THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: SIX BOOKS ON THE HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY (I)

AM | @agumack

- Hedwig Richter. Demokratie. Eine deutsche Affäre. Vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. München: C. H. Beck, 2020 [podcast]

- Paul Cartledge. Democracy. A Life. Oxford University Press, 2016.

- Laura Sancho Rocher. El nacimiento de la democracia. El experimento político ateniense (508-322 a. C.) Barcelona: Ático de Libros, 2021.

- Pierre-Henri Tavoillot. Comment gouverner un peuple-roi. Traité nouveau d'art politique. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2019.

- Nancy Isenberg & Andrew Burstein. The Problem of Democracy. The Presidents Adams confront the cult of personality. New York: Viking, 2019 [VIDEO]

- David Stasavage. The Decline and Rise of Democracy. A Global History from Antiquity to Today. Princeton University Press, 2020.

Democracy is a pretty evasive concept. This disappointing, but hardly surprising idea, is one of the key takeaways of this survey of six recent books on the history of democracy. The approaches reviewed here could not have been more diverse. Whereas David Stasavage favours a data-oriented approach to democracy, from the birth of civilization down to present times, Hedwig Richter concentrates on a couple of centuries of German democracy. And while both Paul Cartledge and Laura Sancho Rocher zero in on ancient Athenian democracy, Pierre-Henri Tavoillot prosposes an eclectic survey of many ideas around the government of a peuple-roi. Finally, Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein deal with John and John Quincy Adams' travails with the nascent American democracy.

 

For all the diversity on display in these highly recommendable books, I cannot help but pointing out to the elephant in the room: the related notions of mixed government and checks and balances. One way or the other, either explicitely or implicitely —and even reluctantly—, most of the authors surveyed here end up conceding defeat about democracy's capacity to stand on its own. As most of them will timidly admit, democracy is not viable without a system of institutional checks and balances that puts limits on political power, even in the case of a democratically elected (or selected) leadership. As an ardent proponent of these ideas myself, I wish defenders of democracy would come up with more creative and positive explanations of mixed government and checks and balances. This would give defenders of democracy more tools to fend off both left- and right-wing criticism of what Winston Churchill famously called "the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".

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A wide-ranging survey of democracy and democracies
In The Decline and Rise of Democracy, David Stasavage makes ample use of the typically data-oriented toolkit of modern political scientists. As a finance instructor myself, I cannot help but admire some of the results on display in this wide-ranging survey. One of the most interesting findings concerns the "standard deviation of caloric potential", a statistical measure of agricultural variability used to assess what the author calls "early democratic governance" (pp. 65-69). Variablilty, the very definition of risk, created the need for some sort of democratic consensus. Brilliant! Another such statistical feat is the link proposed between "the fraction of autonomous cities" and Dr. Stasavage's measurement of "Total Solar Irradiance" over a period of more than 800 hundred years, down to the year 1600 (pp. 123-125).

But virtuosity with numbers is not without dangers. Mr. Stasavage struggles to arrive at a convincing definition of democracy. He explicitely confuses democracy and mixed government, lumped togehter in a somewhat clumsy definition of early democracy. Driven by his desire to prove that democracy arises "naturally", the author loosely considers tour à tour the Kingdon of Mari in Mesopotamia, the Hurons of the Northwestern woodlands in America, Tlaxcala in Mexico and a number of Indian and African tribes as examples of early democracies. Thus we are led to believe that democracy took place where "titled nobles governed the republic" (p. 41). Count me among the skeptics here. As Mr. Stasavage freely admits, "This phenomenon was also known in the Greek world, and it would come to be called a mixed constitution" (p. 8). Right!

Hewdig Richter's book has already been reviewed here: "Democracy: a bold approach — feminist, pro-capitalist and pro-checks & balances" (Contrapesos, 21 February 2021). This is a spirited, and most welcome, defense of German democracy. A best-seller in its own right, Ms. Richter's book is set to be translated into English soon. The book provides a survey of German democracy from the end of the Eighteenth century to the present. It can be read with profit alongside Alexander Thiele's Der Konstituierte Staat. Eine Verfassungsgeschichte der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2021), also reviewed here (1, 2). Prof. Richter does not shy away from analysing the painful period of the Nazi regime. In fact, these pages contain two sobering quotes from Adolf Hitler that are worth their salt for anybody interested in the meaning of democracy and mixed government. But above all, it is the author's enthusiasm for democracy as a way of promoting women's rights and welfare that proves to be the most innovative aspect of the book.

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Paul Cartledge and Laura Sancho Rocher, our 'Greek' authors, have their attention squarely focused on ancient Athenian democracy. (Despite its overly ambitious title, Mr. Cartledge's book only contains four chapters, out of a total of twenty, on non-Athenian democracy, and some of them are but a few pages long). These two books are to be commended for their linguistic precision and for their usefulness in terms of debunking the myth of the intrinsically unstable Athenian democracy. As Paul Cartledge notes, the kratos (κράτος) in 'democracy' means power, force, strength, might, and is not to be confused with 'rule' (ἀρχή), a term that we find, for example, in ‘monarchy’. Both books celebrate the remarkable stability of Athenian democracy in the fourth century BCE, that is, after the defeat against Sparta in the Pelopponesian War.

In their own way, Cartledge and Sancho Romer seek to deviate our attention from Athens' painful anakyklosis, with its sharp regime changes — from tyranny to democracy, from democracy to oligarchy or collective tyranny (dunasteia), and there to a brief interlude of mixed government, before easing again into a remarkable period of democratic stability. This last period extended all the way to 322, the year of the final defeat against Macedonia. Cartledge and Sancho Rocher are right to remind us of this somehow neglected but successful phase of Athenian democracy. This neglect results, perhaps, from the lack of a towering figure like Herodous or Thucydides. One last point. Paul Cartledge has little patience with what he deems “an alternative ‘secret’ history of democracy […] in the Middle East, India, and China before classical Athens” (pp. 2-3). Athens, and only Athens, as he vehemently affirms, pioneered democracy.

Here, he is at odds with David Stasavage, although Democracy. A Life was published well before The Decline and Rise of Democracy. I fully agree with Paul Cartledge on this point, especially as Mr. Stasavage's reliance on a shaky definition of 'early democracy' does nothing to strengthten his case. Pierre-Henri Tavoillot's Comment gouverner un peuple-roi is not a history of democracy in any sense. But his versatility in describing the historical background of different election methods rimes well, among other things, with Mr. Stasavage's remarks about China's examination system. The most disappoint book of the lot, written by Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, still contains some worthwile citations from that champion of mixed government and checks and balances, the indefatigable John Adams [see].

[TO BE CONTINUED. The second part of this review will deal with the notions of mixed government and checks and balances]