Danielle Allen: How does one learn to construct and to lead a republic?
[Danielle Allen is UPS Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and the author most recently of Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago).]
How does one learn to construct and to lead a republic? Monarchies do not provoke this question, or at least not with the same urgency. When King George III took the throne in Britain in 1760, he had some thirty-three predecessors in England alone, if one goes back only to William the Conqueror, and fifty-odd predecessors if one goes back to Egbert, the first "King of All England," in the ninth century. George had all this history to consider, and also the histories of other monarchies and hierarchical structures the world over. When Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, and their colonial friends framed and defended a Constitution for a newly united federation of American states, they, too, turned to history--but they had fewer examples on which to draw. They looked to the ancient Greek city-states, to the republics of northern Italy, to the Germanic League, and, of course, to the Roman Republic, from which they would take their greatest inspiration. They would have leapt for joy to have read Josiah Ober's new book.
As Hamilton, Jay, and Madison saw it, Greece presented little other than a cautionary tale to the eighteenthcentury architects of a new and vast republic. Hamilton was characteristically high-flown:
It is impossible to read the history of the petty
Republics of Greece and Italy, without feeling
sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions
with which they were continually agitated, and at the
rapid succession of revolutions by which they were
kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the
extremes of tyranny and anarchy. If they exhibit
occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived
contrasts to the furious storms that are to succeed.
If now and then intervals of felicity open themselves to
view, we behold them with a mixture of regret, arising
from the reflection that the pleasing scenes before us
are soon to be overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves
of sedition and party rage. If momentary rays of glory
break forth from the gloom, while they dazzle us with a
transient and fleeting brilliancy, they at the same time
admonish us to lament that the vices of government
should pervert the direction and tarnish the luster of
those bright talents and exalted endowments, for which
the favoured soils that produced them have been so
justly celebrated.
The late eighteenth century took its view of ancient Athenian democracy primarily from its critics: Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison were espousing the standard line, which was this: although there were differences between cities--as between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta--all the Greek city-states were given to instability and suffered ugly demographic crises induced by revolution and war. Moreover, the so-called democracies were not really "governments by the people" at all. As Madison put it, "In the most pure democracies of Greece, many of the executive functions were performed, not by the people themselves, but by officers elected by the people, and representing the people in their executive capacity."
Even considered as a republic governed primarily by elite representatives, Athens was to be judged a failure. Its leading statesman, "the celebrated Pericles," in Hamilton's words, routinely "sacrifice[d] the national tranquility to personal advantage, or personal gratification." Most egregiously, according to Hamilton, he started the Peloponnesian War to distract the Athenian populace from efforts to prosecute him for the misuse of state funds. So pure democracy necessarily devolves into either anarchy or rule by a corrupt managerial elite--this is the theoretical claim undergirding the commentary on Athens in The Federalist Papers and sustaining the authors' conclusion that Athens could not be a useful model for the citizens designing a new constitution in 1787 for a set of freshly united states.
In the early twentieth century, the sociologist Robert Michels formalized this theoretical claim as the "iron law of oligarchy." Any collectivity larger than a face-to-face society of a few hundred souls must develop formal organization if it is to succeed at pursuing its collective flourishing; and the imperatives of organization, Michels argued, will inevitably drive the evolution of political forms toward oligarchies ruled by a small elite corps of expert managers. On Michels's argument, a long-lived and competitively successful participatory democracy with direct rule by the people themselves--"pure democracy," in the words of Madison--is best understood as something like a unicorn: beloved for its purity, seen only in dreams.
Josiah Ober has made it his life's work to refute Michels's law, and to prove that "participatory democracy" can meet the demands of organization by developing institutional and cultural forms that effectively provide for a group's success over the long-term. By "participatory democracy," Ober means forms of political organization in which ordinary citizens, amateurs, really do make and implement critical policy decisions as well as sustain the systems of reward and sanction that keep the whole democratic machine functioning. A genuinely participatory democracy is not, contrary to our own regime, built around the principle of representation; but this does not mean that representative and participatory institutions are mutually exclusive forms of democratic organization, as I will suggest....
Read entire article at New Republic
How does one learn to construct and to lead a republic? Monarchies do not provoke this question, or at least not with the same urgency. When King George III took the throne in Britain in 1760, he had some thirty-three predecessors in England alone, if one goes back only to William the Conqueror, and fifty-odd predecessors if one goes back to Egbert, the first "King of All England," in the ninth century. George had all this history to consider, and also the histories of other monarchies and hierarchical structures the world over. When Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, and their colonial friends framed and defended a Constitution for a newly united federation of American states, they, too, turned to history--but they had fewer examples on which to draw. They looked to the ancient Greek city-states, to the republics of northern Italy, to the Germanic League, and, of course, to the Roman Republic, from which they would take their greatest inspiration. They would have leapt for joy to have read Josiah Ober's new book.
As Hamilton, Jay, and Madison saw it, Greece presented little other than a cautionary tale to the eighteenthcentury architects of a new and vast republic. Hamilton was characteristically high-flown:
It is impossible to read the history of the petty
Republics of Greece and Italy, without feeling
sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions
with which they were continually agitated, and at the
rapid succession of revolutions by which they were
kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the
extremes of tyranny and anarchy. If they exhibit
occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived
contrasts to the furious storms that are to succeed.
If now and then intervals of felicity open themselves to
view, we behold them with a mixture of regret, arising
from the reflection that the pleasing scenes before us
are soon to be overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves
of sedition and party rage. If momentary rays of glory
break forth from the gloom, while they dazzle us with a
transient and fleeting brilliancy, they at the same time
admonish us to lament that the vices of government
should pervert the direction and tarnish the luster of
those bright talents and exalted endowments, for which
the favoured soils that produced them have been so
justly celebrated.
The late eighteenth century took its view of ancient Athenian democracy primarily from its critics: Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison were espousing the standard line, which was this: although there were differences between cities--as between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta--all the Greek city-states were given to instability and suffered ugly demographic crises induced by revolution and war. Moreover, the so-called democracies were not really "governments by the people" at all. As Madison put it, "In the most pure democracies of Greece, many of the executive functions were performed, not by the people themselves, but by officers elected by the people, and representing the people in their executive capacity."
Even considered as a republic governed primarily by elite representatives, Athens was to be judged a failure. Its leading statesman, "the celebrated Pericles," in Hamilton's words, routinely "sacrifice[d] the national tranquility to personal advantage, or personal gratification." Most egregiously, according to Hamilton, he started the Peloponnesian War to distract the Athenian populace from efforts to prosecute him for the misuse of state funds. So pure democracy necessarily devolves into either anarchy or rule by a corrupt managerial elite--this is the theoretical claim undergirding the commentary on Athens in The Federalist Papers and sustaining the authors' conclusion that Athens could not be a useful model for the citizens designing a new constitution in 1787 for a set of freshly united states.
In the early twentieth century, the sociologist Robert Michels formalized this theoretical claim as the "iron law of oligarchy." Any collectivity larger than a face-to-face society of a few hundred souls must develop formal organization if it is to succeed at pursuing its collective flourishing; and the imperatives of organization, Michels argued, will inevitably drive the evolution of political forms toward oligarchies ruled by a small elite corps of expert managers. On Michels's argument, a long-lived and competitively successful participatory democracy with direct rule by the people themselves--"pure democracy," in the words of Madison--is best understood as something like a unicorn: beloved for its purity, seen only in dreams.
Josiah Ober has made it his life's work to refute Michels's law, and to prove that "participatory democracy" can meet the demands of organization by developing institutional and cultural forms that effectively provide for a group's success over the long-term. By "participatory democracy," Ober means forms of political organization in which ordinary citizens, amateurs, really do make and implement critical policy decisions as well as sustain the systems of reward and sanction that keep the whole democratic machine functioning. A genuinely participatory democracy is not, contrary to our own regime, built around the principle of representation; but this does not mean that representative and participatory institutions are mutually exclusive forms of democratic organization, as I will suggest....