Democracy: A Life

"This book came out a year or so ago, and was based on his Cambridge lectures. The first part, and the bulk of it, is about ancient democracy. It’s heavily based on Athens because that’s the democracy that we really know about. He does point out that there were perhaps a thousand other democracies, but this is a big one. An awful lot of states would not have been democracies. Then there’s the scepticism with which the Romans dealt with it and it went underground for a long time. The last bit of the book is the revival in modern times—first of all, as an idea to be played with very cautiously. We’re talking about the British civil wars, the Levellers, the Diggers, and so on. There’s the cautious toying with democracy in the French Revolution. There’s some talk of the American Revolution as well. But with the French Revolution, very quickly we get Napoleon. And with American democracy, there was slavery. Then it ends up with some final reflections on democracy now and where we go from here. But a lot of it is just concerned with how similar ancient and modern democratic ideas are and where it all comes from. We tend to think of democracy as a very Greek thing, and Cartledge, I think, is right to say that, ‘Yes, it is.’ It’s one of the ten things that the Sun said that we owed to Greece, in a list which also included theatre, democracy, and the kebab. But there’s some discretion in the book. There are certainly elements that we prize in democracy, like public debate for instance, which are not particularly distinctive to Greece. You can find parallels and antecedents in India and China as well. Cartledge emphasises that, if we’re talking about power and decision-making, then there is a sense in which Athens got to the stage of letting the people really decide things in a way that not many ancient states did. Some did—Syracuse, interestingly, was a democracy. But this has very rarely been reached since. There are good questions of whether we’ll ever have that degree of democracy again: the real involvement of ordinary people in Athens, beyond elections. Elections were there for some things—but there was also the lot to ensure that ordinary people might have their moment in the sun. And it could be literally anybody. All that really direct government has not been characteristic of any democracy as states have got bigger. It’s all been representative democracy. With new technology, we could now move in the direction of a much more direct democracy with new technology. Whether we want to or not is, of course, a very big question. This is what John Stuart Mill called the ‘tyranny of the majority.’ Even in Athens, if one goes back to the tragedies, it’s as easy to find fairly vigorous criticisms of democracy as it is praise. The criticism normally takes the form of criticism of the people and their basis for reaching decisions. One particular play of Euripides, The Suppliant Women , has both. There’s a very eloquent passage of praise for democracy which John Milton later put on the title page of Areopagitica . But there are also lots of pretty near-the-bone criticisms. Echoing a criticism that was often made, it is suggested that people are just not educated enough and it should be the people who are educated enough to understand real dangers who should take the decisions. There is also criticism going back to Herodotus. He describes a constitutional debate of three views: do we want a monarchy? Do we want an oligarchy? Or do we want a democracy? Remarkably, this is in Persia. It has a very succinct treatment of democracy from one of the speakers. He says ‘I’d rather a monarch than a democracy—at least he knows what he’s doing! Whereas, the people just jump in and give everything a kicking around. It’s just like a torrent in flood.’ So there’s a lot of scepticism about it and that goes over into the Roman side as well. Yes, the Romans had an element of democracy—they had elections and the people did have a say there—but that has got to be heavily qualified. It was just men and citizens. Citizenship mattered a great deal and probably, in Athens, only one in ten of the people you would see on the street would be a citizen. There would be women, there would be a lot of slaves, and there would be a lot of what they called ‘metics’—resident aliens, who were making their lives and livelihoods in Athens and were very important to the economy, but were still not part of the body. If you had citizenship, you were, in a sense, already an aristocrat. You maybe weren’t one of the one per cent but at least one of the ten percent. It was a great privilege. It comes in, possibly almost by mistake, as part of a general constitutional settlement back in 508 BC with Cleisthenes. It’s part of a political game. He gets the demos, the people, on his side to establish power for himself. And part of the power, then, goes to the people as part of payback for that. The big difference is that Athenian democracy could really be direct. The assembly of adult male citizens really was sovereign. It was said that it would be appalling if the people were prevented from doing whatever they wanted. In one particular case, there was a trial of some generals who were called to account for letting people drown after a sea battle. And it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t their fault. There was nothing they could have done about it. But the people simply said the generals must be executed and they were executed. It’s a balance between democracy and the rule of law. The rule of law is also an important concept. Law was regarded as an important part of democracy too. But, still, the capacity of a sovereign people to overrule is something that was fairly deeply embedded in Athenian thinking. So the notion that the Supreme Court could be—as the Daily Mail would put it—‘enemies of the people’ would have a lot more bite as an objection in the ancient world than it does in the modern. The protection of the rights of individuals is something that is part of freedom that we would rate rather differently, perhaps. Cartledge himself is very upbeat in his treatment of democracy. He’s obviously very keenly pro-democracy, though, he has said in an interview that he’s a little less pro direct-democracy since Brexit than he was before. He’s rather pessimistic about the future. In the last few pages of the book he talks about the threat to democracy caused by religion and the deployment of religion against democracy—the Daesh slogans of pro-Sharia against democracy, for example. The balance of religion and democracy is a very interesting one in the ancient world. Religion was part of what the city-state was about. The role of the city in guiding religion, taking care of religion and organising it, was fundamental. I think the notion that you could play one against the other is rather more modern than ancient. The connection between freedom and democracy is an interesting area. They are so close in modern sloganism: people fighting for freedom and democracy. With George W. Bush, particularly, they came out almost as one word: ‘freedom-and-democracy’. There are hints of that in the ancient world. That connection comes in around 450 BC largely because, even though they’re not necessarily connected that closely, they both have the same opposite. They are both contrasted with tyranny. If there’s a tyranny (as there was in the Persian world, according to the Greeks), there’s one boss and everybody else is a slave. Tyranny and democracy are opposite ends of the pole. That affects the way in which Herodotus, in particular, portrays the idea of freedom as a great inspiring force. With all the downsides, it’s a very close thing whether it wins, but it does win. On the other hand, certainly in the Greek world, there ought to be a pretty clear antidote to regarding them as equivalent because there were an awful lot of states that were anything but democracies and yet were extraordinarily proud of being free. They would have been horrified by any suggestion that they weren’t. The slogans that are associated with democracy, even more than freedom, are those with equality: either equality of speech—‘isēgoría’—where everybody could speak out, or equal access to the law—‘isonomia’ —perhaps not quite equality before the law but everybody being protected by law. But, as we saw with the case of that trial, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are all that closely connected; the protections aren’t as great. It’s this idea of all citizens sharing things that is more basic, perhaps, even than freedom, to democracy."