A fascinating essay on democracy by the great Robert Conquest. (I just re-discovered his greatness over the past month while reading his The Great Terror: A Re-Assessment).
Here's just a peek at what he says - but I highly recommend you go and read the whole thing.
The revival of the concept of democracy on the European continent saw this huge stress on the demos, the people. They could not in fact match the direct participation of the Athenian demos, but they could be "represented" by any revolutionary regime claiming to do so--often concerned, above all, to repress "enemies of the people." Also, the people, or those of military age, could be conscripted in bulk--the levˇe en masse that long defeated more conventional armies. As the 19th century continued, the people could be polled in plebiscites and thus democratically authenticated. Napoleon III, of course, relied on this, and it is clear that he actually had high majority support. In any case, the new orders, democratic or not, had to seek or claim authentication by the people, the masses, the population.Another aspect of premature "democracy" is the adulation of what used to be and might still be called "the city mob" (noted by Aristotle as ochlocracy). In France, of course, in the 1790s, a spate of ideologues turned to the Paris mob, in riot after riot, until the 18th Brumaire, Napoleon's coup of 1799. The ploy was that, as A. E. Housman put it, a capital city with far fewer inhabitants could decide the fate of the country's millions.
There's much more.
"Democracy" is often given as the essential definition of Western political culture. At the same time, it is applied to other areas of the world in a formal and misleading way. So we are told to regard more or less uncritically the legitimacy of any regime in which a majority has thus won an election. But "democracy" did not develop or become viable in the West until quite a time after a law-and-liberty polity had emerged. Habeas corpus, the jury system and the rule of law were not products of "democracy", but of a long effort, from medieval times, to curb the power of the English executive. And democracy can only be seen in any positive or laudable sense if it emerges from and is an aspect of the law-and-liberty tradition.
There's the rub. But go read the whole thing.
Sheila, the point about democracy being dependent on law-and-liberty is well made.. It's the first thing I think of when certain parties here talk about their 'mandate'.. I usually think of the connection as 'accountability beyond the ballot box'.
and, as a side-note, I'm watching, in my yurt, a programme titled "Who Killed Stalin".. did you know his daughter, Svetlana, is still alive? They weren't able to interview her but they showed footage from a 1969 interview instead.
Posted by: peteb at March 11, 2005 04:15 PMAs a good essay should, the Conquest piece contains meat for all sides of the "democracy" debate. He clearly is skeptical about the likelihood of countries like Iraq turning into political imitations of, say, the US or the UK; yet Conquest's caveats about the unrealistic and potentially destructive demands that internationalist organizations make on "law-and-liberty" countries are particularly apt.
Posted by: NJ Sue at March 11, 2005 05:00 PM