Sphinx

There’s a long essay in today’s Grauniad by James Miller, offering a broad-brush overview of the history of democracy, focusing mainly on what political theorists have had to say about it. I’ve come to think of this as rather an odd sub-genre; these essays are almost invariably condensed versions of books rather than written as essays for a specific publication, and they unite the desire of the author and publisher to hype the book and the desire of the newspaper to be publishing Big Provocative Ideas – hence, in this case, the claim of the title and sub-heading that this essay is all about arguing that maybe populism is essential for democracy rather than a threat to it, a thesis that is only touched on in passing in the actual piece.

The process of editing a book down to essay-length may account for a certain tendency to non-sequiturs:

Current affairs may seem especially bleak, but fears about democracy are nothing new. At the zenith of direct democracy in ancient Athens, in the fifth century BC, one critic called it a “patent absurdity” – and so it seemed to most political experts from Aristotle to Edmund Burke, who considered democracy “the most shameless thing in the world”.

Modern “fears about democracy” – that it’s being subverted, that populism is leading democracies to vote for anti-democratic and anti-liberal values – are clearly not the same sort of thing as the criticisms of democracy offered by thinkers ancient and modern who disapprove of the entire system and seek to uncover its weaknesses and contradictions. Plato’s “fears about democracy”, one might say, are fears of democracy rather than for it.

But it was the “patent absurdity” line that caught my eye, and on further inspection it’s odder than expected – at least once I remembered where it’s from, as ‘long essays’ don’t bother with silly things like references, and the online versions of Miller’s books (he’s used this line before, in his 1984 book on Rousseau) don’t give access to the endnotes. Thucydides 6.89.6: Alcibiades at Sparta. So, rather than being either a friend of democracy worried about its populist tendencies or a critic of democracy denouncing them, this is an aristocratic populist presenting himself as a life-long critic of democracy in the hope of ingratiating himself with an oligarchic, authoritarian regime. I’m sure there are some contemporary parallels we could think of…

The fascination of Alcibiades is his apparent lack of any convictions whatsoever beyond the furthering of his own success; he’s happy to perform the role of dashing democratic leader and voice of the Athenian Id in return for the opportunity for glory and honour, but if that’s taken away then he will play the role of the Lakonophile aristocrat or the friend of Persian autocracy with equal enthusiasm. The one thing we cannot ever take him to be is sincere – or at any rate consistent, given the possibility that he is actually sincere in the moment. That is, this isn’t a terribly solid basis for an argument about how democracy was viewed by its contemporaries, beyond the fact that this is the sort of thing that someone thought a critic of democracy ought to say.

A little further on, Thucydides is lumped in with Plato as a “reviler” of democracy:

The historian Thucydides, another citizen of democratic Athens, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War with Sparta that ended with the defeat of Athens in 404, essentially blamed the power of the ordinary people of Athens, and their susceptibility to manipulation by mendacious orators, for this catastrophic outcome.

“Essentially” is doing a lot of work here; the cynic might suggest that it stands in for “I can’t actually find a quote to this effect, and actually there’s all this positive stuff about democracy from Pericles, and many of the harshest criticisms of democracy are offered by speakers addressing the assembly which seems a bit odd, but I definitely read stuff which says T was hostile to democracy. Hobbes, probably”.* There are many fascinating things to be said about the depiction of democracy in Thucydides, partly presented through sock puppets like Alcibiades and Cleon – and maybe Miller does this in hs book, but the essay seems mainly determined to move into the eighteenth century as quickly as possible. One other by-product of this is the depiction, without much discussion, of Aristotle as a fervent opponent of democracy, which seems open to debate.

Miller concludes with the suggestion that a motto favoured by both Rousseau and Jefferson – “I prefer freedom with all its dangers to tranquility with servitude” – is perfect for our dark times. For an essay concerned with democracy, by someone who’s written on Rousseau, this seems distinctly odd, since the next two sentences in The Social Contract read: “If there were a nation of gods it would be governed democratically. So perfect a government is not suitable for men.” Is this the essay of an oligarch, praising and defending democracy because it’s what he thinks his audience wishes to hear..?

* In fact Hobbes doesn’t get a mention – and nor does the entire seventeenth century.