Democracy, Republic, or Commonwealth?

   

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.