In Our Time - Democracy

Episode Date: October 18, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the origins of democracy. In the Gettysburg Address Abraham Lincoln called it “Government of the people, by the people, for the people”, but the word democracy appears nowhere in the American Constitution; the French Revolution was fought for Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité and the most that Churchill claimed for it was that it was “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” The Athenian city state famously practised participatory democracy, but neither Plato nor Socrates approved, the Romans turned their back on the idea of ‘mob rule’ and it is not until the nineteenth century that it becomes even moderately respectable to call oneself a democrat.So how did democracy rise to become the most cherished form of government in the world? In this programme we hope to trace the history of an idea across the cultures and centuries of Europe and the Middle East. And at a time when ideals of democracy are being thrown into stark relief by world events, we hope to gain a greater understanding of where democratic ideals have come from.With Melissa Lane, University Lecturer in the History of Political Thought; David Wootton, Professor of Intellectual History at Queen Mary College, London; Tim Winter, Assistant Muslim Chaplain at Cambridge University where he is Lecturer in Islamic Studies.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln called it Government of the people, by the people, for the people. But the word democracy appears nowhere in the American Constitution. The French Revolution was fought for liberty, equality and fraternity.

And the most that Churchill claimed for democracy was that it was, quote, the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. The Athenian city-state famously practiced a limited form of participatory democracy, but neither Plato nor Socrates approved.

The Romans turned their back on the idea of mob rule, and it's not until the 19th century that it becomes even moderately respectable to call oneself a Democrat. So how did democracy rise to become arguably the most cherished form of government in the world today? In this program, we hope to

the history of an idea across the cultures and centuries of Europe and America and the Middle East. And at a time when ideals of democracy are being thrown into relief by world events, we hope to gain a greater understanding of where democratic ideals have come from. With me to discuss the origins of democracy is Melissa Lane, author of Plato's progeny, and University of Lecture in the History of Political Thought. David Wooten, Professor of Intellectual History at Queen Mary, University of London. Also with us is Tim Winter, Assistant Muslim Chaparral in at Cambridge University, where he's lecturer in Islamic studies.

Let's start with you, Mother Saline. In the 6th century BC, the Athenian city-state begins operating its system of what we look back on and call democracy. Can you briefly tell us how the system worked and how democratic it was? Yes, it was a system of participation by the male citizens. So there were other people in the state who weren't citizens, slaves and foreigners, and women had a kind of semi-citizen status but weren't able to participate in the democracy. But what was key about it was that the citizens themselves were acting as judges and policy makers.

So there were two key institutions, the assembly, where they decided whether to make peace or make war, and the popular courts where citizens' juries tried people for many kinds of crime. And did they think that they were operating a new system at the time? They didn't use the word democracy. They did use the word democracy. And it comes directly from the group. Greek, demos meaning the people, and Krasi is from the Greek to rule. And they were very much aware of the fragility and significance of this innovation. And indeed, the Greek world at

the time was really divided between Democrats who were seen as the many poor ruling versus the oligarchs, the oligarchies, who were seen as the rule of the few and the rich and the elite. And so it was a social question, a social battle between those two forms of regime as well as a political one. Why was it that Socrates and Plato were rather disdainful of democracy? Well, they thought that if you think that the people rule, in a sense you're saying whatever the people decide is right. And there were famous cases during the war with Sparta where one day the Athenians decided to send out a punitive expedition, and then the next day they changed their minds.

And Plato and Socrates were asking the question, isn't what's right to do decided by moral values in a sense? isn't there some sort of moral knowledge or moral expertise which would determine what's right to do? What's right to do can't simply be whatever you happen to feel like at the time. So it wasn't a criticism only of democracy, it was a criticism of all the existing forms of rule, including oligarchy and tyranny, suggesting that what matters most is to have the right criterion for judgment.

David Wooden, do you think that it's from this example of Greek democracy, as described by Melissa Laine, that most things have flowed, Can we move to the Roman state from then? Did it flow in those ideas that we've heard briefly outlined, but very succinctly outlined, did they flow into the Roman way of doing things? Well, I think in the first place, what people inherited from Greece was a sustained critique of democracy.

Plato and Aristotle had said that democracy was really the worst form of government, that the natural leaders who emerged were demagogues, that they were not only lacking in the right moral principles, but also they lacked the expertise that you would want in good governors, and that any more elitist system would give you better forms of government. And that view is dominant through Western history for the next 2,000 years. The assumption is that democracy is a bad thing. So wherever you get participatory systems of politics,

people tend to avoid calling them democracy because the word carries with it so many unfortunate overturns because of Plato and Aristotle. How did the Republican state in Rome differ from the Greek Assembly, and was that significant? Well, I think one of the central things about the Republican system in Rome, is it sets up several different bases of power. There's popular power with the tribunes,

there's the power of the Senate. Tribune is elected by the people. Some of the people. That's right, by a large body of the people. And then there's the Senate which represents an elite. And so what you have... Is that an elite by birth and merit? It's an elite by birth and wealth, yes.

And so what you have is a balance of power between competing forces. Or certainly that's what people looking back later say. You've got a balance of power between competing forces, and that balance of power means that you get good decision-making. You get conflict which produces good decisions. Tim Winter, Muhammad was born in Macca in 571, at least about more than the century after the fall of Rome,

and by 630 he and his ideas had taken control of the whole of Arabia. How did he organise the early Islamic movement states politically? Are these ideas that we've been discussing carried on there, as civilization moves into what we might loosely call the Arab world. Right. Well, I suppose the great recurrent poser for Muslim political thought is that on one hand the prophet is the inspired model. On the other hand, he's no longer with us.

And he himself, and the theologians say this was actually God's mercy upon the community, never indicated how subsequent Muslim rulers were to be chosen. We know that he created a political as well as a religious community. What was that political community? like? Well, it was in a sense historically unique insofar as for the first time the Arabs who had been polytheists, the prophet

dragged them really to the other extreme of the religious spectrum and brought them to a fairly austere Abrahamic monotheism and almost mirroring that he brought them from a fairly anarchic, exuberant tribal existence, the peninsula had never been unified before into

a unitary state and a state that even more surprisingly, while constituting itself as some kind of Arab nation insofar as the members were Arabs, at the same time transcends itself and becomes international. So he takes them from tribalism to a kind of nationalism, but simultaneously transcends the Arab nation and says the doors of this community are open to everyone. Is there much encouragement for the Democrat in a, we know in different historical context, though, but there's a much encouragement of democracy in the Quran?

Well, the Quran doesn't tell us very much. about how the political processes of the faithful are to be arranged. It gives us a few clues such as verses that say quite explicitly, the affairs of the faithful are to be decided by mutual consultation amongst themselves. And you'll see that verse inscribed. Sometimes one thinks with a kind of discreet irony by the architect over the portals of some of the representative assemblies in the Muslim world. That's the key text.

Somehow there is to be consultation in deciding who has the political clout. And there is also a key clue in the manner by which the Prophet's first successor, a man called Abu Bakr, came to power. Insofar as he certainly wasn't a hereditary ruler. He was not designated explicitly, it seems, by the Prophet as his successor, but he is elected by a small electoral college of distinguished companions of the Prophet following the Prophet's demise. That eventually becomes overwhelmed by Persian ideas of the absolute quasi-divine ruler. but in early Islamic history there is a hint of a participatory

even egalitarian strand that in recent Islamic thought has been coming to the surface again. Right, Mr Lane, back to you. The most... Just let's talk about Hellenism and Humanism now. The most influential of the political text of the ancient world is Plato's Republic. In your new book,

Plato's progeny, you say socialists and fascists alike have invoked Plato to legitimise their programmes. Is this because it's so very... porous or can you just explain that a little bit? It's because actually there are two

key strands in Plato I think which pull in different directions. One is the idea that he wants to create a holistic political community and that's something that appeals to people on the right in a sense. The idea that the whole community is aimed at the happiness of its members and that you think about the community as a whole. But the other

idea is that the way Plato thinks you have to achieve that in the Republic is by quite radical what we now think of as left-wing measures. For example, of property among the rulers and abolition of the family. So that you have this tension that in the 19th and 20th centuries, left-wingers look at communism and say, and Bakunin and others talked about Plato and said he was the first communist.

And on the other hand, you have the right-wing fascists saying Plato is talking about a holistic state ruled by the elite who know, and that looks very attractive to them. David Orton. Plato has this extraordinary presence through our culture, and everybody has tried to lay claim to him in one way, another. But the one thing he doesn't provide is any arguments for representative government or democratic government or limited government. And so that whole tradition that we now think of as

the tradition that's victorious actually has no roots in Plato at all virtually. Well, I would dissent from that a little bit and partly drawing on some of your own work. And in the 17th century, I think there is a movement of the radical Republicans in Britain who, although they're influenced by Rome and the Republican ideas, I think they're also influenced by a reading of Plato, which stresses harmony and diversity among the, in the ideal state, so that it's an idea that you will have an elite, but it will be a kind of natural elite. And the way to find it is to enfranchise people widely so that that natural elite can then rise to the top. So Tim Winter, in the, with the scribes of Baghdad in about 10th century, they start translating

Plato and Aristotle. We're in the middle of the Persian Empire. Does the political content of those to write is begin to feed itself in to the way the state runs itself. It does. I mean, the whole translation movement is one of the great sea changes in Islamic history and possibly one of the few cases in history where one confident civilization deliberately sets out to learn from another. The Caliph established translation academies in the major cities, whereby scribes, very often Christians, would translate really the whole of the Hellenistic corpus, with one or two exceptions, into Arabic. and very rapidly, not just marginal armchair philosophers,

but mainstream theologians and even the jurists start to see that we can learn from, say, Aristotelian logic in cracking some of the poses of Islamic law and that by appealing to reason, we can transcend some of the sectarian scriptural arguments that have afflicted the community. And we know that, for instance, Averroes, Ibn Rush, who was perhaps the greatest thinker of medieval Muslim Spain,

wrote several commentaries on Plato's Republic, some of which later fed into the development of political thought in Europe. Generally they shared the ancient Greek skepticism about democracy, partly because they assumed not just that the ruler had knowledge and therefore alone had the right to be wise and to legislate, but also because the concept of religious law made it somewhat difficult to assume that the masses of such might have something useful.

to contribute. Nonetheless, it's also the case that with somebody like Farabi, for instance, who is from Central Asia, who dies in Syria and is one of the great political thinkers of medieval Islam, that there is also a concept that Islamic society can crack the problems that Greek democracy fail to crack because it has the idea of a state that exists not just to secure the security of the useful elements of society, but also to help the poor, the weak, the afflicted, and hence can bind together

society in a way that the Athenian model ultimately failed to do. Melissa, would you like to comment on that? Yes, I think there's a sense in which not only the Muslims, but also the Jews and the Christians in the Middle Ages thought that exactly, as Tim said, they could crack the thing that the Greeks hadn't because they had revelation. They had the system of religious law so that if you look at the model of the Republic, what you need to have as rulers who are genuinely wise, and revelation guarantees that you have those rulers who are genuinely wise. So actually not only Averroes, but he was a great

influence on Maimonides for Jews and then both of them on Aquinas. You have a whole line of thinkers across the three faiths trying to, and believing that they can marry Greek logic and rationality within this framework of Revelation. Well, this is a very exciting time. Can we then move to the Renaissance? How important for the future of democracy was Machiavelli when we came to that and the idea of conflict? Could you tell us that? Right. I mean, I think Machiavelli is the first person to say that good government is going to involve conflict. And this is a very difficult idea to live with. Most people had always believed that good government represents harmony. And any excellent society will be a harmonious one.

Machiavelli says that's just not the way real life works. Real life involves conflict and conflict can be productive and creative. And that's a fundamental change and people take centuries to come to terms with it. He's looking back to the politics of ancient Rome and he's saying in ancient Rome you have a free people. free people will always be more successful than unfree people because they're prepared to fight for their freedom and the freedom that they have will involve disagreement and conflict, particularly between social classes.

But there's also an idea inside the renaissance of the progressive nature of society, isn't there? And science begins to come in as part of the progressive nature embracing the new, embracing the unknown. Yes, there's certainly that, and I think there's also a very strong idea in the Renaissance that the way forward is through dialogue and debate and discussion. There's a very strong view that the rhetorical skills

are the skills that make it possible to hold society together to bring about agreement, to bring about consensus, to bring about effective government. Now briefly, is this where the Islamic movement,

the Islamic world, begins to slow down in a way, that the idea of conflict that David Wooden has, the idea of dialogue, discussion, confrontation even, isn't present in Islam.

It's sort of, the world flip, over, as it were, the great six or seven hundred years, Arabian years, hauled into Western Europe, or one of a better word, we have to get a move on. And we flip over there, and it doesn't progress in that direction until maybe nowadays. There's a big ossification there. Well, this is one of the big, I think, unresolved questions of history as to why Islamic civilization, which was certainly for five or six centuries, the world's superpower,

was ultimately outstripped by the West, by Europe, which most Muslims assumed to have be in possession of an abrogated and out-of-date religion, and this continues to trouble a lot of Muslims today. I think one reason why these arguments break surface in this period in Europe and not in the Islamic world is that the conditions for the debate in the Islamic world had always been radically different in so far as you didn't have a concept of religious uniformity. In medieval Islamic societies, the rule of thumb was that you could believe and worship as you liked as long as you didn't speak against the sultan from the pulpit, in which case you would be stamped on firmly. So the arguments that come up a little bit later in England, say in

this civil war period, have no context in the Islamic world, because the Ottoman Empire is the most religiously diverse nation in the planet, and we're still dealing with repercussions of that in places like Iraq and Bosnia and elsewhere. There was a kind of almost federal model of the state, but non-territorial. Minorities, Muslim sects, Christians, and Jews, existed and flourished for centuries with their own law courts, their own places of worship. So the idea of the traditional monolithic follow the religion of the king paradigm that was breaking down at the time of the Renaissance and subsequently had no precedent in the Islam.

Yeah, but we've got to get to the fact that the ideas that, for better or worse, it's not a better or worse conversation. What went on in Europe, from the 14th and 50th century in terms of political, let's use the word development, and progressive ideas. of knowledge did not seem to obtain in anything like the same way, or maybe did not obtain full stop in the world of Arab, which had delivered almost the means of doing this to the West. Melissa.

I think actually Tim is exactly on the right lines. I think in a way one could say that Islamic society was too successful in that it maintained a degree of moral uniformity and allowed toleration within that. What happened in the West was the Reformation coming with massive religious civil wars. And in a sense, the breakdown of moral consensus in the West meant that it then had to be reconstructed on a much more minimal basis.

And that's one way of seeing what Hobbs did. If we see Hobbs as a kind of turning point or fulcrum in this, he really said we have to start to reconstruct political society from the ground up on principles that, the most minimal principles that people could agree to, rather than presuming that they might all share in revelation. You brought in the civil wars there. David Wooden, can you bring in the way that religion and politics

walking in hand in the English civil war I know this is very difficult, but there you go. Also, can you just introduce the ideal of conciliarism, which came out of unexpectedly for many of our listeners, that one of the maybe the strands which woven to the democratic, whatever it is, later on, came out of the Catholic Church. Is there any way you could put that together? Okay, there's a series of things here.

Conciliarism. In the Catholic Church, they had to deal in the late 15th century with the whole problem, sorry, the late 14th century, with the whole problem of what do you do if the post, is an evil ruler. How do you get an evil pope under control? How do you, if necessary, replace the pope? All of modern constitutional thinking had been run through in that period. And when people in the 17th and 18th century develop modern political constitutional thinking, they're simply repeating ideas from the conciliary epoch. What it's always based on is the idea that you must replace one pope by another pope. You don't change the

system. You have a particular individual who's presented a problem. You replace him with another person, just as in the company you replace one chief executive with another. What happens in the English Civil War is the notion that you've got a breakdown so serious that you must think about a new system. You must start from scratch. You must return mentally to what they call a state of nature and begin again. And that's a completely new idea and that makes it possible to say if we're beginning again, who has a right to decide how we should begin again? And the answer is everybody. And that's the foundation of a modern democratic thinking, I think. Briefly, where does Hobbs fit into this, Melissa? Then I want to go to Tim Winter for a

a rather surprised listener's view of Hobbs. Where does Hobbs come into this? Well, I think as David was, as I was saying before, and as David has said, the real thing was a breakdown of moral consensus. So there was a sort of paradox in Hobbs, that on the one hand there's a democratic element than that he's saying everyone is originally equal, but he then wants to say, actually,

that doesn't mean that you should have political democracy necessarily as a form of organization. You should authorize a sovereign who may be one person or many, but an artificially constructed sovereign who will then rule. So Hobbs has a kind of liminal position, in the authorization of democracy. That's partly because, or partly because, his view of human nature, which we're all

equal, but we're equally savage. Life is mean, brutish, and short. These savage people have to be controlled by the Leviathan, the great state, which balance together puts in change. It's wonderfully the opposite of Marx, isn't it? I mean, Hobbes seems to think man is everywhere free, but must be put in change, and Marx has ever been changed

and should be free a few centuries later. Never mind. But Hobbes wants that to happen. Now then, Tim Winter, You write that Hobbes was intellectual companion or friend of a man who translated Arab text and his idea from the Leviathan came from something in Islam, the high text. Can you briefly tell us about that? Well, clearly Hobbs is incompatible with certain Islamic assumptions. I think rather along the lines that Locke was unhappy with Hobbs

and that Locke thought that, sure, this is guaranteeing peace, but it's the peace of the dungeon who wants it. And it's also very pessimistic about human nature. that ultimately in the Islamic conception of humanity and also in a certain English optimism about human nature ultimately couldn't put down deep roots. But it's certainly one of the less known aspects of the cauldron of political rethinking

that was going on in the Civil War period that for the first time Islamic texts were being done into English. You had the first chair of Arabic established in Oxford. And as David said, matters were being recreated so drastically that for the first time Europeans were looking with interest. What interests me is the way Hobbes might have got, because you might have been influenced in his ideas from a text, from one of these texts, the high text.

Can you just address yourself to that and then take that on board? Well, there's a number of interesting individuals, particularly somebody called Henry Stubb, who was a personal physician to James I. And one of his excellent trustees was that he wrote the first book in English on chocolate. But he wrote what is perhaps one of the most, astonishing documents of the time, which is a biography of the Prophet, in which he says, a plague on all of these Christian houses, let's look over the border and see what the Saracens

have done. Why is it that the Ottoman Empire is religiously diverse and it has an absolute concept of monarchy? Maybe this is the solution to the problem that has torn England apart. Maybe we need a much simpler kind of religion that isn't so hierarchically arranged with fewer superstitions. And maybe we need an absolute ruler who is absolutely uninterested. in the individual religious communities which he controls. And clearly there are parallels with Hobbes here. There is certainly evidence that some of the Arab Platonic texts had already been done into English at the time that he was writing,

and certainly he would have been aware of certain of the speculations that the Arab Platonists had been offering regarding the perfectability of human nature, the possibility of natural knowledge. Can we move now to a closer definition of what people listening to this programme will think of, as democracies I indeed think of the democracies are. Locke is held to be the founding philosopher of American democracy. And the world we live in today, democracy, the carrying the flag for democracy, is the task that America has given to itself.

Now, can you tell us what Log brought to that and how we links up with Hobbes and what you were saying? Well, what Locke crucially brings is a notion that revolution might well be an acceptable alternative. Hobbs insists that the price of revolution will always be absolutely intolerably high. Locke says people are perfectly reasonable people. We can be quite optimistic about the sort of solutions they will come up with, and therefore if we have a breakdown in the political system,

we can be quite optimistic about replacing it with a better one. So essentially what Locke brings is a new optimism, and that combined with the notion that you should consult everyone initially about how politics should be organized, means that you can move very easily from Locke to a democratic theory. So can you see a direct input, a direct influence of Locke on the great documents which founded a... America? Oh, I think you certainly can, but what you can also see is this tension in the founding of America between initial 1776 period when they want what we would now call democracy, representative government, and then a shift a decade later when they found the Constitution, when what they want to do is partly control the people, make sure that the decisions that people take are taken carefully, that there are competing interests involved in them. And that's the foundation of a modern sort of constitutionalist democracy, which is a big change, I think.

Melissa, I got a bit muddled at the start the program being a bit rusty about democracy in Athens. But the word democracy seemed to slip away for almost two millennia and reemerge. When did it reemerge with authority? It reemerges just in this period which David's been describing, but in the American Revolution and the quarter century following that. And by the early night, by the first years of 1801, Thomas Jefferson is able to write effectively, we are all Democrats now. And in America, that really goes with Jacksonian democracy, which was a kind of widening of the sense of the importance of popular participation. But one way to see this

is that the American revolutionaries were working within the British state, which already had representation, but it was very limited. It was only representation of the property classes. So you had Parliament, but it was, there was a very narrow franchise. And really the movement in America and then spreading into Britain with the Reform Act is a movement about widening the franchise. And it's a social problem because, If you widen the franchise, you then have people who don't own property. And they've always been seen as untrustworthy potential mob people. You can't trust them. These are the poor.

And really, it's that question. Democracy might become okay if it has suitable checks and balances. If you have the rich in charge, the real radical change in the period from the American Revolution onwards is enfranchising the poor. Yes, and the Great Reform Act, to come back to our own country, the Great Reform Acts of the 90th century. Now, we don't find, unless I'm completely wrong, Any parallels there in Islam, do you, Jim Wadler?

That's the case, partly biggest of a certain complacency. They thought we hadn't had all of these nasty religious wars. Things are just fine. Let's continue, as usual. And the idea of democracy as something to be aspired to really only hits mainstream Muslim political discourse in the middle of the 19th century as a result of the spectacle of European military and economic success.

So you have people like the young Ottomans in the middle of the 19th century saying that, okay, it's difficult for us, as believing Muslims to say that we can adopt these foreign ideas, but in fact parliamentary democracy was pinched by the Europeans from the original Islamic egalitarian model, and hence we're just reclaiming our own. So that kind of rhetorical, almost rewriting of history, allows Muslims to import the Lock-in model of the representative democracy

into Muslim political discourse for the first time, but it comes in pretty late. Yes, but in some, would you say that it bit in, the ideas that have been discussed by all three of you, of the ideas from taken out of Athens, Rome, I know it's been a bit of a gallop, but Machiavelli and Hobbes and Locke, do you think that had bit in to Islam in any significant way

that made political state change out of what it had arrived at in the 13th, 14th century? Not in practice, partly because most Muslim countries by that time were under the colonial occupation of European powers and these arguments were academic. And also in 1878, the Sultan suspended the constitution, and even in the Ottoman Empire, they became academic. We tend to think of the modern Islamic world

in terms of wild fundamentalists returning us to the Middle Ages. We tend to lose sight of the fact that the majority of serious Muslim political thinkers now are sincerely committed to the concept of democracy. And you think, for instance, of reform in Indonesia, which is consistently backed by the religious hierarchy there. There are two stories going on in the Muslim world, not just one, and one of them is the democratic one. Well, thank you very much.

I'll be discussing Napoleon and Wellington next week, but thank you very much that Tim Winter, David Wooden and Melissa. Thank you. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.