Liberty Matters

Ancient Legacies: Democracy v Republic (Greece v Rome)

By: Ioannis D. Evrigenis, Marco Romani, Carl Richard, and Charlotte C. Thomas

American revolutionaries looked to the past for lessons about constraining the individuals who would serve in future governments. 

Sections

While they read about systems as varied as monarchies, aristocracies, and tyrannies, they focused on democracies and republics—with an eye to minimizing the dangers of each. In this Liberty Matters series, Carl Richard, Marco Romani, and Charlotte Thomas respond to Ioannis Evrigenis on how the United States’ founders created a bold, new constitution inspired by ancient ones.

Lead Essay Why a “Republic” and Not a “Democracy?”

Ioannis D. Evrigenis

Upon exiting the constitutional convention, on Monday, September 17, 1787, Benjamin Franklin was allegedly asked by Elizabeth Willing Powel whether the meeting had yielded a republic or a monarchy, to which he famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” If that response seems obvious given the nature of the government outlined in the constitution and the options Powel presented to Franklin, it was also the one that most accorded with the predominant view of the framers of the constitution, who persistently distinguished a republic not only from a monarchy, but also from a democracy, and avoided as much as possible describing their ideal as democratic.
If there was ever a time when the debate about which of the two terms best characterizes the United States of America was theoretical and of interest only to political scientists or historians, that time is past. That debate is nowadays part and parcel of stark choices with potentially seismic consequences for American politics, having in recent years acquired new force, as disagreements over the continuing suitability of institutions such as the Electoral College or lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court have gained momentum. The differences between the popular vote and Electoral College counts in recent presidential elections have been predictably followed by calls for the abolition of the latter for its undemocratic nature, in turn followed by reminders that the United States is not a democracy, but a republic. Yet, as George Thomas has pointed out, that dichotomy is often disingenuous, as, whatever they may have envisioned when they referred to a republic, the framers meant to establish a government based on the principle of popular sovereignty, which is also a fundamental characteristic of democracy.[1]
But even after one has established a reasonably broad consensus regarding the Founders' agreement on popular sovereignty as their animating principle, serious questions surrounding these terms remain. In the most succinct and influential contrast of the founding era, in Federalist 10, James Madison defines a democracy as "a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person," and a republic as "a government in which the scheme of representation takes place." The subject matter of Federalist 9 and 10, domestic faction and insurrection, accounts for Alexander Hamilton's and Madison's respective focus on the ways in which a democracy, thus defined, differs from a republic. Madison identifies two principal differences: "first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended."
Even though Madison explicitly identifies the number of citizens involved in government and the extent of a state's territory, he is broadly animated by the mechanics of in-person administration of government, which Hamilton had already sketched out in Federalist 1, namely the threat posed by those who mask their "dangerous ambition" behind the "specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people," and thereby pave the road towards despotism. Such politicians, he argues, "have begun their career, by paying an obsequious court to the people ... commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants." "Demagoguery" makes just one more appearance, in the final Federalist paper, but there are other clues in between to suggest that their authors were--like most people in the more than two millennia that separated them from ancient Athens--very worried about its potential effects on the people.
What was their worry? The Greek word δημοκρατία, the source of "democracy," signified rule by the demos (δήμος), the body of Athenian citizens, in which a variety of participatory institutions and offices that ran the city on a day-to-day basis were ultimately subject to the sovereign assembly, the ecclesia (ἐκκλησία), which made the final decisions on important matters. Surviving sources from the highpoint of Athenian democracy, the fifth century B.C., paint a perplexing picture, for, they make it clear that on the one hand Athens, especially in the period between the end of the Persian Wars and the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, was the envy of the Mediterranean, but on the other hand it managed to lose that war and bring upon itself a tyranny imposed by its arch-enemy, Sparta, which put an end to its democratic institutions. How both of these things could be true at the same time is evident in Thucydides' history, cited by Hamilton in Federalist 6. That work, which was widely read and cited by the American framers, put on full display the allure and dangers inherent in conducting the most important political business through oratory. In one of its most famous episodes, the Funeral Oration delivered at the end of the first year of the war, Pericles touted Athens' openness to trade and ideas, as well as its principle of isonomia (ἰσονομία)--equality before the laws--which every citizen enjoyed regardless of wealth or social status (Thuc., 2.37). Pericles' description of Athenian life sounds enticing, even to modern ears, which is unsurprising given that that speech was intended to bolster Athenian morale after a year of painful losses and hardship. As Thucydides points out not long thereafter, however, Pericles' death left a gap that was filled by individuals who were less competent and more self-interested.
"by his rank, ability, and known integrity, [Pericles] was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude--in short, to lead them instead of being led by them; for as he never sought power by improper means, he was never compelled to flatter them."
In their petty squabbles Pericles’ successors "ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude" (Thuc., 2.65, trans. Crawley, rev. Strassler). For Thucydides, the lesson is clear: "This, as might have been expected in a great and sovereign state, produced a host of blunders, and amongst them the Sicilian expedition" (Thuc., 2.65). The public debate regarding that disastrous campaign was the most consequential and bizarre of several ill-advised decisions made by a multitude susceptible to misinformation, manipulation, distraction, and the mechanics of large assemblies, which are unpredictable.
Soon after Pericles defined Athens' government as a democracy because the city's "administration favors the many instead of the few" (Thuc., 2.37), Plato's Socrates conceded that the city of Athens was like a magnificent horse, but noted that it had fallen asleep and needed to be awakened by a gadfly (Plato, Apology, 30e). Taking on this role, Socrates spent his time challenging the notion that decisions by majorities have any merit other than appeasing most people, before famously declaring democracy the second-worst regime, better only than tyranny, in the Republic (543a-569c). Among many reasons for this ranking, Plato cites the unchecked pursuit of the thing that democracy values the most, namely, freedom by a multitude of insufficiently educated individuals whose eyes are not on the common good, but rather on their interests as members of the lowest economic class. Despite his many disagreements with Plato's Republic, when Aristotle arrived at his own classification of constitutions he, too, placed democracy among the "bad" constitutions, that is, those that are driven by the pursuit of the interest of those who rule, rather than the common good.
Aristotle's solution to the problem came in the form of what he calls a "πολιτεία," which is sometimes translated as "constitutional government" (e.g., Barker). This constitution, which Aristotle considers the best practicable one, results from a mix of oligarchic and democratic elements, that is, two bad constitutions whose mixture produces a good one, in which the many rule for the benefit of the whole. This constitution is often taken as the theoretical origin of "republican" government, in which a few citizens chosen out of the body of all eligible citizens rule for a defined period of time, before they are replaced by others of their peers. For Aristotle, this type of government has several merits, not the least of which is that it exposes one to both ruling and being ruled, thereby incentivizing rulers not to engage in excesses while in office. A further merit lies in this constitution's tempering of the rich and poor by fostering a middle class. These characteristics give some indication as to why Aristotle's basic sketch of a πολιτεία would have appealed to the American Founders, who, however, would have also been well-aware of the fact that his model was not a straightforward fit for America. As Aristotle made clear, not all inhabitants of that city could or should be citizens (interestingly, in Athens, Aristotle himself was not a citizen, but a metic, i.e., a resident alien). Moreover, he argued that cities best be limited to a population in which citizens know one another personally and their territory be εὐσύνοπτος, i.e., such as can be taken in at one view, a condition that clearly did not apply to the expansive American states.
Although the victorious Spartans imposed a brief tyranny on Athens, its democratic institutions returned and survived for another century, before succumbing to Macedonian and, eventually, Roman might. Because, however, Athens' successes and failures during the fifth century overshadowed the rest of its history, and the most famous literary sources came from that period, Athens' final century of democracy went nearly unnoticed in the West.[2] In this truncated history, Athens' Golden Age must have seemed like a curious experiment that ended in disaster, confirming the widespread suspicion that the great mass of citizens were insufficiently educated and publicly-minded to be entrusted with the long-term common good of the polity. To those who had the luxury to think about constitutions in comparative terms, democracy evoked lawless mobs of uneducated poor people out to satisfy their immediate--and basest--needs. Warranted or not, this specter would dominate political theory and practice until the end of the nineteenth century, rendering democracy an unappealing prospect for the American Founders.
If this hasty sketch indicates why democracy was not a good option, the question is how did they settle on the term "republic?" In a letter to Henry Lee, written on May 8, 1825, Thomas Jefferson explained that the purpose of the Declaration of Independence was
not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; [. . .] terms so plain and firm, as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independant stand we [. . .] compelled to take. neither  aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the american mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. all it’s authority rests then on the harmonising sentiments of the day, whether expressed, in conversns in letters, printed essays or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney Etc.[3]
Jefferson's bibliography at the end of this passage is an excellent summary of the rest of the story. Aristotle's description of his πολιτεία as the constitution in which the many rule and are ruled in turn, all with a view to the common good, interestingly means "constitution," as in the arrangement of the institutions of a polity, or simply "state," but it is also the word that Plato had used as the title of his work on justice, which has come to be known as "Republic." Despite the many disagreements between their respective visions of the good polity, Aristotle and Plato converged on the importance of the common good. Marcus Tullius Cicero, a self-described follower of Plato, wrote his own dialogue on justice in imitation of Plato's Πολιτεία, which he titled De re publica, a term that literally refers to the public or common matter but was used broadly to refer to the state, a community, public affairs, or public life. As Cicero began to defend the form of government that had expelled and replaced the kings of Rome, and juxtaposed it to the tyrannical aspirations of Gaius Julius Caesar (Caesar), the term res publica began to morph into what we might nowadays call a commonwealth.[4] At its best, Rome between the expulsion of the kings and Caesar's seizure of power exemplified a constitution in which individuals spread across a large territory were elected into public office, citizens had some say in the government, and there were institutional checks that could (and often did) curb individual or factional interests. In that same period, Roman citizenship coupled with the status of a free person rendered an individual not only the subject of rights, but also made him a part of the Roman people.[5] That period produced several examples that served as models for the American Founders.[6]
Cicero's De re publica does not survive in its entirety. Some of its fragments are known to us only because St. Augustine of Hippo mentions them in his City of God Against the Pagans, to argue that the so-called "Roman Republic" was never truly what it claimed, because it, too, was characterized by socio-economic conflict that overshadowed the common good. Adopting Gaius Sallustius Crispus’s (Sallust) theory that it was the threat of Carthage that kept Rome united and its destruction, in 146 BC, that initiated Rome's decline towards civil war, Augustine invokes Cicero's authority in De re publica to buttress his claim that the Roman "res publica" never existed, because "true justice was never in it" (City of God, 2.21). Absent justice, Augustine argues, aggregations of individuals are "merely multitudes, unworthy of the name people," adding that as an affair of the people, a republic is united by consensus regarding right (City of God, 19.21).
Whether a Roman "republic" existed or not, Caesar's career marked a dramatic shift in Roman politics. It was only after centuries' worth of emperors that Renaissance thinkers could more clearly begin to use the term "republic" to describe the Rome that began with one Brutus (Lucius Junius Brutus who helped expel the kings) and ended with another (Marcus Junius Brutus who tried to forestall monarchy, in vain, by helping assassinate Caesar). Italian thinkers in particular, in city-states experimenting with popular government by turns, would thus refer to "republics" in contrast to monarchies (or principalities). Even these, however, did not use the term "republic" consistently or view Athenian democracy favorably. In his Dialogue on the Government of Florence, for instance, Francesco Guicciardini refers to the Athenians' "republica," but proclaims its citizens "licentious and insolent" (Proemium). Niccolò Machiavelli, too, thought that Solon's exclusive focus on making Athens a "popular state," and the Athenians' subsequent failure to mix their constitutions with the powers of the principality and of the aristocracy caused Athens to live but a short time compared to Sparta (Discourses, 1.2.6). Still, theirs was neither the only, nor the predominant use of the term "republic," as it continued to be used by proponents of kingship or aristocracy to denote states aimed at the common good. For every Machiavelli and Guicciardini there was a Jean Bodin, whose De Republica was anything but a "republican" treatise.
Bodin's Republica inspired Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which in turn became the target of Jefferson's next two authors, John Locke and Algernon Sidney. Filmer criticized Rome between the kings and emperors as unstable and confused; if the city of Rome was democratic, its rule over the provinces was not, and Rome's 480 years paled in comparison to the Assyrian monarchy's twelve centuries and the Roman Empire's 1495 (§ 11). Although Locke had very little to say about democracy in his Two Treatises of Government, Sidney considered it non-existent in fact and undesirable in theory. Both favored a mixed constitution, in which the legislative and executive powers were distinct, which they largely presented in sharp contrast to the absolute monarchy defended by Filmer. It is worth noting that the key term in this contrast is "absolute," since these and other proponents of mixed government were not opposed to mixed monarchy.
This small sample of some of the many uses of the term "republic" indicates that the term was used for a number of very different purposes. To early modern readers who knew Latin, the term first and foremost would have meant a commonwealth. The increasing contrast of republic to absolute monarchy, however, moved the term closer to what Aristotle had designated a "πολιτεία." Both dimensions of the term thus understood would have appealed to the American Founders as they looked for a constitution whose foundation and sovereignty lay in the people and which was aimed at the common good of a large nation spread over an expansive territory. Far less contentious was the view that democracy meant license, disorder, and confusion.
The Founders' attention to the need for checks and balances suggests a further reason for distrusting democracy: its potential to devolve into a tyranny of the majority. At a time when natural rights were proclaimed self-evident, pure democracy posed a serious danger for the freedom of individuals who happened to find themselves in religious, ethnic, and other minorities. Animated by the same concern, Alexis de Tocqueville would describe the fruit of their labors as a "democratic republic," in which both formal and informal institutions, as well as the citizens' morals, helped maintain the people sovereign while keeping the potential excesses of democracy that so many had feared for centuries in check.
As he was finishing Democracy in America, Tocqueville proclaimed equality inevitable. He appears to have been right: democracy, the form of government that favors equality, has now become the gold standard of constitutions, to such an extent that even patently anti-democratic regimes lay claim to its rhetorical magic. Perhaps with some help from Tocqueville, "democracy" has now replaced "republic" as the (approving) term of choice to describe the United States and constitutions inspired by the American one. It is worth remembering, however, that just as Athenian democracy died out, so too the Roman republic gave way to absolute monarchy. Tocqueville closed his work by warning that it depends on democratic nations "whether equality leads them to servitude or freedom, to enlightenment or barbarism, to prosperity or misery" (Democracy in America, 2.4.8, trans. Mansfield & Winthrop). To the extent that "democracy" is the new way to describe the principle of popular sovereignty that animates the best kinds of republics, the change in terminology is innocuous. It is perhaps a cause for concern, however, that in contemporary democracy, which is still relatively young, the common good is increasingly slipping out of the picture.
Endnotes
[1] "'America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy' Is a Dangerous—And Wrong—Argument," The Atlantic, The Battle for the Constitution.
[2] With the exception of Demosthenes, whose speeches were well-known.
[3] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5212, accessed October 15, 2024.
[4] See, e.g., On Duties, 2.3-4, 2.45, 3.4.
[5] See Adolph Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Clark, NJ: The Lawbook Exchange, 1980), s.v. "Civis Romanus," "Civitas Romana."
[6] Among the Founders' favorites were Cincinnatus and Cato. See Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), esp. Ch. 3.

Response Essay What Is a Republic?

Carl Richard

As Professor Evrigenis notes, the founders used the word “republic” in diverse ways.  John Adams employed it to mean a classical mixed government, a system that balanced the power of the one leader, the few rich and well-born, and the many commoners.  By such a definition, even Great Britain might be termed a republic since its monarch was balanced by a House of Lords and a House of Commons.  By contrast, Thomas Jefferson used the word to mean a representative democracy.  James Madison often employed it to refer to a modern type of mixed government, one that balanced the multifarious interests of a modern commercial society rather than the patricians and plebeians of yore.
The U.S. Constitution won wide support because it embodied aspects of each of these different definitions of “republic.”  It established a mixed government but one that was innovative in two respects.  First, unlike in the aristocratic republics of Sparta and Rome, the many held most of the power in the American system.  Majorities of free white males directly elected the House of Representatives and indirectly selected U.S. senators and members of the Electoral College through the election of state legislators.  Second, unlike in the classical republics, the rich and the well-born were not the principal minorities protected by the undemocratic features of the Constitution.  The equal representation of states in the Senate and its resultant impact on the Electoral College, in which each state received as many electors as it possessed congressmen, primarily protected the less populous states.  Thus, the system created by the Constitution was sufficiently democratic for Jefferson, sufficiently aristocratic for Adams, and sufficiently modern for Madison.
As Professor Evrigenis also notes, even democrats like Jefferson and Madison preferred to use the ambiguous and more moderate term “republic” to the clearer and more radical word “democracy” in reference to their favored system.  This is because the aristocrats whose writings constituted the classical canon, such as Thucydides and Plato, successfully demonized the latter term.  By the founders’ day, “democracy” was closely associated in the Western mind with the instability and foolishness of the Athenian masses during the Peloponnesian War.  When feeling bolder, American democrats of the founders’ era might go so far as to call their political party the “Democratic-Republican Party,” thereby melding the radical with the moderate, the bold with the cautious, but more often they termed it simply the “Republican Party.”  The latter name also possessed the advantage of implying that their Federalist opponents were closet monarchists and oligarchs, thereby converting them into the real radicals.
A generation later, George Grote and other historians rehabilitated democracy by highlighting the intellectual and artistic triumphs of Periclean Athens.  In this project they were aided by the universities, which added Athenian tragedies to the Latin works that had previously dominated their curricula.  The new Hellenism was also enhanced by the modern Greeks’ dramatic struggle for independence, a cause celebre of American intellectuals during the antebellum period.  The former party of Jefferson and Madison, now the party of Andrew Jackson, could be renamed the “Democratic Party” without embarrassment.  The undemocratic features of the Constitution could then be reinterpreted as unintentional bugs rather than as intentional features, a formulation that reconciled the new democratic ideology with patriotic reverence for the founders.
A few additional notes concerning Professor Evrigenis’s provocative article are in order.  In classical theory, popular sovereignty referred to the right of the people to select their own form of government.  Simple democracy, or majority rule, was only one possible selection.  Thus, a people might choose to establish a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a mixed government rather than a democracy in complete conformity with popular sovereignty.  The fact that Americans began using the term incorrectly, as a synonym for democracy (i.e., as the right of the majority to elect public officials), illustrates the democratic tenor of the nation’s political culture from the nineteenth century on.
Aristotle did indeed compose the first encomium to the middle class, but it should be noted that he was referring to a middle class of farmers, not a middle class of merchants or artisans.  Like most other classical political theorists, Aristotle considered farmers the backbone of a republic.  Their independent means of subsistence enabled them to exercise their own judgment on political matters, and their attachment to the land inclined them to defend it, whereas men whose wealth consisted of paper were dependent on the caprices of the marketplace and apt to take their money and run when enemies invaded the country.  Thus, despite rejecting Aristotle’s arguments for mixed government, Jefferson embraced the pro-agricultural aspect of his thought.  Romanticizers of the agricultural lifestyle ignored the fact that most modern farmers were every bit as acquisitive and as dependent on global markets as merchants.
On the other hand, Aristotle’s arguments concerning the size of the ideal polis demonstrate that virtually no American, not even the Antifederalists, held a classical position on the issue.  One of the Antifederalists’ principal arguments against the Constitution was that its creation of a single, massive republic out of thirteen smaller ones would doom the American experiment in popular government.  A republic must remain small if it wished to remain a republic, they cried, citing Aristotle and other classical theorists.  But Aristotle and his cohorts would have been just as appalled by a republic the size of late eighteenth-century New York as by one the size of the United States.
Finally, while it is true, as Professor Evrigenis notes, that the Roman Republic began with one Brutus (Lucius Junius Brutus, the tyrant slayer) and ended with another (Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s assassin), it can also be stated that Rome itself began with one Romulus (the twin-slayer) and ended with another (the young emperor Romulus Augustulus, who was brusquely informed by the German commander of the Roman Army in 476 A.D. that his services were no longer required).  Whether the United States, which began with one George overthrowing the rule of another, will end with a third George remains to be seen.

Response Essay Athenian Republican Institutions and the Quest for a Democratic Rule of Law

Charlotte C. Thomas

Plato did not say “Democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried . . .” That was Winston Churchill in his November 1947 speech to the UK House of Commons.[1] But Churchill does not claim the thought as his own, and the Eleatic Stranger in Plato’s Statesman says something very similar. So, perhaps Plato did sort of say it. Here is Seth Benardette’s translation:
. . . the regime of the multitude, in turn is in nearly everything weak and has no capacity for any great good or evil, in comparison, that is, to the rest of the regimes. It’s due to the fact that the offices of rule in it have been distributed in small segments over many officeholders. Accordingly, though of all of the regimes that are lawful it has proved to be the worst, it’s the best of all that are unlawful. And though to live in a democracy wins out over all that are intemperate, of those that are in due order, one must live in this least of all (303a-b).[2]
I take it as a given that neither Plato nor Plato’s Socrates thought that any actual regime had managed to be wholly lawful or temperate. In the Republic Socrates refused to say that it is impossible for that to happen, but he admitted that it was a very remote and improbable possibility.[3]  And, if one understands the radical improbability of a lawful and temperate regime as an implied premise in the Stranger’s claim quoted above, then the gist of it really does seem quite close to Churchill’s quip. Paraphrased, the argument would be:
P1: Democracies are the best regime to live in if all regimes are unlawful and/or intemperate.P2:  All regimes have been and are likely to be unlawful and/or intemperate.C: Therefore, Democracies are the best regimes to live in of all those that have or are likely to exist.
The American Founders knew political history, and a lot of it had happened between the Athenian invention of Democracy and the Eighteenth-century project to create the constitution of the United States. Aristotle and his school had surveyed the constitutions of the ancient Mediterranean and made their extraordinarily well-informed claims about good government; the Romans had invented their republic in light of their understanding of the shortcomings of Athenian institutions; Venice and Florence innovated on Roman and Greek models in hopes of avoiding their fatal errors; and the Glorious Revolution in Britain provided a relatively recent model for a mixed constitution based on the rule of law.
The history of democracies and republics was the image the founders looked to as they imagined stress tests for the emerging shape of the American Constitution. England’s injustices were in the foreground, but the successes and failures of Athens, Sparta, Rome, Venice, Florence, and England were also in play.
It is no wonder that the American Founders rejected Athenian Democracy. Its vulnerabilities and inefficiencies were legion, and they had been well documented since the writing of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. On the other hand, many of the remedies that republics have adopted to address those flaws do not seem better than the institutions the Athenians created to support and protect their regime. Some of them seem clearly to be worse. Given this history, I wonder if the Founders’ criticisms of democracy were already known and addressed by the Athenians. I also wonder if the line they drew between democracies and republics is fuzzier than we tend to think it is.
The Roman emphasis on family ties engendered political marriages, divorces, and adoptions that had nothing to do with the sorts of familial bonds that could provide ballast for the ship of state. The Venetian reliance on a wealthy political class engendered centuries of stability even for its poorest citizens, but it looks far more like a model for oligarchy than for a democratic republic. The Florentine Signoria appointed representatives for such short terms that, in retrospect, the de facto transfer of power to wealthy political families seems almost inevitable. And while we now have evidence from the UK that a constitutional monarchy can be stable, in the eighteenth century, the jury was still out.
Athenian Democracy failed, and it was probably destined to fail even if the Peace of Nicias had held, and the Athenians had emerged victorious from the Peloponnesian War. Long before Alcibiades persuaded Athens to steal defeat from the jaws of victory, the Athenian constitution was crumbling. According to Thucydides, Pericles, Cleon, and Alcibiades agreed that even though Athens might call itself a democracy at home, it was a tyranny abroad. Creating it may have been unjust, but failing to preserve it was suicide.
The risks inherent in democracy were not lost on the Fifth and Fourth century Athenians. One can even imagine an alternative history in which Athens, in contradiction to Thucydides’ account of the inevitability of their implosion, moderated its imperial ambitions and buttressed its democratic institutions instead of having to live through a devastating defeat and a bloody tyranny before reestablishing their constitution. Pericles could have lived. Alcibiades could have left sooner.
Before their collapse, one of the institutions the Athenians put into place, albeit for a relatively short period of time, was ostracism. Men like Aristides and Themistocles were heroes to whom the city owed their very existence. (I count at least three times that Themistocles saved Athens in Herodotus’s History.) The ostracism of Themistocles and Aristides was not really punishment, and the things they did to deserve it were not crimes. Their power and influence was so out of proportion with the rest of the Athenians that they could not help but threaten the stability of democracy, so they were ostracized. They were sent away for a while, but not too far away. Their property was preserved, but their political slates were wiped clean. And, most importantly, they were removed from the democratic conversation so that other voices could be heard.
Another institution that bolstered Athenian democracy was Cleisthenes’s division of the city by demes, i.e., tribe and zone. Before Cleisthenes’s reforms, political factions tended to form along family lines. More than a millennium before the influence of the Medici and Pazzi undermined Florentine institutions, Cleisthenes saw that the power of prominent Athenian families had grown into a threat that only promised to worsen. So, he created new factions, or tribes, based on geography rather than family, and he put at the head of each group a mythological hero, rather than a pater familia.
The genius of the deme system didn’t end with the disruption of familial influence, however. The city was also divided into three zones: the city, the farmland/hills, and the seashore. Each deme had an area in each zone. For example, The Erechtheis tribe had a tenth of the urban land, a tenth of the Attic farmland, and a tenth of the Attic coastline. So did the Aegeis, the Kekropis, and each of the other ten tribes. When each tribe rotated into authority in the Prytanis or had to send representatives to the Boule, the citizens within each deme came together from all three zones, and their effectiveness depended upon their agreement. The men of the city, the farmers, and those who fished or shipped or traded by the sea - men who likely had radically different priorities and world-views -  had to find common cause. Factions that might naturally be divided according to the interests of urban life, or farming, or seafaring could not easily form outside of one’s tribe. Inside of one’s tribe, alienating oneself from those living in different zones was self-defeating, weakening the influence of their deme in the democratic process.[4]
It is also worth noting here that, contrary to popular opinion, representation was a key element of Athenian democracy. It is true that laws were finally ratified by the direct vote of the Ecclesia, but there was no debate on the Pnyx. Debate happened in the Boule, where representatives from each deme hashed out legislation. Matters of state that could not wait for the Boule were made by the Prytaneis, which was constituted by representatives of one deme rotating in to take that office for just one month a year.
The American Founders did not want to create a direct democracy. But neither did the Athenians, really. All the experiments in democratic/republican government from Solon to the American Founding and up to this moment have sought a scheme that would balance representation with enfranchisement in a way that mitigated against the emergence of powerful individuals or factions that could overpower or undermine the regime. Perhaps someday we’ll find it.
Endnotes
[1] https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1947/nov/11/parliament-bill
[2]  Plato, Plato’s Statesman, 1984, Edited and Translated by Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[3] 499b
[4] I’m indebted to George Kokkos for our conversations about Cleisthenes reforms and the lessons they offer to contemporary Americans thinking about gerrymandering.

Response Essay Liberty and the Mixed Constitution

Marco Romani

The Constitution of the United States, according to James Madison, “forms a happy combination” between national and local interests, intended to make it “more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried” (Federalist 10). The idea that the best form of government is a mixed constitution, combining elements germane to various different political systems, is an ancient one, as Ioannis Evrigenis expertly shows in his essay.
Significantly, the Latin name Publius is the collective pseudonym chosen by the co-authors of the Federalist Papers to publish their writings — this nom-de-plume being generally understood to be an allusion to Publius Valerius Publicola, the sixth-century-B.C.E. Roman statesman who contributed to overthrowing the monarchy. As consul in the early days of the Roman republic, Publicola fostered the promulgation of laws to forestall a widely feared return of the Etruscan kings.
On one occasion, Publicola famously ordered his lictors to lower the fasces (which is not unlike asking officers or bodyguards to lower their weapons) so as to symbolize his deference towards the citizens’ assembly and dispel any rumors that he was aiming to establish himself as Rome’s new king. Publicola’s gesture reminded the Romans that he was not one of the notorious demagogues who relied on popular support to pursue their own petty personal or factional interest through “vicious arts,” as Madison would put it.
Indeed, the authors of the Federalist Papers often insist on the distinction between two different forms of popular government, illustrating the ways in which they embraced a ‘republican’ constitution rather than a purely ‘democratic’ one. Despite it being often overlooked or forgotten, it is a fact that the word ‘democracy’ never occurs in the Declaration of Independence (1776) nor in the Constitution of the United States of America (1789).
The reason why such an omission is a result of design and not of accident can be sought for precisely in the framers’ skepticism and distrust towards democracy, which in turn is ultimately rooted in their extensive familiarity with ancient Greek and Roman political thought.
In this regard, it is important to keep in mind that any modern analysis of ancient political theory suffers from a sizable degree of ‘selection bias,’ insofar as the vast majority of Greek and Latin sources at our disposal present a view of government that is programmatically hostile towards democracy, so that we rarely (if ever) get to hear the opposing voice of those who support it.
For instance, both Thucydides and Plato — authors crucial to Evrigenis’ argument — are representatives of an Athenian aristocracy that looked with great suspicion upon democratic  statesmen (or, in their view, demagogues) like Cleon and Anytus. Both writers operated in a historical environment in which oligarchic coups repeatedly attempted to overthrow the city’s democratic institutions around the late fifth and the early fourth century B.C.E.[1]
While Pericles extensively praises the Athenian institutions (serving as a contrast to Sparta’s oligarchy) in his Funeral Oration (Thuc. 2.39),[2] Thucydides himself praises Pericles as the leader who was able to successfully control the crowds instead of being influenced by their ever-changing moods, thereby transforming the city’s nominally democratic institutions into a de facto autocratic government: ἐγίγνετό τε λόγῳ μὲν δημοκρατία, ἔργῳ δὲ ὑπὸ τοῦ πρώτου ἀνδρὸς ἀρχή (Thuc. 2.65.9), or, in Thomas Hobbes’ English version, “It was in name a state democratical, but in fact a government of the principal man.”
In the fourth century, Isocrates offers a more nuanced assessment of Athenian democracy, arguing that the tyranny of the majority loathed by Thucydides and Plato was by no means the government form originally intended by the city’s founding fathers, Solon and Cleisthenes: they “did not establish a polity [...] which trained the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy [ἡγεῖσθαι τὴν μὲν ἀκολασίαν δημοκρατίαν], lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and license to do what they pleased as happiness, but rather a polity which detested and punished such men and by so doing made all the citizens better and wiser”(Isocrates, Areopagiticus 20).[3]
To the classical thinkers and historians mentioned by Evrigenis one might add Polybius, the second-century Greek writer who, in the sixth book of his Histories, attributes the unique magnitude and resilience of the Roman dominion to the development of a mixed (μικτή) constitution in Republican Rome. Polybius distinguishes three ‘simple’ forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.
According to him, each of these three kinds of constitution is bound to be short-lived if used in its pure form, as each of them tends to degenerate into its ‘corrupted’ version. Thus, monarchy is soon replaced by tyranny, aristocracy by oligarchy, and democracy by that most degraded of all political aberrations, ochlocracy (or mob-rule).
In Polybius’ view, the long-lasting rule and stability of Rome, which for centuries has avoided the endless cyclical decay (ἀνακύκλωσις) of one government form into another, is primarily owed to the Roman constitution’s way of mixing elements of all three systems into one state (“a happy combination,” as Madison would put it).
In the Roman republic, according to Polybius, the consuls represent the monarchical element, the senate embodies the old aristocracy, and the popular assemblies give the citizenry a democratic voice. Thus, political power is shared among the three governing bodies, and each of the three materializes a limit to the authority and influence of the other two.
This Roman system of checks and balances, along with its Polybian elucidation, was bound to exercise considerable influence on those early modern political thinkers that the framers often drew upon in their own constitution-making efforts. Montesquieu, in particular, directly quotes Polybius in his Pensées: “je renverrai à Polybe, qui a admirablement bien expliqué quelle part les consuls, le Sénat, le Peuple, prenaient dans ce gouvernement” (“I shall go back to Polybius, who has admirably explained what role the consuls, the senate, and the people played in this government”).[4]
In his Spirit of Laws (11.17), a treatise very familiar to the constitutional framers, Montesquieu emphasizes the importance of the senate in the Roman republic’s balance of powers, and cites Polybius in the same breath: “La part que le sénat prenoit à la puissance exécutrice étoit si grande, que Polybe dit que les étrangers pensoient tous que Rome étoit une aristocratie” (“the role played by the senate in the executive power was so great that, according to Polybius, all foreign people considered Rome to be an aristocracy”). The passage he refers to here is Polyb. 6.13.8-9:
If one were staying at Rome when the consuls were not in town, one would imagine the constitution to be a complete aristocracy: and this has been the idea entertained by many Greeks, and by many kings as well, from the fact that nearly all the business they had with Rome was settled by the Senate.[5]
Interestingly enough, Montesquieu omits the Polybian statement limiting this account to time periods in which the consuls were away from Rome. As a result, the preeminent powers of the senate appear, for the French philosopher, to be an even more inherently constitutional feature of the Roman republican system than Polybius makes it sound. Might that be because, not unlike Thucydides and Plato, Montesquieu is wary of the dangers of unmixed, unbridled democracy?
Democracy, according to Montesquieu, is subject to corruption in either of two ways: i.e., through “the spirit of inequality” or “the spirit of extreme equality” (Spirit of Laws 8.2). The former prevails when citizens place their own individual interest over the common good of their country and seek political power at the expense of their fellow citizens. The latter takes root when the citizens, no longer content with being equal before the law, seek to become equal in all aspects of their lives and thereby cease to respect institutional authority.
It is precisely this kind of political milieu, pervaded by the “spirit of extreme equality,” that paves the way for the ascent of unscrupulous demagogues: “Men of factious tempers,” in Madison’s view (Federalist 10), “of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests of the people.” Unrestrained democracy, in other words, is prone to degenerating into demagogy.
To be sure, as Evrigenis points out, it would be misguided to claim that the US was not founded upon the principles of popular government. However, far from being interchangeable notions, ‘republic’ and ‘democracy’ are utterly distinct in terms of the framers’ value judgment. Indeed, they viewed democracy as the source of several threats and dangers to freedom. “Why a Republic” then, Evrigenis asks, rather than a democracy? For the framers, the central purpose of the government is to grant citizens the threefold rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
To that end, the Constitution establishes the rule of law and lays down clear limitations to the scope of government, so as to protect the rights of individual citizens from any abuses of power, as well as from each other. As a consequence, the framers’ constitutional efforts went to great lengths to make sure that the federal government was a republican one, in the Polybian sense, and thereby sheltered from what they perceived to be the hazards of mob-rule democracy.
References
Harris, E. (1992) Pericles’ Praise of Athenian Democracy. Thucydides 2.37.1. “Harvard Studies in Classical Philology” 94, pp. 157-167.
Kagan, D. (1991) The Fall of the Athenian Empire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Norlin, G. (1928) Isocrates, with an English Translation in Three Volumes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Shuckburgh, E. (2013) The Histories of Polybius. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (first published in 1889).
Endnotes
[1] See Kagan 1991.
[2] See Harris 1992.
[3] Translation: Norlin 1928.
[4] Montesquieu, Pensées #1672 (translation mine).
[5] ἐξ ὧν πάλιν ὁπότε τις ἐπιδημήσαι μὴ παρόντος ὑπάτου, τελείως ἀριστοκρατικὴ φαίνεθ᾽ ἡ πολιτεία. ὃ δὴ καὶ πολλοὶ τῶν Ἑλλήνων, ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ τῶν βασιλέων, πεπεισμένοι τυγχάνουσι, διὰ τὸ τὰ σφῶν πράγματα σχεδὸν πάντα τὴν σύγκλητον κυροῦν. Translation: Shuckburgh 2013.

Conversation Comments Democracy, Republic, or Commonwealth?

Ioannis D. Evrigenis

It is a privilege to receive such excellent commentary, so I must begin by thanking the respondents for their remarks. They raise several significant issues, which, although grounded in historical questions, seem to me to be of crucial importance for our own politics.
Marco Romani notes rightly that there is a selection bias in the Greek and Roman sources that typically form the basis of our debates about democracy. To my mind this observation raises important questions about why and how we got here. Younger people nowadays are often surprised to hear that democracy meant bad news for most of recorded history, and while its transformation into the constitution of choice is evidence of a positive development, it also captures the extent to which our sense of the past and of those who differ from us is affected by our own circumstances. We know that we only have access to a tiny portion of what was written in antiquity, and while it could certainly be the case that enemies of democracy promoted those texts that they found congenial and buried those they deemed dangerous, it is also worth noting that the authors who have come to shape our sense of ancient democracy are primarily concerned with other matters and have much of great value to offer on those. Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle did not survive and rise to prominence because of their critique of democracy, which only occupies a very small portion of their works, but rather for their insights into human nature, our place in the world, knowledge, and many other issues that are related to constitutional design but most often extend well beyond it. Their value on those questions gave them a status that could not be matched by any work simply focusing on constitutional design. Given that "head start," I find it unsurprising that they dominated the debate as democracy experienced growing pains in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its opponents sought intellectual ammunition for their modern case. It is noteworthy that even Isocrates, whom Romani quotes, was contrasting the ideal of the democratic founders with the reality of fourth-century Athenian democracy.
I would, however, like to propose that we consider approaching these sources from a different perspective. Romani characterizes them as "hostile" to democracy, and while in a different setting this characterization is warranted, in our own it seems to me to increase the probability that those who are programmed to support democracy automatically will close their ears to what these authors have to say. Having been weaponized in the debate about democracy and its alternatives, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle are sounding increasingly irrelevant and even dangerous to those who are encouraged to see things in simple, oppositional terms. I would suggest, however, that it is worth evaluating these authors' assessments of democracy from a different point of view: wondering, for instance, why Socrates, in Plato's Apology, calls the city of Athens a magnificent and noble horse and himself a mere gadfly (30 e), as well as whether Plato's Socrates could have arisen out of anything other than a democracy. As Aristotle notes, in philosophical inquiry one should not "overlook or omit anything but [...] bring out the truth concerning each point" (Politics, 1279b15, Apostle trans.). As with most other topics they address, these authors are not simplistic partisans, but thoughtful guides, even on matters on which one disagrees with them.
As all three respondents observe, one's point of view would determine not only whether democracy was good or bad, but also what counted as a democracy and when. Charlotte Thomas rightly points out that for both Athenians as well as their allies and enemies there was a clear distinction between Athens in relation to its citizens and Athens as a force in international politics. If the demands of empire made it clear to fifth-century observers that a democracy at home is consistent with tyranny abroad, the implications of this realization are of crucial importance in a world like ours, in which true isolation is impossible and calls for democratization and humanitarian intervention abound. One of the greatest challenges to modern democracy is the widespread assumption that rights and prosperity are universalizable without costs to those who enjoy them already. The history of ancient democracies and republics offers a lot of food for thought on those questions.
As Carl Richard notes, the American founders were well-aware of Aristotle's observation that the constitutions in his famous matrix were ideal types and that actual constitutions contain elements from across that matrix. The balance struck in Philadelphia enabled most parties to consider the Constitution consistent with their sensibilities. The founders' great innovation was to set these principles down in a way that created a permanent point of reference and bound future generations to the principles of ordered liberty. Another of the Constitution's great innovations was to take Aristotle's general call for checks and balances to an entirely different level of sophistication.
The presence of elements of the United States' Constitution that could be singled out as democratic, aristocratic, and even monarchical meant that opponents could also find something to attack. It also meant that when circumstances brought one of these elements to the fore, observers and critics alike could reasonably refer to the overall constitution as "democratic" or "aristocratic." In Rome, as Romani reminds us, there was good reason to describe the regime as aristocratic when the senate dominated its politics, just as it made sense for Thucydides to describe democratic Athens as effectively a monarchy under Pericles. Whether reasonable or partisan, these allegations have been part and parcel of American politics since before the constitutional convention and are alive and well today, as debates over the extent of judicial or presidential powers continue.
In his thinly veiled criticism of Aristotle for his distinction between good and bad government, Hobbes argued that in calling someone a tyrant, one merely signified that he did not like a king (Leviathan, 19: 94-95). One does not need to accept Hobbes's criticism wholesale to agree with the observation that the use of these terms is usually not technical, but rather political. In some settings, calling something "democratic" is indicative of approbation, in others of disapprobation. For most of history, for reasons that I pointed to in my initial essay, the term "republic" was less controversial, primarily because it was taken to refer not to the type of constitution, but to the common good. Thomas is thus right to remind us that many of the most prominent examples of "republican" government that have come to be seen as precursors of popular sovereignty are more akin to monarchies and oligarchies than democracies.
Thomas also notes that checks and balances were already present in the Athenian constitution, and highlights some of the largely neglected elements of representation in it. This observation is an important reminder that the broad sketch of direct democracy in Athens that has both inspired and terrorized so many over the centuries is a caricature. Even though the Assembly was sovereign, the Athenians' brilliant division into tribes and consequent design of representative institutions were meant to address some of the problems inherent in human beings as political animals, including self-interest, factionalism, tragedies of the commons, and lust for power. At the very least, these are important reminders of the fact that all constitutions have deficiencies, and that, as Federalist 51 warns, politics is not concerned with angels. It is also true, however, that representation on the level of the city is very different from representation across a country, especially one as vast and diverse as the United States. It was during the birth of modern democracy that Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned of the danger of alienating one's will by delegating it to a representative, and although he found that problematic, one could argue that, however uneasily it sits with democracy, representation is still an important part of those valuable checks and balances.
Richard is also correct in pointing to Aristotle's interest in farmers, although when I referred to his treatment of the middle class I had in mind its most general form, as developed between Politics 1295a and 1296b. That broader emphasis on the middle class is not limited to farmers but is rather focused on the institutional advantages of a middle class large enough to ideally resist both the rich and the poor, but at least larger than either of the others on its own. But Richard is ultimately right because Aristotle's suspicion of commerce in Book 7 of that work strikes me as crucial not just for understanding the world of the founders, but also our own. If the size of the United States marks a departure from Aristotle's conditions for a good state, does it not also violate his conditions regarding trade and contact with the rest of the world? Richard argues that Aristotle would have been "appalled" by the size of both American states individually and especially of the United States as a whole, and this is true not only because of the incompatibility between these dominions and the political institutions Aristotle favored, but also because of the notion that trade between, say, New York and Florida could count as domestic. Nevertheless, the basic recommendation of a moderating middle class remains very important, especially as the extremes of economic inequality are not only very far apart, but now also immediately visible to all.
If every state and epoch bring their own unique complications, the challenge posed by America are of a completely different order. In the crudest terms, someone looking from the end of the eighteenth century backwards would find Athens too dissimilar to the United States, even if its politics had any appeal. As the countless parallels between America and Rome that are continuing to spring up suggest, the latter was a much more promising model. As Richard, Romani, and Thomas point out, however, there are all sorts of problems with the simple narratives of both Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism, each of which put history to work in the service of politics. Perhaps it is naive to hope that just as the founders managed to land on common ground, the partisans of American republicanism and those of American democracy will do the same, but that is precisely what a republic in the most basic sense of the term calls for.

Conversation Comments Ancient and Modern Systems

Carl Richard

Even by Thucydides’ account, Athenian democracy worked fairly well until it fell victim to the stresses of the Peloponnesian War.  But Thucydides considered the stresses of war an enduring fact of life that systems of government must be designed to withstand.
Thucydides had a personal as well as an ideological ax to grind with Cleon.  It was Cleon who led the successful effort to ostracize him after he failed to defend Amphipolis from the Spartans.  By that time, ostracism had become a means of punishing failure rather than a method of disarming the powerful as originally intended.  The practice soon degenerated even further into a way of harassing the unpopular, at which point it was abolished.
It was understandable that the Greek historian Polybius employed the theory of a revered Greek philosopher to explain to his dazed and defeated compatriots how a group of barbarians from a small town in the West had managed to conquer “almost the whole of the inhabited world” (just as it was understandable that Livy, when seeking to explain the same phenomenon to his fellow Romans, claimed cultural superiority).  But the Roman republic’s status as a mixed government is debatable.  Even at the height of their power, the consuls and the popular assemblies failed to serve as effective counterweights to the aristocratic Senate.  Indeed, at the very time that Polybius was portraying the republic as the ancient world’s most successful mixed government, the wealth and power produced by rapid Roman expansion across the Mediterranean was tilting the balance of power even further in favor of the aristocrats, thereby bringing about the class conflict that played a crucial role in the downfall of the republic.
The Federalist authors selected their collective pseudonym “Publicola” as part of an effort to dispel the Antifederalist claim that the new constitution they favored would institute a monarchy.  The framers of the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first constitution, had declined to establish a single executive due to the widespread fear of monarchy engendered by George III (under the Articles, executive functions were performed by a congressional committee).  By contrast, the framers of the proposed new constitution took the bold step of creating a fairly powerful executive, thereby reviving fears of monarchy.
Both the British monarch and the House of Lords have been divested of so much of their former power that they have become largely ceremonial institutions.  Thus, the British system of government today more closely resembles a simple democracy than any form of mixed government.  The majority exerts its will directly through a virtually unchecked House of Commons, in which the nation’s chief executive serves as a member.  The modern British system is similar to the unicameral democracy championed by Thomas Paine, Nicolas de Condorcet, and other eighteenth-century radicals.
By contrast, the United States remains a democratic republic, a nation in which the majority wields most of the power but in which a few significant elements of mixture, combined with the separation of powers, provide obstacles to majority tyranny.  The composition of the Senate, in which small states possess equality with large ones, and of the Electoral College, in which small states have slightly more weight than they do in the population count, ensure that majorities do not rule completely.  A powerful executive, holding a mandate from the people separate from that of Congress, possesses the veto power over its bills.  Finally, judicial review by unelected, life-tenured judges provides yet another element capable of thwarting majority opinion.

Conversation Comments Rectifying Republican Names

Charlotte C. Thomas

It is a bit surprising to me that this interesting exchange based on Ioannis Evrigenis’ thoughtful essay on ancient democracy and American constitutionalism has brought to my mind thoughts about Confucianism, but here we are.
One of Confucius’ bedrock strategies for establishing and maintaining social harmony is the “Rectification of Names” (zhèngmíng), an idea that at first might seem out of place in a list of fundamental political principles based on the five Confucian constants (Ren: benevolence, humaneness; Yi: righteousness, justice;  Li: propriety, rites; Zhi: wisdom, knowledge; and Xin: sincerity, faithfulness) and four Confucian virtues (Yi: righteousness, justice; Zhōng: loyalty; Xiào: filial piety; and Ié: continence). But the more I think about it, the wiser Confucius’s emphasis on the rectification of names seems to me, and the more apt it seems to our current conversation.
For Confucius, one part of rectifying names was understanding one’s social role and then inhabiting it with integrity, but the aspect that seems more relevant here is the project to define terms clearly and consistently so that we can know when we agree and disagree, especially about important things. When we do not mean the same things by the same words, we can be misled both about our agreements and our disagreements. We can find ourselves in one of the worst places Plato thought a human being could be: we might not know what we don’t know. And, in the context of politics, that lamentable situation can create disharmony, unrest, and danger.
As Ioannis rightly points out, throughout political history, different thinkers have meant very different things by “republicanism.” And I argue in my piece, that the conventional distinction between republicanism and democracy (at least in the ancient Athenian sense) is drawn much more sharply than it should be. The slipperiness of the terms “republic” and “democracy” make it difficult to know what the American’ Founders or anyone else really thought about political principles like equality, representation, and popular sovereignty, or the institutions proposed to instantiate them. If our path forward is to reach clarity, it must include careful attention to the meaning of these terms both in principle and in practice. We must engage in the “rectification of names.”
The lead essay in this series and the responses it elicited seem to me to be an excellent set of steps in the right direction. All the authors seem to agree that “republic” means many different things to different thinkers. As I read their pieces, it also seems that all of them see areas of overlap between these various historical meanings of “republic” and “democracy.” The history of political philosophy is rife with thoughtful meditations on both and on the relationships between them, but there does not seem to be a conceptual consensus, nor does there seem to be a conventionally consistent usage of either term in contemporary theory.
Although it might seem tedious or pedantic to pull back from such a rich literature of history and theory to develop a consistent technical vocabulary, at least for Confucius, cleaning up the way we talk to each other about important things is an essential step not just toward theoretical clarity, but also toward political stability, social harmony, justice, and peace.

Conversation Comments Ancient Democracy and Education

Marco Romani

In her response essay, Charlotte C. Thomas wonders “if the Founders’ criticisms of democracy were already known and addressed by the Athenians.” My answer to this question, as I have attempted to show, is a resounding yes. Classical Greek authors are often diffident towards democracy, due to its tendency to degenerate into unmanageable forms of government.
Plato, in particular, warns in his Republic against the unbridled race towards -as Evrigenis put it- “freedom by a multitude of insufficiently educated individuals” who place their private interests above the common good. Plato’s suspicion of democracy stems, in large part, from his observation that education in a democratic society often fails to restrain single individuals’ impulses or instill the intellectual and moral discipline necessary for wise governance.
Is there no solution in sight? Are democracies, in ancient Greek political thought, inherently destined to implode or collapse? Isocrates, a contemporary of Plato, offers an interesting perspective on the issue. The solution, for Isocrates, is to foster a shared system of civic and political education that can cultivate excellence while transmitting the core values of democratic equality to the newer generations.
According to Isocrates, the health of a state depends on raising individuals who can think critically, articulate their ideas persuasively, and prioritize the welfare of the community over narrow personal interests. His approach to education, rooted in rhetoric and philosophy, seeks to strike a balance between fostering individual virtue and nurturing a collective sense of responsibility. In his Panegyricus, for example, he writes:
Whether men have been liberally educated from their earliest years is not to be determined by their courage or their wealth or such advantages, but is made manifest most of all by their speech, and that this has proved itself to be the surest sign of culture in every one of us, and that those who are skilled in speech are not only men of power in their own cities but are also held in honor in other states.[1]
Isocrates’ emphasis on shared educational principles goes so far as to form the basis of what it means to be Greek. In his view, the outstanding talent for the arts and the sciences displayed by Athens allows the city to become the ‘teacher’ of Greece as a whole (Panegyricus 39-40), with the result that Athens’ educational guidance becomes the common patrimony of Greek-speaking society at large. Thus, the Greek identity itself comes to indicate a form of education (παίδευσις) rather than a genetic kin group.
Despite their differences, both Isocrates and Plato converge on the idea that education is crucial to the health and sustainability of a constitution. For Isocrates, this means fostering a shared civic culture through rhetorical training that aligned individual ambition with the common good. For Plato, it entails cultivating an intellectual and moral elite capable of guiding society through wisdom. These complementary perspectives reveal an enduring tension in ancient Greek thought on democracy: how to reconcile the demands of individual freedom with the requirements of collective governance.
The framers of the US constitution, well-versed in ancient philosophy, drew heavily on classical ideas when crafting a system designed to balance liberty with stability. In their view, preserving freedom requires equality before the law to be coupled with strong, widespread education and with a shared sense of morality so that a republican system doesn’t give way to tyranny or mob rule.
Endnotes
[1] Isocrates, Panegyricus 49: καὶ τούς τε σοφοὺς καὶ τοὺς ἀμαθεῖς δοκοῦντας εἶναι ταύτῃ πλεῖστον ἀλλήλων διαφέροντας, ἔτι δὲ τοὺς εὐθὺς ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἐλευθέρως τεθραμμένους ἐκ μὲν ἀνδρίας καὶ πλούτου καὶ τῶν τοιούτων ἀγαθῶν οὐ γιγνωσκομένους, ἐκ δὲ τῶν λεγομένων μάλιστα καταφανεῖς γιγνομένους, καὶ τοῦτο σύμβολον τῆς παιδεύσεως ἡμῶν ἑκάστου πιστότατον ἀποδεδειγμένον, καὶ τοὺς λόγῳ καλῶς χρωμένους οὐ μόνον ἐν ταῖς αὑτῶν δυναμένους, ἀλλὰ καὶ παρὰ τοῖς ἄλλοις ἐντίμους ὄντας (tr. Norlin 1928).

Conversation Comments The Common Good

Ioannis D. Evrigenis

I had a similar reaction to Charlotte Thomas's, except it was Thomas Hobbes who came to my mind. He, too, insisted on the proper signification of terms as the first step towards avoiding conflict, and both Confucius and Hobbes have a point. There are at least three difficulties, however, that we must face when considering such terms as "democracy" and "republic." The first is true of all terms, insofar as they are designations attempting to capture the essence of a Venn Diagram. In the best of cases, terms more or less effectively capture and convey the overlapping section. The trouble begins outside the overlap, where the differences can often be bewildering. The second problem is especially true of political terms, which are almost always tinged with some element of approbation or disapprobation, and are therefore subject not just to descriptive or indifferent use, but also to partisan appropriation. As I indicated in my opening remarks, both "democracy" and "republic" have enjoyed periods of widespread approbation, and at present are generally seen in a positive light, despite their differences. There is perhaps no more eloquent example of their currency than the fact that North Korea claims to be both democratic and a republic. The third difficulty arises from the fact that, having been used widely and wildly, these already complex terms have become even harder to pin down. As I noted earlier, the term "republic" was used just as much by monarchists as by those pushing for popular sovereignty. As Mogens Herman Hansen reminds us, "Tyrants also summoned assemblies, and a tyrant's power often rested on his occupying the city-state's top administrative post and terrorising the city-state's political institutions into doing his bidding by means of his clique of followers or his bodyguard."[1] As Carl Richard, Marco Romani, and Charlotte Thomas note, the real story about both Athenian and Roman institutions is far more complicated than their typical ossified summaries (themselves products of not just well-intentioned historical research, but also of political agendas).. Indeed, "democratic" Athens had thought deeply about the problems of direct rule and devised intricate representative institutions, just as "republican" Rome was very often an oligarchy in fact.
These cautionary notes, then, should lead us to ask what it is that we prize in democracy and republicanism, and three things raised in this discussion seem to me to stand out. The first element is freedom, but not just any freedom. As both Plato and Hobbes pointed out, absolute liberty for everyone is nothing but anarchy, and that condition is not one that any reasonable person would want to be in. The American founders knew this well as they kept their eyes on the prize of ordered liberty. But it is very easy to lose sight of it. The call to less than complete freedom is, of course, far less attractive than the call to freedom, but that attraction is superficial. The second element is therefore civic education, because only thereby can we be brought to the point where we realize that less than complete freedom is actually better than living in the state of nature. Civic education would also make clear what Plato, Hobbes, and many others, including the American founders, considered the essence of a republic—democratic or otherwise—namely a robust understanding of and commitment to the common good, the third and crucial element. That is hard to focus on in a society that has come to take commodious living for granted, but it is no less necessary there than it is among those who are striving to get from tyranny to popular sovereignty. Benjamin Franklin's "if you can keep it" is a challenge greater than might appear at first, but it is one we must heed.
Endnotes
[1] Mogens Herman Hansen, Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 112-13.

Conversation Comments Mitigating the Deficiencies of Democracy

Carl Richard

I agree completely with Ioannis Evrigenis that Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle have much to teach us about democracy.  Some modern scholars have been so indignant that these ancient aristocrats dared to criticize democracy that they have sacrificed the golden opportunity of gleaning from their shrewd analyses its real deficiencies (every human system possesses deficiencies because humans are deficient), knowledge that is crucial to its preservation.  Thucydides did not invent the fact that Alcibiades goaded the Athenian popular assembly into launching a disastrous military campaign in Sicily.  Nor did Xenophon invent the fact that the assembly also approved the unjust execution of six of the city’s best generals, thereby precipitating the fatal defeat at Aegospotami soon after.  Majority irrationality and tyranny are not figments of aristocratic imaginations.  They are real phenomena that must be accounted for, not ignored because they are embarrassing.  The romanticizers of democracy do it no favors.  Rather, we should join Winston Churchill in saying that democracy is the worst form of government except for all others.  Acknowledging the dark side of human nature and thus the impossibility of utopia allows for an adult conversation about mitigating democracy’s inherent deficiencies.
As  Marco Romani observes, the proper education of citizens is a crucial element of mitigation.  This is why Thomas Jefferson worked his whole adult life to introduce a system of public education in Virginia.  Although he largely failed, he did play a leading role in the establishment of the University of Virginia, an accomplishment of which he was so proud that he instructed it be engraved on his tombstone, along with references to the Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Religious Freedom.
Finally, I agree with Charlotte Thomas that before we can have a meaningful discussion about republicanism and democracy, we must define these terms.  But I disagree with the contention that we cannot know what the founders thought about them.  Fortunately, they left behind a plethora of documents (letters, diary entries, speeches, and essays) that detailed their political philosophies.  What we discover from this treasure trove is that they disagreed with one another.  During the Revolution, they papered over their differences for the sake of unity, but these disagreements burst to the fore during the early republican period, leading to the rise of political parties.  The sincere fervor with which Federalists and Democratic-Republicans denounced one another as traitors to republicanism (Caesars and Catilines, in the vernacular of the day) reflected astonishment and horror at the discovery that their opponents, whom they had recently considered brothers in arms, had not meant the same thing by the revered term “republic” as they meant.

Conversation Comments The best government for imperfect people is … imperfect

Charlotte C. Thomas

I have enjoyed being a part of this conversation about Ioannis D. Evrigenis’s thoughtful piece, “Why a “Republic” and not a “Democracy?” and I’ve benefitted greatly from Carl Richard and Marco Romani’s responses. I’m grateful to Liberty Fund for making this exchange possible. Perhaps, my gratitude has made me particularly accommodating, because when Evrigenis suggested in his follow up essay that we shift our focus, I was immediately happy to oblige. It helps that I think he is right.
He writes,
I would suggest, however, that it is worth evaluating these authors' assessments of democracy from a different point of view: wondering, for instance, why Socrates, in Plato's Apology, calls the city of Athens a magnificent and noble horse and himself a mere gadfly (30 e), as well as whether Plato's Socrates could have arisen out of anything other than a democracy.
As I wrote in my first response, I understand Socrates’s accounts of political regimes in the Republic collectively to imply that kallipolis has not and likely will not ever exist as a political regime. Socrates insists that it is not impossible for it to exist, but he admits that it is practically impossible to meet the conditions for the possibility of it coming into existence. He also says that it doesn’t matter. Kallipolis is an ideal designed to inform our thinking and orient our ambitions. The fact that it cannot be instantiated as a political regime does not diminish its value.
If kallipolis cannot likely exist as a regime, the question for the practical politician becomes “what is the best possible regime to be attempted?” (There are different questions implied for the philosopher, but that’s a matter for another time.) This is where Evrigenis’s suggestion that we refocus on more positive ancient claims regarding democracy comes into play. Given how low democracy sits in the hierarchy of unjust regimes enumerated in the Republic, it seems implausible to claim that it is being recommended as the best possible regime, but I think that is precisely what Plato implies. If any of the other regime types (except tyranny) were perfectly instantiated, they would be better than democracy. But not only is that unlikely, but the imperfect instantiation of any of them is dangerous, so attempting them is imprudent. Taking the words of James Madison not entirely, I hope, in vain, “If men were angels . . .” we could do better than democracy. But we’re not. And we can’t.
Democracy is the best regime when instantiated imperfectly for imperfect human beings. Socrates’s preference for and commitment to Athens is one of the clearest signs of this being Plato’s position. It is not a small thing to be the regime least likely to kill philosophers – even if that regime is like a big horse that is always swatting at them.
What is meant by “democracy” matters. And, in this case, I think Plato means a regime much closer to what we tend to mean by “republic,” i.e., the rule of law, popular sovereignty, and institutions that avoid, as best they can, what Madison calls “faction” in Federalist 10.
Contemporary advocates of American democracy and republicanism often don’t understand each other because they don’t mean the same things by the same words. Regimes that embody the extreme positions they attribute to one another have never and probably will never exist. If we learn to make ourselves understood and we focus on what is politically possible for imperfect people in an imperfect world, there is probably more common ground than many contemporary partisans imagine. We would do well to look for it together.

Conversation Comments Oligarchies Ancient and Modern

Marco Romani

One thing that all response essays have in common so far is that they successfully highlight the continued relevance of ancient philosophical and historical thought when it comes to the question of democracy and its tragically fragile nature. Richard and Evrigenis, in particular, are right to point out that ancient political thinkers—and especially Aristotle—were  well aware of the threats posed to a stable popular government by the accumulation of wealth and power into the hands of a few, and the corresponding erosion of a previously solid middle class.
Without a doubt, the problem is familiar to observers of the relationship between economic imbalances and democratic process in the early twenty-first century, especially since the landmark Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010 prohibited restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations. In Federalist 10, James Madison already sounded alarm bells:
[...] the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern Legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the Government.
As a consequence of all this, for Madison, representation is a double-edged sword. The sheer size of the republic might make the number of representatives either too large or too small; and, of course, “enlightened statesmen” who can lay aside their private interests in the name of the common good “will not always be at the helm.” Most importantly, representation is inextricably entangled with the emergence of factions based on economic inequality. At the same time, as Evrigenis reminds us, representation itself is “still an important part of those valuable checks and balances” that make up the backbone of popular government.
In his outline of an ideal constitution, Aristotle had acknowledged that representation and participation in office require resources and that, correspondingly, the application of political rights can never be independent from the way in which wealth and resources are distributed. Are those rights themselves equally distributed, if their ultimate underpinning is highly uneven across society? To be sure, our ancient sources stop short of framing the question in these exact terms.
Plato and Aristotle, in particular, did not regard equality as desirable per se in either a political or an economic sense (with the only partial exception of land distribution in Plato’s second-best city: Laws 5.736-46). And yet, if there is one thing the ancients have taught us about the political world, it is precisely the never-ending change that constitutions and government forms are subject to over time. One hopes that we will not forget their warnings as we keep wondering about the future of popular government and democracy itself.

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