Euripides, “Democracy and Despotism”
This brief dialogue taken from the Greek playwright Euripides is one of the earliest known
defenses of the democratic ideal in Western political theory. Taken from his play, The
Suppliants, the excerpt envisions an exchange between an envoy from Thebes, ruled by the
tyrant Creon, and one of the leaders of Athenian democracy, Theseus. The Theban Messenger
makes several criticisms of Athenian democracy, all of which would be echoed later by the
“founder” of Western political philosophy, Plato, in his most famous dialogue, the Republic. The
Theban Messenger decries the democratic masses as “gullible” and easily taken in and
manipulated by a self-serving politician, precisely because they are incapable of judging right
from wrong. So, too, the Messenger claims that most people lack the time and talent necessary to
understand the intricacies of political issues, which are too complex for their feeble and
uneducated minds. Theseus responds that nothing is worse than the rule of one man who places
himself above the law and is not subject to it. Moreover, he claims that real freedom means that
anyone capable of giving sound advice should be able to do so, by contributing directly to the
process of defining the common good through active political participation and deliberation.
Pericles, “Funeral Oration”
Given at a burial ceremony to commemorate fallen warriors during the Peloponnesian War
between Athens and Sparta, Pericles’s funeral oration is regarded as the classic defense of
Athenian democracy. Before praising the dead, Pericles describes the democratic way of life for
which they died. According to his account, the definitional markers of Athenian democracy were
equal justice under the law, and the preferential recognition of excellence among its citizenry,
which took the form of making public service the reward of merit. So, too, the Athenians insisted
that poverty not act as barrier to public service, recognizing full well that talented people are
sometimes born to poor and obscure circumstances. Crucially, Pericles insists that the Athenians
“alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless
character.” Athenian democracy thus put a profound emphasis on public participation and
deliberation in politics, believing, according to Pericles, that, “The great impediment to action is,
in our opinion, not discussion, but the want of that knowledge which is gained by discussion
preparatory to action” (p. 18). Against this backdrop, Pericles maintains that honorable death in
war is the highest form of public service; it is a form of sacrifice for an ideal way of life. By
making it, the individuals who perish demonstrate by their behavior an ability to transcend their
narrowly defined private interests on behalf of something greater than themselves. Pericles
concludes that their sacrifice is worthy of a form of admiration that words can never express.
Aristotle, “Democratic Judgment and the ‘Middling’ Constitution”
In this reading, the Greek political philosopher Aristotle offers a qualified endorsement of the
capacity of democratic citizens to make good political judgments. Aristotle himself was no
defender of democracy: In his six-part taxonomy of political regimes, he classified democracy as
a corrupt or perverted form of government; a kind of class rule by the many poor who think only
of their own interests, and not of the good of the community as a whole. Indeed, Aristotle
believed that democracy often led directly to the worst form of government, tyrannical rule by
one man who dupes the demosby pretending to be their friend and savior. Nevertheless, Aristotle
also argued that democratic majorities are often capable of making very good political
judgments. This is because “Each individual among the many has a share of virtue and prudence,
and when they meet together, they become in a manner of speaking one man, who has many feet
and hands and senses” (p. 22). In this way, the aggregated assessments and decisions made by
the multitude are frequently as good as, or better than, those made by any one single individual.
Moreover, this matters a great deal for Aristotle because he firmly believe that his ideal form of
government, rule by “the best” (or aristocracy), was highly unlikely, given the real existing
conditions of most states and most people most of the time. Thus, Aristotle came to advocate a
form of “mixed government” which he called “polity” as the most practicable alternative to the
ideal of aristocracy. “Polity” combined elements of rule by the few with rule by the many, was
marked by the predominance of a large and thriving middle class, and aimed at achieving not the
good of any one class, but rather the entire community.
Niccolò Machiavelli, “What’s Wrong with Princely Rule?”
While best known as the author of The Prince, the Italian Renaissance thinker Machiavelli’s
greatest contribution to the history of political ideas was his defense of republicanism. The
republican vision of “mixed government” (a combination of rule by one, few, and many), rather
than princely rule, was Machiavelli’s ideal form of government. Republicanism, a classical idea
that can be traced from Aristotle through Polybius to Roman authors, was in the process of being
reborn during Machiavelli’s time. Machiavelli regarded Roman republicanism as particularly
worthy of theoretical defense, and this is what he set out to do in his book, The
Discourses, which is a commentary on the work of the Roman historian Titus Livy. In this
extract from The Discourses, Machiavelli defends a mixed form of government with a broad
popular base (the many) over the simple rule of a prince (the one), on the grounds that the
people’s judgment is better than the prince’s. First, he insists that the proper grounds for making
this assessment is when both forms of government are under the rule of law, which is paramount
for avoiding the chief political vice of corruption. With reference to Roman history, Machiavelli
then argues that rule by the many was more prudent, stable, predicted the future better, led to
more social progress, and produced better choices on the whole than the rule of one man. He
maintains, further, that when the rule of law is in place, “we shall find more virtue in the people
that in the prince” (p. 28), and that the people’s errors will be consequently smaller and more
easily checked than the prince’s.
John Adams, “Thoughts on Government”
In 1776, one of America’s most important Founding Fathers and the eventual second President
of the United States, John Adams, set forth some of the basic tenets of republicanism in
his Thoughts on Government. In this extract, Adams begins with the famous declaration that a
republic is best defined as “an empire of law, and not of men.” He then goes on to consider what
the best institutional arrangements for self-government would be, given this goal of creating a
society in which impartial law, rather than self-interested individuals, holds sway. His argument
here is a modification of the much older ideal of “mixed government” that can be traced back
from Aristotle, through Rome, to the Italian Renaissance. On this view, the elements of the
monarchical one, the aristocratic few, and the popular many must be carefully balanced in one
government in order to stave off corruption. Adams maintains that the first task in any large
society will be to choose “a few of the most wise and good” as representatives of the people (p.
821). He insists further that, due largely to the negative propensities of human nature; a simple
unicameral legislature is undesirable. Instead, Adams argues for a bicameral legislature and an
executive vested with veto power, in order for the people’s representatives to be able to check
one another, and thus to prevent the slide into corrupt rule. Similarly, Adams advocates an
independent judicial branch that is “distinct from both the legislative and executive,” in order for
it to “be a check upon both, as both should be checks upon that” (pp. 33-34).
“Bill of Rights of the United States”
While the Framers of the Constitution originally believed that the system of separation of powers
and checks and balances outlined in the document would be sufficient both to ward off the
danger of corrupt rule from the national government and protect individual rights, many others
were not so convinced. Largely due to criticism from these “Antifederalists,” a Bill of Rights
was drafted to make certain guarantees to individuals and states explicit and inviolable. This
document was adopted as the first ten amendments to the Constitution in 1791. The Bill of
Rights is an admixture of old republican concerns about domination by a corrupt government and
fears that the national government was not sufficiently democratic, with the language of liberal
individualism.
Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy and Equality”
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America after a nine-month visit to the United States
in the early 1830s. It is one of the most profound interpretations of the potential implications of
the democratic ideal ever written. While born into the French aristocracy, Tocqueville came to
see democracy as an irresistible force that was definitional of political modernity, one destined to
sweep away societies like those in Europe which were predicated on feudal orders, ranks, and
aristocratic privileges. Democracy, in short, was on Tocqueville’s account historically inevitable,
and not a matter of choice. Given this, he sought to understand democracy’s tendencies—both
positive and negative—and to accentuate the former, while mitigating if not eliminating the
latter. In this regard, Tocqueville is probably best known for his analysis of democracy’s
shortcomings, particularly its tendency to produce mediocrity and conformism. By celebrating
equality, democracy pressures people to think and act in similar ways, especially in the mindless
pursuit of material wealth. Tocqueville called this psychological pressure towards blind
conformity “the tyranny of the majority,” and argued that it threatened to lead either to rule by
the dull and mediocre (because no great individuals would enter politics), or old fashioned
despotism, as demagogues tricked the people into believing in them while pursuing their own
power. He added that democracy might also lead to a new form of tyranny, which he called “soft
despotism,” or the threat that individuals would gradually cede more and more of their liberties
to an increasingly powerful state, which they expected to dole out material benefits and
privileges. To counter these tendencies, Tocqueville argued for a range of intermediary
institutions within the context of democracy, like those which had existed in the European Old
Regime, where the aristocracy had served as a buffer to the emergence of despotism by guarding
its privileges and property, and inculcated values like honor which were contrary to materialism
and conformity. The trick, of course, was that these intermediary bodies could not actually
recreate an aristocracy, which was a conceptual non-starter for a democratic society.
Consequently, Tocqueville would turn to such remedies as organized religion, lawyers and the
judicial branch as a whole, and the educational system, to act as bulwarks against the tyranny of
the majority and despotism. He also famously advocated local self-governance and active
participation (such as the New England town hall meeting and jury duty), to attach people to
their locality, to develop “habits of the heart” that lead to communal over self-interest, and
thereby to stem the flow of power to the center of large political associations.
In this reading, drawn from the introduction to Democracy in America,Tocqueville focuses on
the inevitability of democracy, a phrase which he makes synonymous with “equality of
conditions.” For Tocqueville: “The gradual development of the equality of conditions is…a
providential fact, and it possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree” (p. 40). Tocqueville
notes that this process has effectively destroyed the aristocracy in France, and substituted
political democracy, the necessary concomitant of it, in its place. The problem, however, is that
this new democracy is untutored and uneducated. The consequence, he tells his French
countrymen, is that they have destroyed all of the intermediary bodies that could act as a
counterweight to democracy’s negative tendencies, but replaced them with nothing. “Having
destroyed and aristocracy, we seem inclined to survey its ruins with complacency.” The
consequence is that the “lawless” government he calls the “democracy of France…has
overthrown whatever crossed its path, and has shaken all that it has not destroyed” (p. 43). In
order to find out what should be done in France, then, Tocqueville traveled to America, to look at
a country where there had never been anything but equality of condition, on his view, and which
therefore afforded the perfect opportunity to contemplate the positive and negative tendencies of
democratic principles in all their purity. His goal was to discover what the Americans did poorly,
and what they did well, in order to learn how to “educate the democracy” which was inevitable
in France, and throughout Europe. What was needed, in short was to “a new science of politics”
in order to confront a “new world’ that would be inescapably democratic for better and worse.
John Stuart Mill, “Democratic Participation and Political Education”
In this extract, taken from his Considerations on Representative Government,the great English
philosopher and political theorist John Stuart Mill makes a case for representative democracy as
the ideal form of government. Mill’s argument rests on two broad claims. The first is that such a
government alone is truly “self-protecting”; that is, only a representative democracy in which
individuals are directly involved in choosing those who will govern them can truly express their
interests and prevent “evil at the hands of others” (p. 49). This is consistent with Mill’s lifelong
commitment to the philosophy of Utilitarianism, which sought to promote “the greatest good for
the greatest number.” Utilitarians believed that democracy provided a mechanism for individuals
to express their conception of self-interest, principally through the mechanism of casting votes
that could be aggregated to discern which policies were most desirable for the community as a
whole. However, the bulk of Mill’s essay focuses on his second argument in favor of democracy,
which pertains to its educative effects on the moral and civic character of individuals, as well as
the tremendous benefits that such citizens provide for the community writ large. With reference
back to participatory Athenian democracy, but also like his friend Tocqueville, Mill insists that a
citizen, while actively engaged in politics, even if only at the local level, is called upon, while so
engaged, to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another
rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for
reason of existence the common good…Where this school of public spirit does not exist,
scarcely any sense is entertained that private persons, in no eminent social situation, owe any
duties to society, except to obey the laws and submit to the government. There is no unselfish
sentiment of identification with the public (p. 52).