Liberdades antigas

Political Liberty and the Classical Tradition, Thomas J. Fleming

(...) It is not often commented upon in civics classes, but few of the founding fathers of the American republic were fond of democracy. The exception was Jefferson, but his view of democracy was completely opposite to the American system today, whose centralized and intrusive power would have horrified the poor states-rights Virginian. But Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and the others were determined, in drawing up the Constitution, to prevent democracy, which they regarded as a kind of mob-rule that ended in tyranny. As Franklin said, when asked what kind of government they had given the nation at Philadelphia, “a republic, if you can keep it.” Any government that has no monarch may be described as a republic, but the word is also used in something of the sense of Aristotle’s word politeia, a constitutional commonwealth, what John Adams to as the rule of law and not of men. As Aristotle also points out, a democracy that elevates the will of the people above the law is really only another kind of tyranny. (...)

When Jefferson spoke glowingly of democracy, he did not mean the right of a 51 percent majority of voters in a national election to ride roughshod over the other 49 percent of the voters and, in fact, the majority of the people. Here in America, voter turnout is 50-60 percent, thus a victory really represents something like 25-30 percent of eligible voters. What he envisioned was a society in which every level of social organization, from the family to the state, would take care of its own interests. In the same way that he believed that Virginia’s problems should not be solved by the voters of Massachusetts—or of all the states represented in Congress—he also believed that local communities should not be dictated to by the government of Virginia.

Jefferson believed that the separate states should be sovereign in all that concerned them, and he agreed with John Adams that the federal government should be limited to affairs of state, making war, coining money, managing the postal system, and adjudicating disputes between states. But Jefferson did not stop there: He believed that a state itself was too large to be run on democratic lines and wanted to see power devolved first to the level of the county and then all the way to the neighborhood or village—the “wards” as he called them—which he would have made republics in miniature, responsible for their own police, roads, charitable assistance, and education. (...)

The Real Athens

Then let us return briefly to Athens and see how it actually functioned. The first thing to note is that for the two basic institutions of democracy, there were no elections. The nine chief magistracies were selected by lot. Greeks believed, with considerable justification, that elections would always be controlled by the wealthy, which makes them inherently undemocratic—as they are in America, where heavily-funded coalitions of lobbyists select the candidates and to a large extent determine the outcome of most elections.

While it is certainly fair to describe to describe Athens as a democratic city, so long as we agree that slaves and women should not vote and that immigrants should not be made citizens, but it was not a democratic state, because a city without bureaucrats or police can hardly be called a state in the modern sense. No matter how tyrannically the Athenian assembly might behave toward subject cities or towards political leaders it took a dislike to, its ability to intervene in the private life of most citizens was neglible in comparison with the social authority exercised by modern states.

Most of the state functions we take for granted were completely absent. Athens as a city-state had no public schools or universities, no social workers, no social security, no agency to regulate marriage and divorce. All of these functions of welfare and moral regulation were under the control of the families themselves or, where families had problems, of the phratries and demes. Athenian citizens paid market duties and import tolls, but no taxes on their income or wealth—an income tax was the badge of servitude for Greeks and Romans alike. Think of this as you file your tax returns. The real Athens offers a truly Jeffersonian vision that is very compatible with the American constitutional system in theory though not in practice.

To conclude: Democracy has two faces—one is the face of Aristotle and Jefferson, a completely decentralized system in which power is exercised at the lowest possible level and is subject to law and tradition. As Aristotle noted, any democracy in which the will of the people takes precedence over law and tradition is only another kind of tyranny.

The other face, the false face, is that of the demagogues of the Athenian Assembly, and also of Robespierre and Abraham Lincoln and both political parties today. This is a system based on the principle of untrammeled majority rule, subject to neither law nor tradition. If the people want to overturn any clause in the Constitution, they are free to do so. This explains why the Bill of Rights, which were designed to protect the states and the people from the federal government are now used to reinforce the power of the federal government against the people and the states.

Sovereign authority did not lie in an elected parliament but in the popular assembly, which sounds very democratic until we recall that the only people eligible were adult male citizens, most of whom had to be able to prove descent from Athenian parents on both sides. Slaves, foreigners, and women could not vote. It was more difficult for a foreigner to become a naturalized citizen than in Switzerland—and that is saying a great deal. I should have added “straight,” because whatever bisexual proclivities the Athenians had, they disenfranchised men whose primary sexual orientation was toward other men by giving official notice not to attend the Ecclesia. If they disobeyed, they were, at least in principle, subject to the death penalty. (...)"