Dan Snow's History Hit - Democracy

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

In this episode taken from our back catalogue Professor Paul Cartledge the concept which is the foundation stone of our political culture: democracy. Paul Cartledge is Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus University of Cambridge and author of many books, including, Democracy: A Life.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got a rerun today. We've reached back in the archive, one of the old classics, and because we're all talking at the moment, aren't we, about democracy, the hell's going on, we decided to go back to a conversation I had with Professor Paul Cartlidge. He's one of the best, most well-known classical historians in the country. He's got such a great gift of communication, as you'll hear. He spent his career teaching at Cambridge University and now he obviously continues to be very active and writing and appearing on podcasts and radio shows very often. We talked about democracy, that fragile experiment in ancient Greece derided by many at the time and since, another threat now from various enemies domestic and foreign. I hope you enjoyed

this conversation. If you do, it is a reminder of some of the absolute gold in the old back catalogue of podcasts. The only place you can get those is at historyhits.tv. It's not just a history channel with documentaries. It's also got hundreds and hundreds of podcasts, which you can get ad-free by just signing up to a little subscription, historyhit.tv. A little subscription will sort you out and go on making great shows and great pods. Thanks for your support. In the meantime, here is Professor Paul Cartlidge. Enjoy. Paul, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. You write so beautifully about ancient Greece, about the classical world, and now in particular about democracy. And it is a time when we should all be thinking about democracy and its roots. Thanks very much for having me on

your podcast. And when I give a talk to schools or literary festivals, or even academic audiences, I tend to start now by saying that once upon a time when I was actually starting the work, particularly for this book, there was a democratic deficit. There was a sense that people felt disempowered, disengaged, not asked to have a say. Now I say that there's probably a democratic surplus. And that's because in 2016, and there's a great little book called F and then three asterisks U 2016. And I happen to agree with that. But anyway, we had two major exercises of what we count as democracy. But whereas one was normal, the other one was abnormal. The normal one is the American presidential election. That's how they do it. They have an electoral college, and that actually

decides who wins the presidential election. We have a parliamentary representative democracy. Normally, we vote not for the prime minister. We vote for a party and that party, which is the majority in government, forms the government. We have now a prime minister who is not even chosen by her own party, let alone by us. And we have a system of parliamentary democracy which is, frankly, broken. And it wasn't just broken in 2016. It was broken before. And that's actually one reason why the referendum was called, because a referendum is direct democracy, whereas parliamentary, our system of democracy, is representative and indirect. So the referendum was actually a contradiction of the norm of our british

parliamentary democracy i mean you're already we're on so many so much fascinating turf there i think what the referenda with the scottish referenda yes the promised referendas you're seeing now in france about and and are we back into a referenda and what that reminds me was in during the cold war period and more recently, we rather lazily said, you should be a democracy. Afghanistan should be a democracy. We're now having to stand up and actually define what we mean by that. Because do we think direct democracy, plebiscitary democracy is a good thing? Or do we actually think investing representatives with legitimacy through our voting and then leaving them to make decisions

and the two are very different actually and i think that the kind of lazy cold war well good democracy is a good thing we're actually being forced to read just like and i think technology will make us like what can we all vote on our phones yes yes yes in principle you could so but we don't let's talk about these different forms yeah absolutely are these different forms of democracy is there tension between them right from the start when it just emerges no because the ancient world being the way it was without technology face to face very much smaller scale there was actually never a question of even representative democracy let alone tele-democracy i mean democracy to distance so the ancients invented both the word and the thing. And one of the points of my book is that the word is in itself ambiguous and ambivalent.

In other words, you and I might think democracy means the rule of the majority, however estimated and whoever you count as people who are going to be counted. But the word demos in ancient Greek is actually ambivalent, which is quite strange, because it means on the one hand, all the people, so all the empowered people, and that means, of course, adult males only, citizens, free, legitimate. But it can also mean the majority of that body, who by sociological fact, as in pretty much every society there's ever been, the majority are relatively or absolutely poor. So if you interpret demos to mean the poor majority, who are they ruling for and over? And so what you get in the ancient Greek context, very different from ours, where we can argue about representative as opposed to direct. They argued about different forms of direct self-rule. And, for example, Plato, Aristotle, one might think, are intellectual ancestors. They must have been Democrats, mustn't they? No, they were anti or non-Democrats because what they disliked about mass poor majority direct democracy was that it was the masses who they thought were relatively ignorant, poorly educated, not well off, and therefore liable to be swayed too much by emotion to vote for their own material interests rather than for broader intellectual reasons for all these reasons the

masses are bad and actually the greeks had that word the word kakos bad which is related by the way to the word for shit kaka it's it's etymologically related the bad are ruling not for the good of the community then it's not the rule of the people for the people, but it's the rule of the poor people over the elite, like them, Plato and Aristotle. So I sometimes use as an analogy, and it's from Marx and Valenin, and it's dictatorship of the proletariat. It's as if the masses are ruling in a sectarian way against the best interests of the few elite, well-educated, rich, good-looking. The whole thing goes together, the good in short. When Plato and Aristotle are making these criticisms of democracy, are they thinking in the abstract as philosophers or are they looking at empirically

what's going on and what has gone on in Greece? The answer is both. Plato more theoretically, Aristotle more empirically because Aristotle was prepared to concede that moderate democracy, in other words, where the masses, the majority of poor, don't decide everything. They can't stand for every office. They can't be, for example, generals or they can't be top financial officials. That is acceptable because, very interesting point, it's something like our notion of wisdom of the crowd and the masses, the poor, as against the elite. They're going to make worse decisions than the elite. But add in the elite and the masses together, let the masses hear the arguments of the elite, then in the balance, you know, sort of on average, the vote

is liable to be no worse than if you committed it every major decision solely to experts. It's very interesting, this debate is already an ancient one about experts versus masses. Plato is the exact opposite. Because he thought that being a politician, doing politics, was something like being a nuclear physicist, that there is, in other words, a right answer. If you understand the processes, if you have true knowledge of what is good, for example, you are automatically going to make the right decision in a practical case. And because the elite are better educated, smarter, only they can qualify to be in a position of power.

So Plato goes for an extreme form of, we would call it oligarchy, he would call it aristocracy, rule of the best. And it's a kind of technocracy because only the few know the facts, understand the truth, and therefore only they can judge and rule correctly. And what other experiments in democracy were they looking at in Greece?

We all know about 5th century BC Athens, but there were others, weren't there? You're right. I mean, when we say Greece, it's a bit of a misnomer. It was a congeries, a gathering of about a thousand separate political entities stretching all over the Mediterranean, all around the Black Sea. So within that group, there were only perhaps a minority ever which had any form of democracy. Aristotle distinguished four types of democracy in varying degrees. In other words, more power to the masses as opposed to less power to the masses. And so of those that were democracies, the most famous, the most influential, because the originator was Athens.

And Athens went through at least three forms of democracy over a period of about 180 years. And it actually lost democracy twice. Once by its own decision. It's very interesting that the democracy voted itself out of existence at one point in the middle of a war when everything was going wrong. And they were told, they were convinced, it's, dare I say, something like the Brexit referendum, where the masses were convinced that the only way forward, and so on. So they voted to abolish

democracy. They were actually told, it's only a suspension, but in fact, it meant abolition. Anyway, they were for about 180 years on and off, mainly democratic. And it's that democracy that Plato, he wasn't Athenian. Aristotle lived in Athens, mainly used as their template. So if you're looking for a bad decision, you know, you think of what the Athenians did in 427 BC. One of their allies revolted. It's in a major war. They really were pissed off with this state. And they voted, the Athenian assembly, under emotion, high emotion, to condemn to death the entirety of the adult male citizen population of this city,

when actually it was an oligarchically run city. So actually the masses didn't normally have much say. So they were, in other words, the Athenian assembly was voting to penalize people who could argue, look, I didn't vote to revolt from you. I'm just a Mytilenean. And so, yeah. And they then had an assembly the following day. And they reversed that decision, but not totally.

They voted to condemn to death the ringleaders. But they chose 1,000 ringleaders. And that seems to some of us rather high. So that and there are others are sort of famous mistakes that the Athenians made. And there's a very famous Athenian historian, Thucydides, a contemporary of these events. And he argued that the reason Athens lost this major war, it was actually a kind of civil war against Sparta, was precisely because of the mistakes they made, under the pressure of emotion, misled by leaders who were misleading them. They were not leading them correctly. And that's... He's not a Democrat. You can get the picture.

He's quite a strong anti-Democrat on intellectual grounds. And that's why, well, we're going to talk later on in the podcast about why democracy therefore had such a rotten name throughout much of subsequent history. Mob rule. Oclocracy. Yeah, yeah. But let's, because I'm feeling a bit negative about democracy. So during the course of this podcast, let's say, is it, it can't be accidental though, that during Athens' experiment with democracy or incorporating elements of democracy, there is the most extraordinary intellectual, artistic and cultural period of enlightenment almost in our history, in

the history of the world. So therefore, is that related to political practices or not? Directly in one respect. I mean, one can argue more broadly that the notion of equality and freedom, which are the two key ideological major notes, as it were, in Perfume's sense of the democracy, they enhanced and enabled the cultural fluorescence, which possibly would have happened elsewhere or would have happened in other ways. But there is one art form which is peculiarly democratic, and that is the art form of the theatre. Though the Athenians had dramatic representations before the democracy, under the democracy,

they built a dedicated theatre. They introduced a form of programme whereby people who wished to have their plays put on offered themselves. They were chosen by one of the Athenians' annual officials to put on their play. First of all, tragedy, then comedy. People were paid. If they were too poor, they were given a state dole to enable them to attend the assembly. It's so important. You have three tragic playwrights in competition. Competition, very Greek.

But who was going to decide the outcome? Ten randomly selected Athenians in the audience, and then their votes were then randomly selected. Not all ten were counted. I mean, it's an extraordinary attempt, on the one hand, to avoid bribery, on the other hand, to say any Athenian is qualified to judge between Aeschylus and Sophocles, if you can imagine, these absolute giants of theatre, world theatre. And then comedy, and comedy is on the other side. So whereas tragedy is set in the past, typically, among elites, comedy is in the present, and it's down and dirty. It's the girl next door, the man next door, and they're talking sex and mixing sex with politics as well.

In both cases, it's both entertaining and elevating because the issues are how best to run a city. You know, should one ally with this city as opposed to that? What if somebody accidentally kills their father and marries their mother, this is Oedipus, what implications does that have? Because he was the ruler of Thebes. Is there a connection between the fact Thebes suffers a plague and so on and so on, then civil war, Oedipus' sons kill each other. So all the big issues are there. We have periodically great

plays today. Shakespeare is obviously some sort of equivalent in himself because he did both tragedy and comedy. But we really don't think of theatre as democracy in action as they did. Is there a sense, am I being a bit too 18th century

here, is there a sense, we think of bit too 18th century here is there a sense we think of democracy again the travails that we see in the world at the moment democracy under attack we've also realized it's not just plebiscitary democracy versus representative democracy but too many people i think think democracy equals the rule of law and they can be quite different things you can have a an arbitrary ruler who's not just a capricious lunatic who recognizes the rule of law or can you question in ancient athens do you have a sense that because it's democratic people are treated with more the law is blind towards their status well there are lots of issues you're raising there one of the criticisms of democracy as opposed to oligarchy by oligarchs is that the people make the laws, the people

judge the laws in law courts. In other words, the validity of all laws are general. When they're tested in a specific circumstance, then a jury has to decide this way or that way. The people therefore both make the laws and judge the laws. There are no judges in the modern sense. And so oligarchs said, oh, well, that's typical. The people, meaning the masses, the poor, override the laws. They supersede. They supplant the laws. So in other words, Democrats were ancient Democrats just as fiercely in favor of the rule of law, which they claim to be instantiated every bit as much in

their system of democracy, as in oligarchy, or as in any modern, if you like, post 18th century rule of law, where we have division of powers, and the judiciary is an absolutely key equal to the other two executive and legislature components of the government. There are issues over justice, that is equity, and if somebody is on trial and he's very rich and he's accused of, let's say, impiety, opponents of the democracy would say, well, he's not really being tried for his impiety, but because he's rich. And so there

is always the possibility of ideologically inflected justice in the practical sense of a law court. But that's not the same as saying that the Democrats as such did not believe in the rule of law as something above themselves, something over and above them, justice, the rule of law as something above themselves, something over and above them. Justice, the rule of law as an absolute, as opposed to something merely manipulable and pragmatic. So if you'd been a wealthy citizen, you'd have been as happy or possibly more happy to live in an oligarchy, which wasn't egregiously capricious, as opposed to Athens. I mean, you didn't, everyone didn't seek to come to to Athens because there, you know, it's the shining city on the hill. Well, Athens was the biggest Greek city and therefore the most plural, the most diverse. It was most possible if you were unhappy in your

own city, of which there were many, many others, and you wish to trade perhaps most advantageously. And Athens has the biggest international market, a bit like the city of London, you know, that sort of argument, then you might well give up your citizenship of, let's say, Miletus on the other side of the Aegean and come and live in Athens as a resident alien. Negative politically, because you had no political standing whatsoever. You've given up your citizenship, which is of Miletus, and you've come to live in Athens, and you're profiting from the commercial situation. And interestingly, the Athenian demos was very aware of the economic benefit. It's very like the city of London.

So they made conditions very favorable for foreigners to come and live, and they passed laws which made certain types of trading for example in grain or in silver particularly advantageous because they needed grain they're a huge population they needed to import especially wheat which came from what's now the ukraine south russia so um it's an interestingly um complicated situation i'm still trying to work out whether Athens was so extraordinary because they had silver mines, they were in the right place, and it was busy, or because it was democratic. Or it's impossible to separate those two things. It's impossible to separate, but there's no question but that Athens could not have been the kind of democracy it was. In other words, make so much available to ordinary people, the masses benefited, not just politically, not just they had a say, but economically.

Had it not also been, as it were, a world power, basically a naval power, and there's a direct connection. Who rode the fleet? Well, there were some slaves, because remember, who got the silver out of the ground? Slaves. This is a slave-based economy, as well as agriculture and craftsmanship and so on. But the Athenians were very aware that as the majority of the rowers in the Athenian ships were citizens, the poor rowed the fleet. The poor were the backbone, the power of the city, and that had direct economic consequences. So there's a symbiosis between economics, military and politics. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking to Professor Paul Cartlidge about democracy. More after this. Spire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive,

but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Does even Plato accept the fact that because the poor feel that they are citizens, because they feel they have power, that they put a little extra back into it, you know, in these great sea battles that Athens, well, by and large. On the contrary, he uses it as a weapon against democracy. I mean, it's a funny thing to us. But you as an oarsman know you don't actually face the way that you're going when you're rowing.

You're looking away. Now, if you're attacking an enemy, the enemy is behind you. Whereas if you're a hoplite, that is heavy infantryman in the ranks, you're facing, and if you're in the front rank, you're toe to toe with your enemy, and that's bravery. And there's a Greek word, andria, which means virility. So if you're brave, you're being a man. Well, if you're rowing, you're looking away from the enemy. You are, as it were, retreating, though you're not, you're attacking. But Plato seriously uses this as an argument against trireme. That's the heavy oared ship, the warship, three banks and so on.

Trireme warfare is anti, he uses it as an anti-democratic argument. Amazing but true so we've got athens after a run of great naval victories loses eventually to sparta in this peloponnesian war that thucydides the father of history if you like written history writes about these beautiful accounts and remarkable accounts is that it's loss in the war decisions made like the one you mentioned about Mytilene and Thucydides' critique of it, is that what gives democracy a bad name? Not so much that. I mean, one could say Persian money, the rather factors, in other words, on the Spartan side, behind the Spartans' victory.

and behind the Spartans' victory. But it's not so much the actual defeat in the war, but the aftermath that gives Athens, in the eyes of its enemies, a really bad name. And one in particular occurrence, namely a trial, a political trial, that to them was natural. Politics, jurisdiction go together. Same people pass the laws and act as judges, jurors. The trial of Socrates, 399. So it's five years after. It's four years after a major civil war. There's very nasty post-defeat civil war exacerbated by the Spartans who came in,

pitched in on the side of the oligarchs, imposed an extreme narrow dynasty of 30, the 30 tyrants as it's called. Well, Socrates made the mistake, or you could say because he was relatively apolitical, he just didn't perceive the mistake he was making of not leaving Athens, of becoming inscribed among the citizen role within this extreme narrow oligarchy, of not joining the democratic resistance which developed to the 30 tyrants. So for all those reasons, his association with extreme oligarchs, one of his former students was the leader of the 30 tyrants, a relative of Plato, by the way, Plato's uncle. For all these reasons, Socrates is put on trial, not only because of the

ostensible crime, which is impiety, but I think many of the jury did believe he was guilty of that. And it's a complicated question, not worth going into. But others who weren't aware of the issues of impiety, the ins and outs, the subtleties of what does and what does not count as impiety, saw him as an enemy of the people. And he was condemned to death, not by a huge amount, but significant margin. And that was held when people look back on what kind of a regime did Athens have in the 5th and 4th century, yeah, Pericles comes out pretty well through Thucydides, but through Plato, Socrates comes out very badly, appalling treatment,

travesty of justice, absolutely, and that's typical of a democracy. That's the line taken. Then we get into the biggest territory of all, really, But that's the line taken. Then we get into the biggest territory of all really, which is why did the things that happened in this little to intellectually the Athenians, Cicero's a prime guilty party, if you like, were their ancestors culturally. And actually, they invented myths whereby there was some sort of physical connection, but anyway, a complete nonsense. But the Romans had their own, they evolved their own form of republic. Our word

republic comes, of course, from the Latin, not from the Greek. And in Greek, the Greek for republic is democratia. So, I mean, it means not having a monarch. And the Romans were fanatical anti-monarchists. They weren't democrats in the Greek sense at all, because they did not believe in one person, one vote. They had a very hierarchical system of allocating say, power, influence within the polity. But the Romans preserved Greek literature. So people we've mentioned, Thucydides, Aeschines, Demosthenes, great models for Cicero and others. And that preserves the tradition because the Roman Empire is the framework within which European civilization via the Byzantines and then on the other side, the medieval Italians and so on and so on. The classical tradition goes essentially through Rome in the last centuries BC and the first centuries ad absolutely crucial so we should check the difference between therefore rome and athens we should mention before we leave athens behind when you're talking about

one person one vote you really mean that there was a place gathered you can still see it today where if you were a adult male citizen yeah you went and put your hand up did you or how do you do exactly but one must qualify that because if you've got some let's say six thousand plus and for some votes you had to have 6 000 therefore everybody would be individually counted if you think how long it takes to count or to register let's say putting a pebble or even to count hands and probably normally if the issue was clearly you know the what we call the sense of the meeting. The chairman would say, are we all agree? And then, you know, so you'd move on.

But if it was radically contested, let's say making an alliance or passing a law about impiety or something like that, then there might be one person, one vote. And the normal way would be raising the hand, exceptionally using a pebble. And our word psiphology, the study of voting practice, comes from the Greek word psiphos, which means a pebble and our psephology, the study of voting practice, comes from the Greek word psephos which means a pebble But the Romans

did have some kind of voting so how did that work? It's very complicated and in my book I do actually have a whole chapter on why Rome was not a democracy of the Greek, the 5th 4th century BC Greek type, because it's rather important because there are those who defend the Romans or wish to advocate for the Romans and say,

well, they had democracy too, you know, it's not just a Greek thing, all this stuff about that's if you think democracy in principle, whatever sort is a good thing. Now we might have more qualified views on that. But broadly speaking, the main legislative and decision-making assembly, which chose the most important officials, the consuls, the praetors, and the censors and so on, had what they call ladder of offices. So the very top offices were chosen on a, timocratic is a Greek word, according to wealth. So the wealthier people were grouped into, all votes were done by groups. The Romans never voted as individuals.

They voted in a block. And then the majority of that block counted as the vote of that. Like the old Labour Party. So you're equal, but only to your equals, not everybody is equal to everybody else. And so it was possible for the very rich to determine major policy and who was in the top offices without the masses having any say. There was no popular judiciary in the way the Athenians as i said they have jurors judges who are also taking the decisions as to the legality of something the romans did not have popular

judiciaries did the roman republic regard itself as quite clever did it regard itself as a perfection of of athenian democracy having taken into account plato and aristotle's uh critique of it or did they sort of develop that from indigenous? I mean, it's very difficult to argue because we don't have explicit evidence. We really, really mainly have Cicero. And so you have to take on board whatever he says. But Romans were very pragmatic. They had a fundamental nostrum,

which is that the way the custom of the ancestors is always to decide the best. So in other words, what should we do? What would the ancestors do? Well, of course, in fact, you're deciding what the ancestors is always to decide the best. In other words, what should we do? What would the ancestors do? Well, of course, in fact, you're deciding what the ancestors do. But they were therefore very conservative. And so the point about that is you don't move forward by revolution in Rome. You move forward by evolution.

And over hundreds of years, there are revolutionary moments. But you can actually detect at what point certain things change. But the system as it had evolved by the last two centuries BC, when Polybius is writing about it in Greek, when Cicero is writing about it in Latin, that is the result of it's a sort of mess. And in a way, there wasn't a constitution, but just sort of privileges, duties, sacred notions and customs and practices, we would say. So the key point for me is that never at any time was there a meeting of all, in principle, Roman citizens who were willing to turn up. They take a vote and the majority decides an issue. Never.

I mean, partly numbers. There were way more Romans than there were ever members of any Greek city. Let's say 60,000 maximum at Athens, up to three-quarters of a million Romans, perhaps. So it's a very different order of magnitude. perhaps. So it's a very different order of magnitude. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble

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And yet the Romans clearly understood that some sort of voting, some citizenship sort of mattered. Absolutely. And the big difference or the big change comes when, after the civil wars, the whole bunch of civil wars, of course, going on over many decades, a principate, as it was called, but in fact a kind of disguised monarchy or autocracy, supersedes republicanism. So the Romans get a kind of king, but he must not be called a king.

And I'm referring to Augustus, who founded, we distinguish Roman Empire, capital E, from Roman Republic, capital R, all within the Roman Empire in the physical sense. But the Roman principate is the system of governance, which means there's never again going to be democracy of any sort anywhere in the West, in Europe, and before, what, 18th century? You know what I mean? That kills off the notion of the populace, which is the Latin term, the people, people from the Latin, and they're not ever again going to decide their own future.

And if you were one of your predecessors at Cambridge, you were teaching young folk in the 17th and 16th centuries, what would you have told them about our flirtation with democracy? Or did people even know about it? Back then, well, the word populus persists, and in Italian, popolo, and there were what we call city-st city states where il popolo has a function. It doesn't actually rule, but there is something called that that periodically is apparent in the political process as a kind of sounding board. But it's not till the 17th century in our country that the notion of the people having a political status and actually

making a difference seriously rises. I'm talking about the Civil War. And it was provoked really by having a monarch, Charles, Charles I, who took an extreme line on divine right of kings. Had he been a more moderate monarch, not believing that whatever he did, forget parliament, forget, you know, there's a parliament, but forget them, the people utterly out of it, because they're not consulted even, let alone asked to have a say. He insisted upon this notion that whatever he did was law, was right, was inappellable, uncheckable. So he sort of provoked Republicans and developed engendered republicanism, which is most famously instantiated in the so-called Putney debates. I come from Putney, and the church, St Mary's on Putney Bridge, is still there. And there's a nice exhibition there celebrating, commemorating the Putney debates of 1647, October, November,

with Cromwell in the chair and the New Model Army and especially the Levellers. Why are they called Levellers? Because their opponents argued they leveled they leveled down they of course argued they were wanting to level up when i think about the levelers i often wonder whether they were inspired by ancient the ancient world ancient athens and ideas about democracy or were they imbibing that sort of perhaps slightly more indigenous tradition of the anglo-saxaxon community where people would have a say and simply widening the definition of people out from the elite to everybody. It's the latter because there were a few intellectuals who were aware of this Roman Republican, we sometimes call it civic humanist tradition. So in other words, empowering ordinary people, the notion that you don't have to be a lord or a king to have a political say. There were some who were

intellectuals, but most of the, not only the Levers, of course, the New Model Army as a whole, they were well off than the average. They weren't poor peasants, but they weren't terrifically schooled in the highest form of political thought and political theory. It's more a, as you say, a kind of notion of the people in a sentimental sense. When's the first time someone actually suggests giving votes to peasants? Well, I guess peasants, we in our country, of course, tend to think that they cease to exist because of the scientific revolution, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution. But on the continent of Europe, it's still okay to be a paysan or a paysan. And so I guess it goes…

French Revolution? I guess it goes – well, I was going to say that's the first moment because I don't think – though Jefferson was in the American Revolution very keen on the notion that all – the sort of default American should be a sturdy farmer. He wouldn't have called them a peasant in the sense – peasants typically, though they might be independent, are small men and they're not necessarily very connected with towns, with political processes. And the American Revolution, like pretty much any political revolution of a democratic kind, in some degree involves urbanism. I don't know. I mean, the nearest, I think, to a democratic revolution that's based on the land, probably the Chinese Revolution of the 1940s, 30s and 40s. I mean, the peasants were undervalued. They were always sort of looked on as just one below those who should be in power, typically.

And it's interesting, the 19th century, when the British expand the franchise, they're enfranchising people who are coming into property and education. Landholding in some sense. It's a sense of the the pool of the elite getting bigger rather than let's enfranchise non-elite yeah and just to give an example the beginning of the 20th century when women in this country were first given a vote in

national elections you had to be a householder so in other words a widow probably or a maiden aunt as it were or over 30 so age qualification plus property qualification not just the fact that you were a citizen well okay well then let's talk about the 20th century let's talk about this this idea that democracy suddenly became the answer to every everyone's ills even though i always found it extraordinary because democracy took so many different forms i mean the british margaret thatcher was elected with a tiny minority of the vote in britain uh you know democracy in in north america in you know it looked very different to switzerland as it did in america as we all now know it what's the effect been of that sort of lazy embrace of this thing

called democracy well it goes back to the 19th century not the 18th so you have a few radicals thomas pain and so on They're radical republicans. So anything except monarchy. Get rid of George III, for example. But once one's decided, OK, we're not going to have a monarch. What are we going to have? We're going to have parliament. Are we going to have a house of lords? Or are we going to have an upper house that's entirely elected?

You know, there is this idea, well, the Americans were well ahead. The French were well ahead of us. We still have an unelected house of Lords. We have a mixed constitution. We still have a so-called constitutional monarch. So you're quite right. Democracy is not a simple thing. But I think it speaks to the notion that in principle, if you're adult and you're legitimate, you've not committed a crime such that you should be incarcerated. You should, when time comes, have a say. And the question then is, on what basis? What are the constituencies? How are you going to measure the votes? So gather them together.

And that's where what's called gerrymandering can come in. And some people believe that the, for example, the Brexit referendum, which was a direct democracy, one person, one vote of those allowed to vote, was a kind of gerrymandering because in Scotland, 2014, 16 and 17 year olds were allowed to vote. In Britain, in England, 2016, they were not. So you could argue that that was forcing them out of being counted. So yes, it's a broad movement, very unspecific, and it develops in different ways in different countries. So our democracy is different from the French and from the Italian and so on and so on. But there is a broad sense in the 19th century after the French and American revolutions that ordinary people, adults, not yet children, ordinary adults should at least be consulted.

Why do we believe that democracy is the only game in town? Well, it can't be because of Athens, because of the negative tradition. And so the French is slightly different from the Americans before the French. And there was a dimension to the French Revolution of direct democracy, the notion that, well, perhaps ordinary people really should be allowed to vote and have a say and count. The American Revolution absolutely against that. And they cited all the negative reasons given by anti-democrats in the ancient world against democracy as reasons why they did not want direct democracy in their country now. in terms of dissent. But you raised earlier technocracy. And with modern technology at a

distance, smartphones, televisions, and so on, in principle now, because we're all surveilled to death, we could actually have a, let's say on Friday, such and such a day, we're going to decide whether to spend X on the National Health Service through taxation or on Trident. And it's going to be a vote. And the vote won't be binding. It's going to be advisory because we have a parliamentary democracy. We don't have, you know, see what I'm saying. It could now be done. We could resuscitate ancient Athenian notions of how to do politics, which we don't have as a norm today it strikes me that we've got them a kind of bit of an aristotelian system at the moment like a popular element the popular the

basically the the demos is choosing between two sides constituent parts of the oligarchy to rule us yes so you can choose between this chap who went to cambridge and that one who went to you know that's and that's certainly the criticism of it you having uh studied spent your life talking about democracy do you think the answer is uh to maintain that kind of it was Aristotle right is that actually quite a good balancing balance constitution or do you think we need more more democracy should we be looking forward to the day when we can vote with our smartphones yeah well there's one thing I've not mentioned, which is an ancient democratic nostrum, which is the lottery. And this can be used in a number of ways. For example, allocating public funds between two competing choices between, let's say, a hospital for this or a school for that.

But it could also be used to choose a segment of our legislators, by which I mean parliamentarians, so both lower and upper house. And there are people who believe the entire upper house should be chosen by lot on the basis, well, this is where you argue age, gender, religion, special interest groups, educationists, industrialists, and so on. And I think that would be very interesting. But it's, gosh, it's such a mindset leap, because we're having problem making even our own parliamentary democracy, even the moderate reforms we've made to the House of Lords, we're finding them difficult, or they're not working terribly smoothly. When you're talking, I just think to myself that in a way democracy isn't, of course, it's not a single system.

It seems to be at its essence. Is it about the importance of individuals and everybody in society? Finding some way to transmit that doesn't almost matter. Ultimately, yeah. But it's about everybody having, being citizens. It it is but then you've got to aggregate up in other words it's not the tricky bit yeah and it's the basis on which you aggregate and what do you do about minorities and just to go back rather boringly to the referendum of june last year to me if you have a referendum it it's merely advisory, technically, but you should have a super

majority if you're going to act on the advice of it. It's not a normal thing. When I was, first of all, a fellow of a college, there were various statutory matters that came up. To change the statutes of my Oxford College required a 66 and two thirds percent majority. Well, that's to make it very, very difficult. So in an issue of such monumental significance as Brexit, to merely allow 50.000-whatever potentially to be the decisive majority, I was against that vehemently. I still am against that. Well, and that's the framers of the U.S. Constitution, of course,

built that to amend the Constitution is a very... Absolutely. ...in these days of divided America. Do you buy the argument that perhaps the late 19th century and 20th century sort of fixation of democracy is the only legitimate form of government, even though it isn't a form of government, it's just an idea?

Do you buy the idea that's coming under threat at the moment and we may enter a world where other systems actually have equal legitimacy? So, we've not had a clear run since the late 19th century and the early 20th century when the rules and regulations for what we take to be proper democracy were introduced. So, we've had fits and starts, shall we say. What do I think about the long-term future if I was to weigh up? Suppose I was doing an Aristotle or a Plato and so on. was doing an Aristotle or a Plato and so on. I'm aware that if you live in a country such as China with a billion, two billion people, huge extent, the notion of it being governed by anything like an ancient Greek style direct democracy is pretty alien for this reason. Not that it couldn't be

done because of technology, but it's what should we call the spirit. That how do you bind together such a vast organism? And to me, what's lacking in our, just to think, you know, what would I do if I was to introduce some changes apart from an elected House of Lordsords or a sortition use of the lottery house of lords and so on it would be education education education we typically in our schools do not sufficiently educate our young people as to what it is to be a citizen or what being a citizen could be well i think that's something we can agree on at the end of that it's a great place to do the podcast thank you thank you very much indeed. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here toing in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts,

if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you. you