Buonarroti, Conspiration, 28.

18. Buonarroti, Conspiration, 33.

19. Buonarroti, Conspiration, 114.

20. Buonarroti, Conspiration, 114n.

21. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, tr & ed Harvey C. Mansfield & Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

22. For the sheer length of the time-span, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Perseus Books, 2000). For the complexity and ambivalence of the protracted and still severely incomplete process of political reconciliation to the outcome, see especially Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), and James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978).

23. Cf Bernard Williams, ‘External and Internal Reasons’, in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 101–13.

24. For a classic exposition of this point, see Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

25. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist

26. Cobb, The Police and the People gives a withering verdict. For the subsequent fate of the Democrats see Isser Woloch, The Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement under the Directory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), esp chapter 6 ‘The Democratic Persuasion’.

27. David Hume, ‘Of the First Principles of Government’, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1985), 32: ‘Nothing appears more surprising, to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.’ The best picture of the conclusions which Hume drew from this insight is still Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

28. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, tr Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). The best attempt to tell the story continuously in relation to a single political community has been made (unsurprisingly) in relation to France itself. See Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen: Histoire de la suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Le Peuple introuvable: histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1998); La Démocratie inachevée: Histoire de la souverainté du peuple en France (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); Le Modèle Politique Français: la société civile contre le jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004). For the context of modern politics, see John Dunn (ed), The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) (especially the chapter by Istvan Hont).

29. Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

30. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Bks I & II, tr Charles Forster Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1928), II, lxv, 9, pp 376–77.

31. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950), 285.

32. See, for example, Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

33. The country of which this is least clearly true is still the United States of America; and the obstacles which stand in the way of its doing so are still a plain legacy from the efforts by Madison and his colleagues to ensure that the United States should not be what they understood as a democracy (cf Manin, ‘Checks, Balances and Boundaries’, in Biancamaria Fontana (ed), The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 27–62).

34. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

35. Cf Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

36. G. A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

37. The idea of fixed and objective standards enjoyed an intense glamour in the course of the Revolution. The view that measures of time and space can and should be drawn directly from the fabric of the world itself, and not from antique superstitions or habits, led, amongst other things, to the creation of a new calendar and the invention of the metric system: cf Denis Guedj, Le Mètre du monde (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000); Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things (London: Abacus, 2004).

38. ‘US Leader appeals to closest friend in the world’, Financial Times, 20 November 2003, p 4.

39. Joseph de Maistre, Works, ed & tr Jack Lively (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 93: ‘It is said that the people are sovereign; but over whom? Over themselves, apparently. The people are thus subject. There is surely something equivocal if not erroneous here, for the people which command are not the people which obey.’

40. C. V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (London: Fontana, 1964), 217.

41. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, 71.

42. Bruce Cumings, North Korea: The Hermit Kingdom (London: Prospect, 2003)

43. Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Philip Short, Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare (London: John Murray, 2004).

44. Plato, The Republic, 558C, tr Paul Shorey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), Vol 2, 290–91.

45. Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 313–28.

Chapter 4

1. The best picture of Babeuf’s political life, the botched conspiracy to which he gave his name, his defiant defence of a lifetime’s aims and convictions before the tribunal at Vendôme, failed suicide attempt and prompt execution, is R. B. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist (London: Edwin Arnold, 1978). There is no good reason to doubt Babeuf’s commitment to democracy under less extreme conditions throughout his life: 68, 160–61, 380. On 4 July 1790, from the Conciergerie prison, in the third number of his Journal de la Confédération, he gave classic expression to the most drastic vision of what democracy means: ‘If the People are the Sovereign, they should exercise as much sovereignty as they absolutely can themselves … to accomplish that which you have to do and can do yourself use representation on the fewest possible occasions and be nearly always your own representative’ (p 77). Easier said than done. For the final stage of his life, see 325–26.

2. Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1977 & 1981).

3. Cf Jeremy Bentham’s verdict on full-fledged natural rights: Anarchical Fallacies, in J. Bentham, Rights, Representation and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution, ed Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin & Cyprian Blamires (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 317–434, esp 330.

4. Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Protest in the Industrial Revolution (Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1986) ; Gareth Stedman Jones, Rethinking Chartism, Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 90–178; Mark Hovell, The Chartist Movement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1918); Logie Barrow & Ian Bullock, Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

5. For Cavour, see Dennis Mack Smith, Italy: A Modern History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), chapters 1–3; Denis Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi: A Study in Political Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Anthony Cardozo, ‘Cavour and Piedmont’, John A. Davis (ed), Italy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 108–31. For Bismarck, A.J.P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (London: Arrow Books, 1961); Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroder and the Building of the German Empire (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977). For Disraeli, Paul Smith, Disraeli: A Brief Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Edgar Feuchtwanger, Disraeli (London: Arnold, 2000); Maurice Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone & Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).

6. Proudhon thought and wrote about this issue over several decades, usually in a state of some anxiety and dismay. For key episodes, see Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Idée Générale de la Révolution au xixe siècle, ed Aimé Berthod (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1923), 210–14 and 344–45. For characteristic notes, see, e.g. p 211: ‘Je veux traiter directement, individuellement pour moi-même; le suffrage universel est à mes yeux une vraie loterie’ (a complete lottery); p 208 ‘Gouvernement démocratique et Religion naturelle sont des contradictions, à moins qu’on ne préfère y voir deux mystifications. Le peuple n’a pas plus voix consultative dans l’État que dans l’Église: son rôle est d’obéir et de croire.’ La Révolution Sociale démontrée par le coup d’état du deux decembre, ed Edouard Dolléans & Georges Duveau (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1936), chapter 3 & pp 288–97; De la Capacité Politique des Classes Ouvrières, ed Maxime Leroy (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1924), Pt II, chapter 15 & Pt III. For helpful presentations of his thinking as a whole, see Robert J. Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Thought of P-J Proudhon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), and K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

7. Cf Michael Mandlebaum, The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century (Oxford: Public Affairs Press, 2002); Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). John A. Thompson, Woodrow Wilson (London: Longman, 2002), gives a lucid and balanced account. Note the firmness of Wilson in stating America’s war aims to Congress, 2 April 1917: ‘We shall fight for the things we have always carried closest to our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free’ (149–50). But note also the prudent reservation a year later (remarks to foreign correspondents, 8 April 1918): ‘I am not fighting for democracy except for the peoples who want democracy. If they don’t want it, that is none of my business’ (169, 185). Some Presidents learn slower than others: if at all.

8. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

9. John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad & The Road to Berlin (both London: Panther, 1985).

10. Tony Judt, La Réconstruction du parti socialiste 1921–1926 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1976); Socialism in Provence 1871–1914: A Study of the Origins of the Modern French Left (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in France 1830–1981 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (London: Routledge, 1961); Europe in the Twentieth Century (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972); Annie Kriegel, Aux Origines du communisme français, 2 vols (Paris: Mouton, 1966); Richard Lowenthal, World Communism: The Disintegration of a Secular Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

Behind this quarrel lay, amongst much else, the thorny question of Marx’s own attitude towards democracy, in theory and in practice. This epitomizes the opacity of the story which we need to recover, shrouded in the dense competing smoke screens laid down by well over a century of global struggle. For representative disagreements, see besides the works of Lichtheim and Furet, Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Oscar J. Hammen, The Red 48-ers (New York: Charles Scribner, 1969); Alan Gilbert, Marx’s Politics (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981); Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1974); Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, 2 vols in 4 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977–78); Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, tr P. S. Falla (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); Michael Levin, Marx, Engels and Liberal Democracy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) & The Spectre of Democracy: The Rise of Modern Democracy as Seen by Its Critics (Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1992); and the Introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones to Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Books, 2002).

11. François Furet, The Future of an Illusion, tr Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

12. Cf J. Dunn, The Politics of Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); The Cunning of Unreason (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

13. George W. Bush, Financial Times, 11 November 2003. Cf Woodrow Wilson, note 7 above.

14. Cf Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Fontana, 1989).

15. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (London: Pimlico, 1997), chapter 6, esp 232–41; Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia 1910–1925 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Geroid T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).

16. Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Oeuvres Complètes, ed Charles Vellay (Paris: Charpentier & Fasquelle, 1908), II, 238, Speech of 8 Ventôse An II (26 Feb 1794), a report to the Convention on the contents of its prisons: ‘les malheureux sont les puissances de la terre; ils ont le droit de parler en maîtres aux gouvernements qui les négligent.’ [The unfortunate (the poor) are the powers of the earth; they have every right to speak as masters to governments which neglect them.]

17. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed & tr Harvey Mansfield & Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

18. Cf J. Dunn (ed), Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

19. Cf Samuel Finer, The History of Government 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

20. Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason.

21. Mogens H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

22. Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 313–28.

23. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy 3rd ed (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950), chapters 20–23; esp chapter 23, ‘The Inference’. For the life from which these judgments emerged, see Richard Swedberg, Schumpeter: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

24. Schumpeter, Capitalism, 285. And see p 247: ‘the people never really rule but they can always be made to do so by definition.’ Compare the force of two aphorisms gleaned from his private diary: aphorism 3: ‘Democracy is government by lying’ (Swedberg, 200); and aphorism 18: ‘To lie – what distinguishes man from animals’ (Swedberg, 201).

25. Cf Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). For what may be some of the consequences, see Thomas Patterson, The Vanishing Voter (New York: Vintage, 2003), & Russell J Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choice: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For the ecological context within which this seepage of interest is occurring, see Harold L. Wilensky, Rich Democracies: Political Economy, Public Policy & Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

26. For a particularly vivid example, see Paul Ginsborg, Italy and its Discontents 1980–2001 (London: Penguin, 2001).

27. Georges Sorel, Reflexions on Violence, tr T. E. Hulme & J. Roth (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 222. The whole of chapter 7, ‘The Ethics of the Producers’, remains a powerful indictment.

28. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du Citoyen: histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). Cf M. H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

29. Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

30. Cf Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, chapters 8 & 9 (Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 48–60, 138–39), and for the strategic judgment which issues from this vision, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chapter 11, p 70.

31. Cf Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed D. D. Raphael & A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). To the cool eye of the order of egoism in its heyday, the moral sentiments have no privileged place amongst other sentiments; and their causal power, or motivational pressure, falls plainly short of sundry other sentiments.

32. Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections with Ilustrations on the Moral Sense 3rd ed (London: A. Ward etc, 1742). First ed 1728. The more sophisticated diagnosticians of the order of egoism are disinclined to believe that there is a moral sense. There is good reason to believe that they are right. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985); Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

33. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (London: W.W. Norton, 1995).

34. Cf Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

35. Tocqueville, Democracy in America.

36. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes; Marcel Detienne, Qui veut prendre la parole? (Paris: Seuil, 2003).

37. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (London: J. M. Dent, 1910), 180.

38. Paul Ginsborg, Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony (London: Verso, 2004).

39. Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

40. David Butler & Austin Ranney (eds), Referendums: A Comparative Study of Practice and Theory (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1980), and Referendums around the World: The Growing Use of Direct Democracy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).

41. Yannis Papadopoulos, Démocratie Directe (Paris: Economica, 1998).

42. Amy Gutmann & Denis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); James S. Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), accessible samples from a very large body of recent academic writing.

43. Aristotle, Politics, tr H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932), 1281b–1284a, pp 220–41 (esp III, vi, 4–10 & III, vii, 12).

44. These remain intensely controversial criteria; and it is hard to see how they could ever cease to be so.

45. Far the most elaborate and pertinacious attempt to think this idea through has come in the massive oeuvre of Jürgen Habermas. For an impressively clear and sceptical assessment of the limits to its coherence see Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

46. Hobbes, Elements of Law, chapter 8 (Human Nature, 48–49).

47. John Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Empire 1878–1954 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979) & Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000); Ala S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–51 (London: Methuen, 1984).

48. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997); Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography 3 vols (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975–84); Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).

49. John K Fairbank (ed), The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).

50. For a particularly illuminating discussion see Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For a vivid sketch of a great political leader deeply dedicated to this world and to the party as its central form of agency, see Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 29–85 on Léon Blum.

51. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

52. Paul Ginsborg, Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony (London: Verso, 2004).

53. J. Dunn, ‘Situating Democratic Accountability’, in Adam Przeworski, Susan C. Stokes, & Bernard Manin (eds), Democracy, Accountability and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 329–44

54. J. Dunn (ed), The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Dunn, Cunning of Unreason.

55. David Held, Global Covenant (Cambridge: Polity, 2004); Democracy and the Global Order (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).

56. It asks in effect for the re-creation of the Garden of Eden, to harbour the great and natural community of mankind (John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, II, para 128, ed Mark Goldie (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 179; ‘he and all the rest of mankind are one community … this great and natural community’) in punctilious shared observance of the Law of Nature itself. Or, if that for some reason proves unavailable, for equally punctilious and spontaneous observance of ‘known standing laws’ which raise no contentious issues of judgment in their interpretation and provoke no quarrels in their enforcement. Compare J. Dunn, ‘The Contemporary Political Significance of John Locke’s Conception of Civil Society’, Sunil Khilnani & Sudipta Kaviraj (eds), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 39–57.

Conclusion

1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992), 339, “the direction of the wagons’ wandering must remain provisionally inconclusive”.

2. Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order (New York: Farrar Strauss, 2011); Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy (London: Profile, 2012).

3. Compare the assessment of François Fillon’s moral rectitude in France’s 2017 Presidential campaign before and after the details of his family hiring arrangements from the public revenues were released by a satirical newspaper. And set beside this the apparent impact of the leaking efforts of Russia’s security services on the slender margin by which America’s Presidential election was decided.

4. John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (London: HarperCollins, 2000); Interpreting Political Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990; J. Dunn (ed), The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

5. Neither was unprecedented: Mark Mazower, The Dark Continent:Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1999).

6. Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 308–28.

7. What makes political leaders effective is far from evident; but it is certainly wrong to see it mainly in their capacity to impose their own will on others: Archie Brown, The Myth of the Strong Leader (London: Bodley Head, 2014).

8. David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

9. Financial Times, 6 May 2017, p 1.

10. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005); Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998); Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: Allen Lane, 2000).

11. See chapter 3; also, Filippo Buonarroti, Conspiration pour l’Églité, dite de Babeuf (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1957), I, 26–33.

12. Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

13. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014); Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2014). This has not precluded substantial narrowing in the inequalities between populations across the world: cf Francis Bourguignon, The Globalization of Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for an Age of Globalization (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).

14. John Dunn, Rethinking Modern Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 119–38; John Dunn (ed), The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Interpreting Political Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 193–215; J. Dunn, ‘How Politics Limits Markets’, in S. Bowles, M. Franzini & U. Pagano (eds), The Politics and Economics of Power (London: Routledge, 1999), 85–100.

15. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, tr Charles Forster Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), Vol III, Bk VI.

16. Monsieur Wagner a de beaux moments, mais de mauvais quart d’heures (Letter to Emile Naumann, April 1867, quoted in E. Naumann, Italienische Tondichter (1883), Vol. 4, p. 5. Translation from The Riverside Dictionary of Biography (2005), p. 689.)

17. Monarchy? Self-assessed aristocracy? Dictatorship bereft of any discernible claim of right? The rule of the best organized and most heavily armed? The unabashed and unalloyed rule of the very best off in virtue solely of their current holdings?

18. Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

19. Frans Timmermans, quoted in: “EU vows to help Italy control migrant surge,” Financial Times, 5/7/17, p4

20. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1959).

21. Ryszard Kapuściński, The Emperor: The Fall of an Autocrat (New York: Vintage International, 1978).

22. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed H. G. Gerth & C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1948), 77–128.