Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 126 | David Stasavage on the Origin and History of Democracy

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

Those of us living in democracies tend to take the idea for granted. We forget what an audacious, radical idea it is to put government power into the hands of literally all of the citizens of a country. Where did such an idea come from, and where is it going? Political scientist David Stasavage has written an ambitious history of democracy worldwide, in which he makes a number of unconventional points. The roots of democracy go much further back than we often think; the idea wasn't invented in Athens, but can be found in a large number of ancient societies. And the resurgence of democracy in Europe wasn't because that continent was especially advanced, but precisely the opposite. These insights have implications for what the future of democracy has in store. Support Mindscape on Patreon. David Stasavage received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. He is currently Dean for the Social Sciences and the Julius Silver Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University and an Affiliated Professor in NYU's School of Law. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book is The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today. Web site NYU web page Google Scholar publications Talk on the history of taxation and fairness Amazon author page Twitter

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Realtors are members of the National Association of Realtors, right by you. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. So democracy seems to have survived for another day here in the United States, no matter which side you're on. Hopefully you're pro-democracy one way or the other. Of course, we had a fun conversation with Cornell West the day before Election Day. But that was more about the spirit of democracy. Today we're going to be talking about the history of democracy. You know, again, as I said in the previous podcast, democracy is something we take for granted. We're just taught that it's good. It's a, positive valence word that you can throw out there when you're talking to other people. But it's not obvious, right? It's not self-evident that democracy is the best kind of government. And certainly through history, places have been democratic and places have not been democratic. So how did it come to be democracy? And why did it sometimes go away, right? How did it both get invented and why did it sometimes get overturned? Today's guest is David Stasavage, who is dean for the social sciences, as well as a professor of politics at NYU,

and he has a book out on the decline and rise of democracy, where it's a wonderful book, you know, a very readable, big picture history kind of book, but he makes a couple of very interesting points that weren't obvious. One is that we think of, in our Western-focused viewpoint, democracy as coming to be in Greece and then spreading to Rome and then kind of fading away before being rediscovered, which is a very inaccurate history of early democracy

in David Stavich's point of view, he thinks that early democracy was all over. And I shouldn't say he thinks. He points out correctly and obviously to any historian, early democracy was all over the place. There are many societies, groups, tribes, including here in the Western Hemisphere, where democracy was the form of government that was accepted in all sorts of different ways, sort of more or less direct democracy, more or less Republican versions, et cetera. And then, you know, the Athenians really sort of theorized it in a special way. And, of course, Rome helped really establish the Republican way of doing things.

But then we do know that in Europe, anyway, democracy kind of faded away for a while. And so one interesting question is, what was the original democracy? And David makes the good point. It was long before Athens. The other interesting point is how did it come back into vogue? Because today, if you're a modern, grown-up nation state, you want to be thought of as a democracy. whether or not you are, how did that happen? And again, we tend to look at Europe and the rise of democracy back, the recovery of democracy, if you want to put it that way, in Europe. But then

that raises a question, why was it in Europe rather than anywhere else? And so if you look at the world a thousand years ago and you look at sort of the major power centers, you would have picked out the Islamic world and you would have picked out China, maybe India, but Europe would have not have been in the top two. Europe was a relatively weak, um, low-income, low-grossed domestic product kind of place. And so David makes the argument that, interestingly, one of the reasons why democracy sort of re-flourished in Europe is exactly because of its backwardness,

because the states that existed in Europe were less good at controlling their populace. The rulers had less information about what was going on, therefore they could tax them less efficiently, the bureaucracy was not as good, and therefore they could punish, and control and raise armies less efficiently than in China or the Islamic world. And so in some sense, democracy had a chance of coming back in Europe just because it was fighting against a less powerful autocratic scheme overall. So it's an interesting take, I think.

There's, of course, also a given take between science and philosophy as well as the politics of democracy. It is very interesting to think about. And, of course, there's no guarantee that democracy stays, right? It came for a while. It went away. Came again. Went away. Maybe. Who knows? This is what we have to keep an eye out for. There's nothing inevitable about democracy. And therefore, it is crucially important, I think, if we want democracy to survive as long as possible, to understand the history of what made it come, what made it go, how to keep it around. So let's go. David's to Savage. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Thank you very much for having me. Now, you've written a book about the history of democracy, and we've all been taught a version of this.

the history of democracy, namely that the Greeks invented it and then the Romans borrowed it, but it kind of collapsed. And over a thousand years later, the Europeans rediscovered it, and now we're spreading it to the whole world. So is that not the correct story? Yeah, I don't think that's actually the correct story. It's a nice story, but it misses a lot of things. And I think that the traditional story of democracy, as you've just summed it up well, it resembles the idea that democracy was sort of invented at one place and one time. And democracy is like a torch that gets passed on from one society to another. And there's always some core fragility to it.

And if the torch ever goes out, then we're done for. And so that describes exactly what you would have generally learned, or at least what I learned in school with regard to the practice being invented by the Greeks, passed on via the Romans, via Italian city-states, may be thinking about events like Magna Carta in England onto eventually some more modern type of democracy. And what I tried to argue in the book is not that the contribution of the Greeks was irrelevant. That would be silly to say. But in fact, what the Greeks did is they gave us the word, the best word to describe democracy, Democratia, which simply means that the people have power.

But they didn't invent the practice because there were a lot of human societies independently over the millennia that had systems of governance where the people had power. Well, that's right. Counsels, via assemblies. Yeah, I mean, and that's one of the fascinating things. One of the various fascinating things in your book is this idea that democracy was kind of all over the place in one form or the other in what you label early democracy. It's not exactly what we have now, but you try to make the case that the idea of the people

having some voice in how the society they were in was governed was not at all a rare precious gem early on. I think that's right. And then the key element to distinguish early democracy from the type of democracy we think of today is that if you ask just about anyone today, maybe not just about anyone, if you ask many people today, what is democracy? They would say, well, democracy is about elections, free and fair elections with multiple political parties competing. And we're hopefully also, it's possible for incumbents to lose. When incumbents just always don't gain the upper hand. And that very well describes elements, core are core elements of modern democracy. But that's not the only way that the people can have power. There are a great number of human societies where rulers were not elected. They may have been chosen through some consensual procedure. They may have even inherited their position. But they were constrained to rule together with the people in councils and assemblies

because they really didn't have any other means of governing. And so that's what I would call the early democracies. Yeah, I mean, maybe we can put some flesh on those bones with some examples because they are quite variegated. and I won't even suggest. What are your favorite examples of early democracy? Well, I think my favorite example is driven a bit by the ethnographic evidence because the Huron, or they called themselves the Wendat, were an Iroquoian-speaking tribe in what is today present-day Ontario. And we know an awful lot about their entire society and how they govern themselves, because in the middle of the 17th century, the French crown sent Jesuits out to,

try to convert these people, obviously. That was the main goal. But being good Jesuits, they also wanted to learn about these societies in order to achieve that ultimate goal of conversion. And so they sent home something like 72 volumes of reports from this area. And in there, we can find many discussions of how the Huron actually governed themselves. And it was quite a sophisticated way involving council governance at the level of individual villages, and then at each tribe and then it would be a confederation above the tribal level. And it was one where the formal role of women in politics was not that great, but it was certainly greater than it was in Europe at the time via informal means. So that's one of my favorites. And so were these councils literally voted on

by, I mean, I guess not white free males, but whatever, whoever the voters were, there was there literally like a category of voters and they voted for the council? And the council make decisions? It would be, it would make decisions and it would make decisions in a very consensual way. And it would make decisions in a consensual way because one of the characteristics of Huron democracy that was true of a lot of early democracies was that, um, it is a principle I call the take your marbles and go home principle, that anyone who wasn't happy with a decision could always just take off. If an individual tribe did not want to participate in something the confederation was doing, they could say, we're just not going to do it. Yeah. If an individual village didn't want to just, uh,

participate in something that the tribe was deciding upon, they could make that, they could do that as well. And so that system meant you really had to have a consensus of some sort to be able to do anything. And was this widespread in the Americas at this time, similar systems, or do we just not know? It was very widespread in the Americas. It was certainly widespread among the, the Iroquois, who called themselves a Harrodunusani, which means people of the Longhouse. we have hints of it in a lot of other societies as well, although it wasn't universal among Native American societies pre-conquest. There was a group of societies in the southeastern United States that are referred to as the Mississippian societies that existed at an earlier phase of development. And they were actually more autocratic in form.

Okay. And also elsewhere and, you know, where else in the world would we have these early democracies? Well, they were common in a lot of different places. So one of the core areas where we have some good evidence comes from pre-colonial Africa, from what is today to Democratic Republic of the Congo, where people have done remarkable work. There was a historian who died a few years back named Jan Van Sina, who reconstructed a lot of practices of these societies based on contemporary evidence as well as oral tradition. So it's clear that pre-colonial Africa is a place where early democracy was widespread. It was also widespread in some earlier locales that we wouldn't necessarily think of, like ancient Mesopotamia.

Ancient Mesopotamia, we think of as having been governed by top-down autocrats like Hamarabi of Babylon. But in Mesopotamia, actually, there was a bit of an alternation over time between forms of governance that were more autocratic and forms of governance that were more democratic. And I guess this makes sense. I mean, people like to govern themselves rather than be governed, maybe. But can we say anything about how natural or, you know, common this was overall when a society evolves from just a small group of hunter-gathers or whatever to a more organized civilization? Is it 50-50 or is it, you know, the rare exception that things go in a democratic direction? I think we can say that it's natural in the sense that this was sufficiently widespread to indicate. that it's not a tremendously rare event, the fact that it occurred at very different time periods

in very different places also. So it's not like the practice was just invented in a couple places and diffused elsewhere. So it seems to, so that's an obvious indication. If you want to get to the actual prediction of how frequent it was or not, well, then we could refer to some of the data collected by anthropologists led by George Peter Murdoch back in the 60s and the 70s where they put together a data set known as a standard cross-cultural sample. And there you could get an indication that early democracy was present, maybe in about half of the 186 societies they considered. So one out of two maybe based on that. That's very interesting that it's exactly a half. Well, not exactly, but near enough to a half.

Close enough. Close enough. And I think you could try to define it different ways and that data has all sorts of issues with it, not the fault of the authors, but just the fact that it's difficult to decide what is a democracy and what is not a democracy. but it was very prevalent. Do we know much from the Jesuits or anywhere else about what we would now call the political philosophy of these groups? I mean, how explicit were they in saying, you know, people have rights to be represented in their government?

They tended not, there's much less evidence of that. And one always wonders, is that, A, because Europeans were just unique or exceptional in developing a much more elaborate and full. formalized system of rights? Or was it just that when we don't have the evidence for this and people were also, a lot of the early ethnographic work that was done was by people who didn't necessarily have very, shall we say, enlightened views of indigenous people and they may have been less interested in that. So there are discussions. There are senses of what is the, what is the way to do things. Certainly in what we know coming back to the Huron and the Uruguay, one thing the Jesuits

did remark on is that there are very clear ways of behaving and talking and making arguments in a council or in an assembly that there would be. The speakers would adopt a different tone, very sort of intricate things that we might not think of ourselves, but that I think gets a little bit towards what you're speaking of. So just as, you know, people in the U.S. Senator, House representatives or the parliament or something like that have formal ways of addressing each other and so forth. That was already there in the hereon assemblies. Yeah, it's very clear that there was a way to make an argument and it wasn't just shouting or something like that. And there were formal, they're not, well, they would be into the extent that the, if you look at the U.S. House

of Representatives and the Senate, the ways in which arguments have been made from the floor have evolved tremendously over time. And at anyone given time, there tend to be informal norms about this is the best or most convincing way to make an argument, and this is not. And I think the same was true for the Huron or for their neighbors to the south, the Iroquois. You mentioned Mesopotamia as something that kind of went back and forth. I mean, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if that was pretty common, that there was a constant give and take between some people wanted to be autocrats and other people wanted a more democratic rule. Do we have a lot of evidence about regime change or system of government change in these early democracies? Yes, we do in Mesopotamia is a great example because

there was so much regime change in that early democracy was a form of government that didn't have to happen only in person, but it was often occurring in a face-to-face setting. Right. And so that would be a face-to-face setting where the autonomous community or or a city perhaps would have a council who would be charged with governance affairs. And early democracy would be sustained at that level. But then what would happen is that eventually someone else would try to say, I'm going to try to conquer several cities and make myself a kingdom or even an empire, if you want to call it that.

And then when these societies, when the form of governance increased in scale, that tended to veer things towards artocracy and away from democracy. It's important to take time to do things that lift us up, that make us feel better. One of the best ways I know to do that is learning with the Great Courses Plus. The Great Courses Plus is a streaming surface and an app that gets you access to thousands of videos, video lecture courses covering hundreds of topics, from credible sources, from professors who know what they're talking about, and also from me. And the number of courses is amazing.

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When you go there, you'll get a free 14-day trial with unlimited access. So go right now. That's T-A-G-G-G-G-Courses-P-L-U-S dot com slash Minescape. And I get the impression from your book that early democracy was, I don't know exactly how to put it, more of a full-time job than we have now. You know, there's a lot more direct influence on the people who are voting on the actual decisions the government made. I think that's right. If you had the right to participate, then you were participating frequently. And certainly if we go to the Athenian example and we shouldn't forget them, of course,

that this has been traced out by people. The actual number of person hours required to govern Athens was rather extraordinary compared to what we might think of today, where we're used to voting every couple years. And for most people in the U.S. or other modern democracies, that's the extent of your political participation. But on the other hand, they didn't have email or social media, so they probably had a lot of free time to devote to governing the polis at the time. Right. Imagine that.

Maybe it may be, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe we should get back to that a little bit. So about Athens, I mean, was there something special about it or is it just that that's where our history sort of focuses back on? Do they actually innovate when it comes to democracy? I think there were, there was an innovation in terms of the, first of all, the terms they gave us, of Democritia, et cetera. which and the principles, the equal laws for all, it was innovative in terms of the breadth of participation. In a lot of early democracies, there would have been wide-scale participation, but there wasn't the same principle we have today of every adult should be able to. Of course, when we say that, when we say that was broad participation in Athens, we mean for,

first of all, for males, because Athenian women were notoriously excluded from any political role, really. And of course, there was a significant slave population in Athens as well. Do any of these early democracies feature widespread participation by women? Well, yeah, I think some of the Native American societies come closest to that from what we've seen. I wouldn't say they're the only example, but there were some. There were some other early of a conservative rule around the northern parts of the Black Sea, where it's a very interesting story, actually, we know from Herodotus about the Amazon supposedly, and for a long time, people thought that the Amazons were a myth, but then archaeologists in recent decades have

actually started digging up the skeletons that are female skeletons, where they actually see from their bowed legs or other things that they had been in battle, and there are myths about those societies having a female rule. I don't have a record from Jesuits at the time because they went around yet of having gone and seen these councils, but it's quite likely that they might have existed. I'm going to betray my incredible ignorance about indigenous civilizations in the Americas, but do we have any written records from them about how they organize things in their own words? Well, we have written. So all writing originated from three sources from Cuneiform and Sumer. from China with scrapings basically on Oracle bones that became Chinese characters,

and then with the Olmex, who were a society in two millennia ago in Mesoamerica, and it is thought that that was the reason why some societies later in Mesoamerica had a form of writing. So the Aztecs had forms of writing other societies between the Olmex and the Aztecs do. What we don't have, because a lot of this stuff was destroyed. at the time of the conquest. And unfortunately, Cortez was not as interested in the Jesuits in learning about these societies and writing about them. From the Inca to the south, we have an even more fascinating example.

They didn't have writing, but they had this thing called a Kippu, which basically looks to us today just like a group of strings and of different colors and different lengths. But we don't know how to interpret those. Now, of course, the Aztecs and the Inca were autocratic societies, not democratic. but it would have been interesting if we could know more about what these what these societies thought of themselves. That's correct. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it just seems like I'm just dwelling on this tremendous historical tragedy that so much of that knowledge was lost. But I guess that's not exactly news to the world. No, and the other place where you can see some of this is if you go to, as I talk about in the book, to thinking about governance in pre-Islamic Arabia, then we actually have clear evidence from.

early parts that wound up in the Koran about, and this thing called the Constitution of Medina, about a relatively non-hierarchical form of governance in localities. And we also can gain inference on that by looking at how Bedouin groups in the Middle East, even today, govern themselves. And they govern themselves in a very consensual, non-hierarchical way. So that's another way to get some angle. So you can actually, those are people you can actually go and you can talk to. And I cite, I didn't go and talk to them myself, but I cite some of them in the book, and it's quite interesting. And we mentioned Athens, and I did a podcast quite a while ago with Edward Watts about the fall of the Roman Republic. And I didn't know much about the Roman Republic. I knew a little bit about

the empire. But do we give Rome any credit for innovation here in the sense that it was less direct democracy, more of a Republican system? Was that, you know, an intellectual change? Or was it just they kind of stumbled upon it? Yeah. Certainly we have to give them credit in two ways. One was that they were, the Romans conquered a lot of peoples and they therefore spread Greek culture and ideas in a lot of different places where it wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to it throughout Europe and throughout North Africa as well. But it's also true that the Romans did innovate in terms of the way they thought about how a republic should be governed and they did have a republic for some time.

And so there's always been this question among people who think about your subsequent European developments in the medieval area. They'd like to know, well, where do these practices come from when we start seeing city states and people in places like Florence and Bologna that govern themselves without kings and might say had at times somewhat democratic ways of ruling themselves? And there's a debate about whether it comes from the Greeks or the Romans or from some entirely different source. I mean, yeah, you say that they had it for a while. They had it for 500 years, which is longer than we've had it, right? No, that's pretty good. And that's right, because so far the American Republic has lasted about as long as democracy lasted in Athens.

So that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's a time scale there. Yeah. And I also have the impression, but maybe yours is much more informed than mine that there were, there were absolutely senses in which the Romans were better at democracy than the Athenians were. I mean, the Athenian democracy was a little bit, uh, too unstable because, you know, everyone could in the, in the city could just change their mind and call back the fleet at any time rather than the Romans, you know, picked sub-representatives to make choices for them. No, I think that's right. And so it was, it was a more hierarchical form that provided some stability, but it wasn't a strict and pure hierarchy. And so it was a more, it was a more elaborate. You got this idea was not, it was not a, it was not a Roman idea originally, but the idea of, quote, a mixed constitution. A constitution having something,

that would involve both a degree of aristocratic influence and a degree of popular influence. And this was something that was a term that existed in the Greek world, but the Romans probably you can think of as establishing that mixed constitution and maintaining it for a long time. And the idea of a mixed constitution was, of course, incredibly influential for subsequent developments involving the U.S. founding fathers and thinking about how we should structure our own republic. Okay, so if democracy was there half the time, the other half the time there was something else. And I guess autocracy is the good thing to say that when you're not democracy or autocracy, is that the other category we should use?

Yeah, you could say autocrat or authoritarian, but authoritarian tends to have a much more 20th century ring to it. I use for back a lack of a better term autocracy in the book because it describes the opposite. it, but in a sense, autocracy itself is a misnomer because, of course, autocrats don't truly govern on their own in almost anything apart from the smallest scale society and autocrat would need subordinates to govern through. And so it's an autocratic slash bureaucratic order, I would say. Well, I think it's a crucially important thing, right? I mean, the strongest centralized dictator relies on the support of a very large number of people, right? At the very least, their military or their strong men or whatever. It's not, no one person.

can do it all by themselves. Precisely. And this is the way that would-be autocrats got a leg up on things. If we come back on things, if we come back to the Mesopotamian example where someone like Hamarabi is trying to conquer several neighboring city states or existing kingdoms, then it helps a lot if you have a standing army that you're paying

and you'd get to tell what to do. It helps a lot if you have bureaucrats that can help you go out and collect taxes and assess how much people can pay in taxes in the first place. And so all of those aspects that we think of as just natural today didn't always exist. Early democracy existed in lieu of a state bureaucracy. You needed the people to help you rule, whereas autocracy in these early phages was ruling not with the people, but through your own subordinates who you had chosen and remunerated.

Do you think that when autocracy did come about, it generally replaced? placed some primitive democracy, or are there societies that were just autocratic the whole way down? It's hard to think that it was present from the very, very, very beginning. The Chinese case is the one where we have the most continuous historical record of autocracy being the paramount, apart from a couple very, very small periods where China was disintegrating and there are senses or were their assemblies and cities that were important. But really, you know, from sort of like the middle of the second millennium BC, we have, we have autocracy. And it would be, it would be fascinating to know what existed before that. But before that, we're beyond the knowledge of any

existing dynasties, and we don't have any written records as well. So you're just forced to rely purely on archaeological evidence. Well, we should probably talk about the Chinese example in some detail. I mean, you mentioned bureaucracy a lot. I'm surprised how much the word bureaucracy comes up in the book, but in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. And in some sense, no one is better at bureaucracy than the Chinese system. Yeah, that's right. I think it's very interesting. If you're someone like me who started a career in political science in the late 1980s,

then at the time the whole idea was China was maybe a deviant path from the more normal political evolution path that the U.S. and Western Europe were on, and as they got richer, they would become more democratic. And in fact, what we've seen, I think, actually, if you look at the history, is that China has, has presented this continuous alternative political model to our own. And it's a very successful, depending how you judge success, it's a very successful one. Right. By its own standards, it's very successful. That's right. By its own criteria, it is very successful. And there has been a continuous tradition of having, you know, in the first two millennia, before the common area, you get this gradual development and improvement of bureaucratic tools

and also technological tools to make a bureaucracy function. And of course, you also needed writing to make a bureaucracy function better that allowed rulers to govern in a way that didn't really seek consent from anyone who is representing the people or not from the people directly either. And so it's just, it's a fascinating example. Yeah, so, I mean, tell us a little bit more about how democracy came to be in China. I mean, there's famously, you know, examinations that the imperial system would hand down to let people join the bureaucracy. It just seems, again, to someone who is completely uneducated in these things, that the existence of a bureaucracy is much more deeply ingrained in the Chinese way of looking at the world than in the European way. I mean, they talk about the celestial bureaucracy, right, which I don't think that any Western religions ever really emphasized.

No, that's right. And there are, you know, it's a very interesting distinction. There are other things like in the Middle East, the idea of the circle of justice, which was something that the Islamic conquerors inherited from the Sassanian Empire before them. And that continued right on until the middle of the, the, in 19th century, under the Ottomans as a political idea. And in the circle of justice, there is a role for the people, there's a role for the rulers. And there is a role for tax collectors. Oddly enough. And. And And so for Europeans, this idea that the tax collector should be a fundamental part of the political order, you know, people in Renaissance Europe, or medieval Europe were not thinking or writing things this way. That was seen more like they were annoyance. And so you're right, that the Chinese, the Chinese bureaucratic model is a lot more ingrained. And what's something like the examination system does is it's almost like an alternative way of organizing things rather than having a representative assembly. Rather than having the people in localities choose representatives and then you're sent and you govern with them, you choose who you're going to have. And you choose that based on performance in an exam, which ideally would make you less beholden to localized interests, which could still be a problem even in an autocracy. I mean, you could spin it in a somewhat meritocratic way, right? You know, we're going to send the best people and they're going to rule us. No, and that's right. And so from the point of view of a, you know, contrast a English peasant in the 13th century

with a Chinese peasant in the 13th century. Well, in England, you would have been maybe excited to hear that there was this new thing called Magna Carta, which was eventually developing into a parliament. But you as a peasant didn't really have much of a say in things individually. Yeah. Whereas in China, perhaps maybe someone was happier that actually choose this person. I'm not going to rule myself. No one's going to ask me what I want, but maybe at least they're just going to choose the most, the most skillful person for doing the job, and that could leave me better off.

Was there a Chinese equivalent of the American dream? I mean, could anyone take this exam and join the bureaucracy? Yeah, that's the idea. Of course, the examination system, we talk about it as if it was one constant thing, but of course, it lasted for a very long time from its beginning in the Tongue. dynasty all the way up to its abolition and right around the turn of the 20th century. But yeah, at times that was the idea. Now, of course, like a lot of other examination systems in more recent countries, you observe that people who had attained the highest rank,

their children were also more likely to attain the highest rank. Could be for genetic reasons, could be for cultural capital or any other mechanism. But you're right, at least in principle, there was this idea. It was not something that said like this is exclusively reserved to some people and not others. So it's more like the American reality than the American dream in principle. Exactly, exactly. I mean, you mentioned that actually, before I forget, there's a slight deviation, but the system in China, one way or the other, has been around for a very, very long time. Is there some sense in which even modern China, which is nominally communist party rule, is sort of...

of borrowing a lot of the superstructure from that system? Oh, yes. Yes, absolutely. There's, there's, I don't want to downplay the, the innovation of the, all the tumult of the 20th century and how the PRC is, is, is, is different from, from existing or prior, um, dynist imperial dynasties. But there is a lot of, uh, there is a lot of continuity. So in the imperial era from a very early date, one of the big things that the government does to try to control matters is to have household registration and to know where people are, what they're doing, and to have people report on each other if there are problems. And there's

control in that way with something that got set up. And then you see that persisting into the brief Republican period and into the system of household registration today, where it seems unlikely that the PRC would have had such an easy time setting up a system of household registration. If this had not been the practice that it was very, very deeply ingrained already. December is a busy month. A lot of people are planning for the holidays, but don't put off planning for the future, such as life insurance. If you want life insurance, but don't want to deal with the hassle or expense, try PolicyGenius. PolicyGenius combines a cutting-edge insurance marketplace with help from license experts to save you time and money. Right now, you could

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You cast it more as just a very successful alternative, a different way of doing things. And it reminded me a little bit of when I read Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. You know, he was kind of a geographic determinist and tried to explain how societies developed on the basis of where they lived and what latitude things stretched out on. But all of his theories were completely falsified by China. And he knew this in some sense. And it was very, very different. And he sort of tried his best to squeeze it in. What is it that made China different? I mean, you mentioned that bureaucracy was there. But then you have a little bit, of more literally down-to-earth explanation in terms of the form of soil and so forth. Yeah, so down to earth. And then I try to steer a narrow course in the book or maybe thread the needle is the better metaphor between, I'd like to emphasize how geography I think mattered, how the natural environment mattered. But the problem is, as soon as you start to say that, then people think you're a geographic

determinist. And I don't by any means when to say the geography determined for all future points in time. how a society organized itself. But it is quite dramatic to see the distinction between the European, Western European pattern of extensive agriculture where people are spread out. They're moving. Things are a lot more uncertain. It makes it harder for rulers to rule with the Chinese pattern where the first few dynasties arose on this plain near the Yellow River in northeast of China today where there was a certain type of soil that was very easily farmed, even with easy, with primitive tools, and that allowed for higher yields and a concentration of people and also a certain regularity

that you can imagine a bureaucracy would have found it easier to organize. And people were not moving around, and they weren't practicing a type of agriculture where they didn't move every 20 or 30 years. And so I do think, and we see this in other areas of the world, that type of agricultural, that type of system where humans have that relationship with the natural environment did lend itself a little bit tilted the scales in favor of autocracy. Made it easier to rule more or less unilaterally over a large region. I think that's right. I think that's right because life was more predictable and visible and legible to use this, this term that the political scientist named James Scott has coined.

And just because some listeners might want to Google it, we're talking about lois soil or lus. soil? How do you pronounce it? I avoid pronouncing it because I don't know exactly how to say it, but yeah, L-O-E-S-S. It is a German term, and it describes a soil that is deposited by, it's a deposit that it is very fine-grained and so subject to very easy erosion, which has always been a problem, but is also very easily farmed. And so we know that Europe's first farmers were also, also, also, existed on these, if a farm, this type of soil. But in Europe, the loath soil was deposited in a lot more small river valleys and locations that were spread out. There was no one large Loz plain of the type that we see in China. And the other example that one has to confront of a non-democratic rule, but in a, you know, relatively successful society overall, is the Middle East, you know, the Islamic nations, the caliphates. And there, the explanation for autocracy is maybe a little bit different, but not incompatible

with the Chinese explanation. No, that's right. It's not incompatible, but it's fascinating because I think it's different than what a lot of people think. It was due to the nature of the Islamic conquest that we got a shift to autocracy, but it had nothing to do with Islam as a religion itself. What happened was when the Arab armies spread out of Arabia, one of the first places they conquer is the Sasanid Empire that I referred to earlier, which was located in where present-day Iraq is southern Iraq. And this was an area that had a very fertile soil where there was an intensive system of agriculture based on irrigation and where the Sasanian rulers over time had built up a very nice autocratic, bureaucratic,

system for themselves, where they were taxing people based, they knew how much they could reduce, they would give you a different tax rate to depend on the quality of your soil or what kind of crops you were growing. And so what that did is it allowed inheriting a state, inheriting a bureaucratic state, allowed the Islamic conquerors to shift over to a more autocratic form of rule. And so there are, while these traditions say that the first few caliphs were chosen through Shura, which is a principle of consensus and consultation, after a first, after, a brief amount of period of time, all that goes out the window and we have a system of inheritance and autocracy for rule. Right. So basically the tools were in place for them to

quickly move in an autocratic direction. Yeah, exactly, just because they were lucky to inherit that from someone else. And so what they did is they got rid of the Sasanian rulers, but otherwise they kept the rest of the state. And it was very convenient. And it was a huge source of revenue that allowed them to go out and conquer other territories as well. And not too wildly generalize, generalize, we're going to move back to Europe in a second. But what about places like India, Japan, Southeast Asia? Are there, were they autocratic, democratic, somewhere in between? So India is interesting in that I don't want to go too much out on a limb, but it's interesting. We do have these examples from ancient India that I talk about in chapter two of the book,

about examples of ancient Indian republics. The evidence is not terrific. It's not as detailed as what we have for the Huron, but it's extensive enough to suggest that, yes, there were actually republics that existed in India at that time. Now, I don't want to suggest that because India had republics in the time of Buddha, that it's necessarily a democracy today. But that would probably be a little bit of a leap. But it's interesting to see that all the same, there was never a period where autocratic, bureaucratic rules succeeded in uniting all of India in a very, very durable way. And I think that that does matter for the political trajectory. There was some democratic energy there somewhere, even if only in pockets.

Yes. Yes. When you compare it to the Chinese case, I think the difference is really stark. Okay. And so now with all of that wonderful, now that we know the complete history of early democracy, thank you very much. That was quick but very useful. But now it gets into the part which I really think is fascinating and difficult to grapple with, which is the implication that in some sense, what made democracy fail was the places where government was effective. In other words, whether the technology and the societal structures were able to give the governments the power to do what they wanted. And you didn't need democracy in those cases, or democracy couldn't evolve in some sense. Is that a roughly good lesson to draw? Yeah, I think that's one of the lessons that I've drawn myself and that I'm trying to convince others of.

But we have a tendency to think of based on the world that we've had until recently, well, if you go back several decades where we still used to talk about, quote, the advanced industrialized democracies. We're no longer so advanced nor no so democratic. But thinking that whatever generated democracy and whatever generated progress must have gone hand in hand. the sort of all good things go together approach. And what we actually see is that Europeans, if you're in favor of democracy, which I am,

then you have to believe, based on the evidence, that our democratic inheritance from Europe is due in large part, or at least in significant part, to the fact that Europe was behind technologically in a lot of different ways in terms of building states, and that people tend to not realize that strong state bureaucracies in Europe are a 19th and 20th. a century phenomenon, whereas in other parts of the globe, they existed at a much earlier date.

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Individual results may vary not medical advice, eligibility required seaside for details. And that was the mind-blowing radical claim that I got from your book exactly. That somehow, I mean, in retrospect, it's clear, you know, 1,500 years ago, arguably 2,000 years ago, China was ahead of Europe technologically. And a thousand years ago, the Middle East certainly was ahead. But, and we, like you say, we, we'd like to give some credit to technology and democracy going hand in hand, but we kind of get the opposite lesson here. Yeah, that's right.

And so, no, I don't want to suggest by that that all new technology is bad and that we need to flee from it. But you can think then about different types of technologies and how technology, what types of technologies gave access to the state bureaucracy and which types of technology. in which types of technologies gave access to ordinary people. And so if you think of writing as being a fundamental technology for human society, then there are different forms of writing. Some forms of writing, pre-alphabetic forms of writing, or non-alphabetic forms of writing are much more complicated to learn. If you go back to ancient Sumeria,

Cuneiform was something that would have been learned only by a state elite. We're linear B and A in Greece during the Bronze Age, same deal. But if you get to alphabetic forms of writing, then that's a technology that provides much more. more much broader access to anyone who can learn it. So we could say at the end, the technology has had this effect, but then if you wanted to push further, and I touched on this very slightly in chapter four,

but could take it further to suggest that then what you need to be discussing is what, when is it that technology is developing, but it provides broad access to people in society, and when is it a technology that is especially reinforcing the power of the state bureaucracy. But the other thing that has great resonance with our current situation is that one of the things you can do with technology is surveillance, or understanding what's going on in your country. And if you can surveil and you know what's going on,

you can collect taxes, and that can make your government stronger. No, exactly. And so the surveillance capacity of a modern state is absolutely extraordinary and would have made any ancient autocrat who had surveillance technology for knowing what people could grow or how much they should do. be taxed would have loved modern, modern state surveillance in that way. And of course, some, some governments around the globe are, are really going in, in that direction. Well, you have these wonderful graphs that display very vividly in the book that where tax

collection was good, autocracy followed. Yeah. No, that's right. That's right. And so, well, the two went, the two went hand in hand, that the autocrats were much more, had much higher levels of revenue per size of the economy. And it's really, the differences are really extraordinary. That's right. So is it too crazy to say something like, or too simplistic to say something like the following, that there was more or less advanced technology and social structure in China and the Middle East that enabled autocratic governments to stay in power and,

you know, stave off any democratic impulses? Whereas in Europe where the technology was not as good, local sets of people could demand their rights and become more democratic. But then what I want to say is, you know, there was at some point a sympathy between the democratic impulse and the scientific impulse, right? I mean, letting people come up with crazy ideas and explore them and falsify them and so forth seems to be a common philosophical attitude that is both in democracy. and in science. No, I think that's absolutely right. And that gets into a very, that gets into a very big debate that was inspired. Some people refer to it as the Needham question from the great China scholar, Joseph Needham, about why, if China was developed all these techniques and technologies earlier, far earlier than Europeans did, why is it that eventually Europe ended up being the first to industrialized and the first modern scientific society?

Right. So what I, what that's, that's probably what you could say is that by the very nature of democracy, earlier modern, being a somewhat more disorganized and decentralized affair than autocracy, it gave people the, the margin to experiment and to think about what they would, what they would like to do on their own. So, you know, one person, I think it's a little bit too trite to say it this way, but some of the, has suggested that, well, if Galileo had lived in China, he would have been a state bureaucrat. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe that's not right. I don't know, but maybe I'm just being trite myself. It's a little bit trite because I think there were a lot of technological innovations in the bureaucracy in China. And, you know, the Chinese bureaucracy was quite amazing in accordance of what it could do.

But I think there's something to that. There's something to that, that underlying idea that you raised. Well, could we put it this way? I mean, people like Galileo and Bruno and Copernicus and Kepler raised. a fuss and the institutions did try in some sense to stop them but failed, maybe because those institutions were weaker than they would have been in a very flourishing autocracy. Well, that's the other thing, exactly. It's not just that it's a question of what were the alternatives to do, what were the,

the nature of European society at its time at the time of, I mean, we wouldn't, Bruno, obviously, he got burnt at the stake. So that was a fairly, that's an example of power, right? But there were, the idea that someone like Copernicus could have this, have this, have this, I don't know if you call it a treaties, we're getting more into your area of knowledge than me. And he didn't publish it until after he died. Is that correct? That's correct. No, it is.

Yeah. Okay. But the idea that that would be out and he could do that on his own with no one watching and have it published even afterwards is pretty extraordinary. Right. Yeah. So it speaks to this point that you emphasize quite a bit, which is the path dependence of how these things happen, that rather than seeing it as just progression from autocratic rule to democracy, there's a back and forth that is kind of unpredictable, you know, like what kind of technologies and what kind of social structures come first affect greatly what will come afterward. Yeah, there's a back and forth and there's especially an issue of sequencing. I guess that's a term that political scientists used to love to use, so I use it. But when I wrote the first draft of this book, some people thought, oh, wow, this sounds like a real libertarian take. Like if we had no bureaucracy, then we'd be more likely to be Democratic.

And that's probably true, right? But that wouldn't necessarily be that great a thing because bureaucracies do a lot of great things for us. So what I emphasize is this sequencing question. If you have an early democratic tradition and you develop that for a society that's maybe on a larger scale than something like a village or a city, as Europeans did, then eventually you can develop a state bureaucracy, and it's a state bureaucracy that is controlled by representatives of the people and the ruler himself or herself as well. And so you get to a more virtuous outcome than if you start with bureaucratic rule as being the first step. Yeah, so, I mean, let's revisit Europe when the democracy began coming back.

And you attribute a lot of it, to oversimplify once again, just to the fact that the rulers were so weak. right? I mean, there were kings, there were emperors, but there was a lot of local autonomy and a lot of the energy for democracy came from there. Yeah, absolutely. I think someone said that one way to sum it up in my book is to understand democracy, follow the money, which again, maybe a little bit too trite, but it's one way of saying. And so what happened is that both Europe and China experienced commercial revolutions at roughly the same time. And in China a little bit earlier in terms of around the turn of the first millennium in Europe a couple hundred years after that, thought perhaps to have been linked to somehow favorable solar activity. And in China, we have a lot of commercial development. Cities grow in size, but you already have a state bureaucracy. And so they just say, oh, this is great.

We're going to tax this economic activity. In Europe, you get the growth of towns and cities, but these are all autonomous because rulers have no bureaucracy. They have no real central power. And so now rulers recognize, wow, these towns are rich. They're growing rich. They're engaging in commerce. We like to go to war with people next door. How am I going to raise money?

Well, I'm going to have to talk to the towns and the cities. But I have no way of forcing the towns and the cities to give me something. And I have no bureaucracy to collect it. So you're forced to go into this more consensual way of governing where you have an assembly and you have a representative assembly or a representative from the town be part of the assembly. And then you have a bargaining interaction about how much can be paid in terms of taxes. And so that's that's where that's how it gets rolling. And were the towns themselves Democratic? Is there a sense in which democracy sort of starts on the smaller, literally smaller scales and then expands upward?

It varied a lot. The general view from medieval historians, a sort of stereotypical or archetypal view is that a lot of the towns started off when they first became autonomous as quite non-hierarchical, and they gradually, over time, they got more hierarchical, as you would get a smaller oligarchy of people running the town council. So it really depended on what was the breadth of participation in the town council. There's considerable variation. Sometimes it would be just the merchants guild, the richest people in the town. sometimes it would also be members of artisans guilds as well. So in any case, what's interesting about the cities is they were not ruled as autocracies. It's fascinating to think about we don't have a great list of really memorable names of rulers of Republican autonomous cities in Europe because the individual rulers weren't that important.

It was more of a collective operation. And where should we give credit to the revival of democracy in Europe, whether, Are there specific places that are most notable there? Well, it's especially, if you want to think about the urban phenomenon, it's especially something that occurs in northern Italy, in parts of Catalonia, and in the low countries, especially also, that are really the first movers in terms of the representative assembly phenomenon and where you get new ideas about what it means to have political representation

and what the rights and responsibilities of different groups are. And was it mostly economics and sort of the organization of trade that made that happen? Or were they reading Aristotle once again and got all fired up? Yeah. I mean, it's hard to deny that the rediscovery of the classical tradition fed into this. But it fed into it. Aristotle wasn't retranslated into Latin until about 1260. And that's about 100 years after a lot of the time. towns in northern Italy became autonomous. So the fascinating thing about this representative phenomenon

and the autonomous city phenomenon is it started off with ordinary people basically rebuilding the ship at sea. They needed to figure out a different way of governing, and they didn't have some core constitutional or classical text to rely on to say, oh, we just do it like it says in the book. And one of the things I think to Americans that is most interesting, or most surprising, I guess, is that we, our myth is that we were ruled by a king and we threw them over, we invented democracy. But a lot of this resurgence of democracy was much more gradual and negotiated, right? I mean, there were kings, but they gave up their power, maybe not willingly, but because they were negotiating with some councils or some nobles or something like that. No, that's right. It was negotiated and evolved over time, and it was very widespread within Europe.

it wasn't a specifically Anglo-American, Anglo and then American phenomenon. But England did play a big role, right? I mean, do you think that England was one of the first to really get the Democratic ball rolling with its most momentum? Yeah, I think so. And if you want to talk about England now, I think I don't know if it's too early, but talk about the shift to modern democracy because that's what's really critical for. So the English, there's this old phrase from the 19th century that the English parliament was the mother of all parliaments. And that is completely incorrect because we know that assemblies and parliament, they were called different things in different places, but assemblies like this existed in a great many European states around in the medieval and early modern eras.

What was different about England was a new type of, it was a mother of a new type of parliament. And there are several ways in which this was the case that perhaps the most important was that in England from the 14th century, middle of the 14th century onwards, representatives could no longer be bound by mandates given by their constituencies. So elsewhere in Europe, it had been and would continue to be the practice much more frequently for a town to say, okay, we are sending you as a representative to this assembly, and this is what you can agree to, and this is not what you can not agree to. And that was it. And that was obviously meant as a way of trying to prevent representatives for being subject undue royal influence. But as you can imagine, it led to a very cumbersome means of decision making. Because if all you could agree to is that, then everybody would have to go back to their

constituencies and come back again and so on and iterate. It made things very clumsy. It was good for liberty, good for early democracy, but it was also very clumsy. In Britain, for one reason or another, and I don't know if we know exactly why this was the case, the Crown succeeds in imposing from the middle of the 14th century onwards that's idea that members must come with full powers. This is an expression that existed in, in other European countries as well, but it was really implemented in England. And full powers meaning that you could no longer have a mandate from your constituency. And you could not be,

you could not say, okay, I can't finish and decide what I feel about this proposal until I go back and talk to my constituency again. And so that made suddenly the British Parliament a much more decisive type of organization, in a way, perhaps also a little bit less democratic. How does that relate to what it would have been in the Roman Republic? In the Roman Republic, there would not have been mandates as well, but there would also been that the Roman system is a little bit different in terms of the extent to rely, decentralized forms of revenue collection. So it's a little bit of a difficult comparison. I think the better comparison is with the Dutch Republic.

Okay. The Dutch Republic, the Dutch Republic is fascinating because the Dutch Republic is often called the first modern economy. So it really was the richest society on earth in the 17th century, yet they had this very pre-modern form of representation where mandates continued as a means of binding representatives right up until the 18th century, until the end of the 18th century. And the Dutch, just like the Iroquois and the Huron before them, had a, what? is in essence, a model of political representation where you can still take your marbles and go home if you weren't happy. And so there are these stories where they were trying to organize and figure out how we're going to pay for ships for naval engagements against England. And sometimes they just couldn't get the money because an individual city would say, well, sorry, I'm not paying this time.

Right. I mean, it seems like even if there's not geographic determinism here, there's an awful lot of economic determinism that what really enabled this sort of devolution of power from the autocrat to smaller collections of people was that those people had the money. That's right. Those people had the money, but also conditional on their not being a prior bureaucratic order. Because if they were, then they could collect taxes and the autocrat would get all the money. Exactly. So that's why the Chinese commercial revolution under the Song Dynasty did not lead to the dismantling of the imperial state and in fact reinforced it. But you're right, in a context where the ruler starts off week to begin with, the growth of the civil society in that way of their

economic power leads to a strengthening of democracy. That's because basically for the fundamental reason that rulers really started to need their people. Yeah. I mean, I have a bunch of like miscellaneous questions. You can tell me where they fit in here. Even before, this renaissance of democracy in Europe. The church played an enormous role, right, in the life of the continent. And is there some sense in which the church was democratic? I mean, you vote for the Pope, at least the Council of Cardinals, the College of Cardinals, votes for the Pope?

Yeah, so the Pope actually suffered the same problem as did European monarchs. And the Pope didn't really have much of a bureaucracy and was, okay, the Pope technically doesn't rule. But if you permit the term, the Pope, had to manage things with a very decentralized system of different abbees and monasteries and chapters and orders and so on. And the Pope, like a lot of other rulers, sometimes felt like they wanted to get money. And they wanted to get money maybe for a new crusade or something like that. And so, well, what they wanted to do that, they didn't have a bureaucracy to just say,

okay, you must all pay this. The tithe to the extent existed was a local tax. So what ends up happening is from a very early date in the early 13th century, that the papacy and the church becomes actually something of an incubator for a lot of these democratic ideas. This Latin phrase quodomness, Tangit that goes on a little bit longer that says basically that which touches all should be discussed and approved by all, comes by a tacit agreement between the papacy and various other church bodies saying, okay, if we're going to give you money, then we should, have a role in agreeing, like, should there be a new crusade against the Alba Gensians or against other groups or something like that?

Right. Okay. But, I mean, I was just thinking more of the role model aspect. I mean, was it always true that the Pope was elected by the Cardinals? Yeah, the Pope was elected. That's right. But I don't know that, I don't know if that really served as the main instigator for, because certainly what you don't find is when elections for, for.

nation states come in later on, it's often in places where people have anti-clerical attitude. So France, for example, people weren't saying at the time of the French Revolution, oh, boy, well, the popes have been elected forever. So why don't we do it that way here? I guess the Pope was elected, but it was supposed to be the will of God who was moving people's hands in doing it. So maybe not a good role model. Yeah. No, not that. I mean, a great example, if you think about it, but for various reasons, I don't think that I don't think people wanted to go there. And the other kind of sort of of miscellaneous question I didn't want to forget was when we compare China and maybe this also works for the Middle East to Europe, one of the differences besides the fact that there were stronger bureaucracies in China and the Middle East, there's this Tower of Babel kind of situation in Europe where people didn't share a common language and they were sort of very fractured. And is it too much or too little to say that that kind of differentiation between

European cultures provided some energy also that led to innovation and led to Europe actually sort of through the force of competition taking over the world? Yes, I think that that's been an argument that has been around for some time. And there have been a couple great books on that subject recently that provided more evidence. Phil Hoffman's, why did Europeans conquer the world, is excellent at showing that Europeans may not have been ahead of other societies in terms of most economic technologies, but it was interstate competition that drove this remarkable progress in terms of firearms technology in Europe during the early. And if you look at the rates, the rate of annual rates of technology,

growth in firearms based on basically how long it took an individual musketeer to fire how many rounds, you get an astounding rate of technological progress. It's sort of more like what we're used to seeing in industrial societies that are really growing quickly and certainly not something that you're used to seeing in a pre-industrial society. Got it. Okay, very good. And then back to the sort of the history of the democracy coming up. Even if these first resurgence of democracy came before we had rediscovered Aristotle, It certainly seems like there was theorizing about democracy that flourished in Europe around this time.

What is the chicken egg effect here? Was there a lot of effect of thoughts about the rights of people that fed into people saying, okay, yes, I suppose we could become democratic? Or was it more ex post facto justification? So coming back to the medieval and early modern eras, then, I think this is another thing. I try to steer a fine line in the book between saying on one hand, I don't believe in, I don't think the evidence is there to support the view that it's just sort of these ideas were discovered by someone or handed down from on high or rediscovering the classical tradition

that led people to behave and suddenly say, well, we'd like to move towards democracy. I think there were a lot more structural features that we just talked about that led towards that development of a more democratic form of rule in Europe. Sorry, I was actually thinking more like the Enlightenment, more like, once we get to Lock and Hobbs and so forth. Yeah, certainly what was very crucial before Lock and Hobbs, before all that, Europeans developed these theories of political representation and theories of a state and what that was. And I think those were absolutely critical to subsequent democratic development and also critical for the idea of liberty itself.

And I think the idea of liberty itself is something that could exist, first of all, because you weren't in an autocratic bureaucratic order where if you wrote about liberty, you would have been censored or your book wouldn't have been allowed. But then actually, of course, the ideas mattered to the extent. They had some traction to the extent that someone had to come up with a particularly elegant and compact and incisive way of expressing these ideas. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's a natural thought for us here in the U.S.

because we tell ourselves that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were heavily influenced by some of these, more philosophical writings at the time. Yes, I think that's right. And at the same time that they were also trying to solve a very practical from their mind set of a set of questions. Yeah. And is it, how well does the U.S. fit into your general framework? It seems to fit in pretty well.

I mean, can we say that there was no preexisting bureaucratic state in the British colonies and therefore it was relatively easy for democracy to take hold? Yeah, I think that's that that's true. true. And what happens if you think, coming back to the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a situation of tremendous land abundance. after European conquest. And that is even in Native American populations were actually much less, there was lower population density compared to the population density

in Mesoamerica. And then of course, a lot of the native, huge amounts of the native population were either exterminated or died off from European diseases. So what you get then is that through this horrible sequence of events, you get this area of great land abundance where British settlers,

are coming over or people are trying to attract British settlers. And things are going relatively well in the 17th century in England in terms of wages are rising for ordinary people. And so in that environment, you have these people you're trying to attract to come over. The people who are running the colonies switched over to saying, okay, you can have the vote. Maybe if you're able to vote about your affairs, you'll come over. And also there was a great break on things as saying that people could just sort of take off into the woods and found their new settlement if they weren't happy with someone who

tried to rule in an autocratic fashion. And so I think that was tremendously important. This was, to be fair, that you make this point very clearly that not only does a functioning bureaucracy help autocracy, but the ability to vote with your feet and to get up and leave is a big boon to democracy. That's right. Now, the distinction being, of course, that this was a story of what was happening for free white males, whereas for Africans who were brought over the story was the absolute flip side in terms of they were being brought over forcibly to try to solve a problem of land abundance and labor scarcity, but they didn't have the same exit options that an ordinary British settler would have had. Yeah, and didn't get the right to vote. So, yeah,

that makes perfect sense. Exactly. So it's the same feature of land abundance that leads to liberty for some and to slavery for others. Right. Is there any chance that some of the early settlers in the Americas were influenced in their thinking by the Native American way of doing things, even if there's terrible stories of, you know, war and pestilence, but could there have been some philosophical influence there? That has been a huge debate over time, and it's often been a debate where people have very strong views, and we don't have a tremendous amount of evidence. So what we certainly know is that there are great many cases where Europeans who came over had a respect for some Europeans who came over,

had a respect for Native American institutions. And so there's always this debate about, well, the Iroquois Confederacy was quite an amazing example of democracy. Did this influence people like Ben Franklin, who then helped influence the Constitution? And there's been a huge debate over that all the time, sort of attempting to show it that, yes, this had this influence. That's a difficult.

It's a difficult task. It was certainly the case, though, that these institutions that the Native Americans had were appreciated. And coming back to the Huron again, the Jesuits said, well, their confederation council is like the States General, which was the representative assembly in France. So it's not implausible to say that there was a connection. It's just to show it, to show that it really made the difference these ideas percolating through is a difficult task. Well, and I can certainly imagine that they did have an influence, but that no one mentioned it, right? That it was not the way you said. It was much more prestigious to harken back to Athens than to give credit to the Iroquois. That is also certainly true. That would not have bought you misprosage with a lot of people to say this is what we're modeling this on. So if in England one of the great innovations was basically to elect representatives and then let them make their decisions rather than to give them explicit instructions through mandates.

Were there extra innovations when we got to the U.S. and the Constitution? Well, the other innovations have to do with, in many senses, pushing, there's a distinction between what happens under the colonies and what happens under the Constitution. And the colonies, at times a lot of the colonial assemblies, particularly in New England, tended to bring back some earlier forms of democracy. Mandates were sometimes used, the principle that the representative could be impeached. And the frequency of elections was very high. So you tended to reelect people, have a choice

to reelect people every year in a lot of instances. And so that is much different from the British example. But then what happens with the Constitution is the Constitution sort of sweeps a lot of those things out. So there's no possibility of mandates. So that gets debated actually. It was debated whether in the debates over what would become the First Amendment, some people suggested that freedom to expression might mean freedom to express a view that would constrain your representative. And elections become less frequent. And so there was a shift away towards a somewhat more distant view where citizens only were able to express their views every few years instead of every year. And in some sense, these are moves slightly away from the purest form of democracy, right? But maybe towards something more sustainable and stable.

Well, that's the question, right, because a lot of the founders, certainly what they didn't want, they had this view that actual more direct democracy would be this cantankerous thing that wouldn't fly. And also, they tended to be richer than most people. And so they were probably worried about being expropriate. There was a lot of movement in the 1780s about people who owned, owned debts who wanted debts to be canceled. A lot of this fed into debates about the Constitution. And so whether you want to see it as sort of narrow, cynically minded or broad minded in terms of stability, the end outcome ends up being the same that we have a much more distant type of

democracy than we otherwise would have had. Yeah. And is it is it possible to measure the extent to which this experiment that happened in the United States with the Constitution really did influence thinking back over in Europe? I think it's certainly, if you come back to thinking about, of course, the big one, the French Revolution and others, then you start to get movements that resemble or ideas transmitting that resemble what you saw in the U.S. So it's certainly there's a debate about mandates and whether they should be allowed during the French Revolution.

And the decision is very clear and very stark that no. a modern republic or democracy, whatever you want to call it, representatives should not be bound by mandates. Right. Okay. A longer electoral terms as well were another feature. And I guess, you know, we already talked about the fraught relationship between democracy and technology or science,

that in some sense good technology enables you to stop democracy from growing. But then once democracy is there, it enables even better scientific progress. What about the analogous question vis-a-vis economic development or inequality? I think that there's a story we would like to tell ourselves that democracies are engines of economic success as well. Is that a legit claim or are we just telling stories to ourselves? Yeah, and there are legit claims, but that is something that's been debated over and over.

and the data, I think, may point to a slight advance for democracies in that regard. But it's tough to tell because, of course, European, Europe was the cradle of modern democracy, but for a very, very long time, it was very backward economically compared to other world regions. So that would seem to call into question that. If there is an added benefit of democracy, several people have suggested something along the lines of what you already hinted at. And I think this would be how the argument would have to be made is to say that it's precisely because the democratic spirit goes hand in hand with this spirit of free inquiry into affairs, both scientific and other. That if you see that scientific progress is fundamental to economic progress, as it most certainly is, then you could make an argument. It's an easier argument to say than to actually prove it.

But it's certainly out there as an idea. Okay, so I would have skipped ahead a couple hundred years to just bring us up to today. Thinking about the status of democracy today. And I guess there's two sides to that. One is there's still plenty of countries out there that are not democratic. What are the prospects for them? And on the other side, there are countries that are democratic where democracy is under threat a little bit. I mean, I worry that the lesson of your book is since a very strong bureaucracy and knowledgeable surveillance state is a good tool to stave off democracy, then we're in trouble because that's everywhere now.

Yeah, that's right. And the power of the modern state is really remarkable in many cases. So I think that comes back to the idea that developments like that are not necessarily. a bad thing for democracy, I hope, if I'm right, and I hope I'm right, if you have this long democratic tradition and pattern of governance beforehand. So if you have a country like the U.S., if we continue to keep ourselves a democracy where if there's some development in surveillance technology that could be used to monitor people and to know what they're doing, that it's possible for ruler and people, people indirectly via their representatives to discuss what sort of limit should be placed on the use of that technology. But for autocratic societies, you would think, yes, this unambiguously strengthens the power of the central state.

Well, presumably it enables people who are pro-democracy to sort of organize and share information in a different way. That must countervail a little bit against the ability of the state to see what we're doing. Yeah, and the literature on that has kind of gone back and forth. when Twitter first came out, there was a lot of discussion about, well, how people in protesting in places like Ukraine were using Twitter to coordinate. And they could certainly do that. But then what you see afterwards, after the lack of effect of the Arab Spring and turning the Middle East toward on a more democratic trajectory, is that states also learn to use

these new tools very effectively as well. Right. And so I think the jury is out for things like that. I think the jury is out. Sometimes it must be helpful for democracy sometimes. And we simply, these are very, very, in the scope of human history, these are extremely recent developments. So I think we should be, yeah, it's very hard with that little, that, that, you know, that amount of data and that minimal amount of experience to sort of predict which way it's going to go. Right. We should certainly be appropriately humble. And I think that it flows both. ways. Part of us, part of the lesson is, if we look at a place like China, there's no inevitability that it's going to turn into a democracy someday, right? I mean, given its history and the strength of its current state and its empirical success in squelching things like the memory of the Tiananmen Square event and so forth, it's completely plausible that it'll just have this kind of autocratic rule into the foreseeable future. No, I think that's absolutely

correct. And so the view that would have been common circa 1989 would have been, either China would not be able to continue to develop economically unless it became more democratic or that as China grew richer people would demand democracy, democracy of a sort we have, has not come, has not definitely not come to pass yet. And so if from people who were making that argument in 1989, if you told them how rich China would be in 20, and it would still be very much an autocracy, I think they would have recognized that they got the argument wrong. But on the other side, I can imagine that the world is increasingly interconnected and something

that is true now that would not have been relevant 2,000 years ago is that people in China cannot help but know that there are other countries out there that are democracies. I mean, surely that has some effect giving them a little bit of hope. Maybe I'm whistling in the dark here. Yeah, it's led to this interesting fact that since 1945, most everyone has said that there are democracy. Yeah. You know, North Korea, Democratic, supposedly. Mao emphasized the idea of a people's democracy, which he contrasted with bourgeois liberal democracy.

And so the Chinese have their own word for her democracy, Minju, and they speak of democracy of a different, very, very different sort. within China as opposed to liberal democracy elsewhere. And so it's almost like you, no one is running around saying praising the virtues of autocracy. In the modern world, you've got to claim that you're truly democratic. And yet, we do have a rise of populism and related movements. How worried are you about the stability of democracies in Europe and the U.S. and the West more generally? I think it's quite worrisome. I think the, I sort of say the immediate developments are very worrisome, but we also need to keep things in broader perspective.

So circa 1900, about 10% of the Earth's population was in a country that could reasonably call the democracy. Today, depending upon which measure by political scientists you adopt, that number is something more like 60%. So that's an extraordinary change in an extraordinary. progress for democracy in 120 years. If the U.S. shifted soon to being an autocracy or an authoritarian state, that's about 4% of the world's population. So the bigger picture is that democracy has actually been doing well. And there are places in Africa that are democracies today that a lot of people 30 years ago thought would not be democracies today. But that, of course, the problem is we live in the U.S. and we're worried about our democracy. And we have reason to be

Yeah. Well, you know, nevertheless, I do like to end every podcast when possible on an optimistic note. Are there any sort of action items you can suggest for those of us who are fans of democracy to either, you know, directly help it along or at least to think about it in the most productive way? Well, vote, first of all, of course, that's the simplest, but that's only one step. I think one of the things that is the weak points of modern democracy or can be the weak point is that people start to feel very disconnected, disengaged, and distrustful of government. And that is a fundamental problem in the United States today where you went from a situation where in the 1960s about three quarters of people said that they trusted the government in Washington to do the right thing most of the time and now only about 20 percent say that.

And this has been at 20 percent both during the Obama and Trump administrations. And so you need to think about what the sources of that distrust are and how people could become more engaged. And so I do think that the events following the horrible killing of George Floyd nonetheless showed a very bright spot for American democracy in terms of people getting involved and protesting peacefully in all sorts of areas, not just the usual. It wasn't just the usual suspects in the usual places, that being people in a lot of small. all towns protesting as well. And so I think rediscovering any form of political engagement or expression or debate is critically important. Because, you know, if democracy means power to the people, if the people aren't bothered with, by, you know, trying to have any influence on things, then your democracy is going to be pretty unhealthy. I like that as a closing message.

It gives us a little bit of responsibility. If power is supposed to be to the people and we're the people, then we have to do something about it and not just wait for it to happen. Yeah, I think that ultimately democracy is us. We tend to, particularly in recent decades in the U.S., blame the government or something like that, but ultimately democracy is us. And so if we don't do something about it, then it's not going to work. All right. Let's stop listening to podcasts. Let's get out there and do something about it. David's to Savage. Thanks so much for being on the Minescape podcast. Thank you.