Democracy on Trial by Jean Bethke Elshtain

Author:Jean Bethke Elshtain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 1993-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

IV

Democracy’s Shady Past

STEPPING BACK FOR A MOMENT from democracy’s contemporary trials will help us to recall what might be called democracy’s perpetual trial. Although democracy enjoys a good press as we enter the waning years of the twentieth century, it has not always been so. The history of Western politics and Western political thought puts on display a variety of powerful arguments both for and against democracy. While it is the case that nowadays no one wants to be thought “anti-democratic,” including tyrants, oligarchs, and zealots of whatever stripe, this is a relatively recent development. To call oneself a democrat in previous epochs was to court suspicion, even disdain. In our own enthusiasm for the word democracy, we not only downplay anti-democratic developments in our own societies, we forget just how hard-fought the struggle over democracy has been, in texts and assemblies, in schools and streets, in the homes of the bereft and the corridors of power alike.

I ask the reader to return with me to the time and place where the issues at stake between democrats and anti-democrats first got joined: ancient Attica. Modern political philosophers and citizens alike look to our ancient Greek forebears as the originating fathers of democracy; indeed, we are taught that the Athenians “invented” democracy. But, by our contemporary reckoning, it was a rather peculiar democracy: the vast majority of the populace of Athens could neither vote nor deliberate in assembly, nor, indeed, fight in a war — the signal responsibility and privilege of the citizen. Slaves, labourers, and women were excluded. Nonetheless, the Athenians proclaimed themselves a special sort of breed, that called by the name “democrat,” because the minority who were citizens had final say on the actions to be taken by the polis, the political community, as a whole.

The term democracy was known as early as the seventh century B.C. By the second half of the sixth century, arguments for and against democracy had jelled. As the story is usually told, democrats won the fight for the “hearts and minds” of later generations, including early modern social contract thinkers, constitutionalists, and political reformers seeking ancient lineage for, and classical legitimation of, many of their own ideas. One need look no further than the American Federalist Papers to read the assessments of the pros and cons of democracy, ancient and modern, taken up by the founders of the American republic. The Founders were well aware of the classical democratic heritage. But they also appreciated the fact that an ancient political philosopher had the better argument — or at least the most elegantly elaborated case — and it was anti- rather than pro-democratic. This argument was deeded to later generations by the masterful pen of Plato, the Athenian.35

But let us take up the pro-democratic story first, especially as it was articulated in the fullness of rhetorical splendour in the funeral speech of Pericles, a leader in Athens’s prolonged conflict with Sparta. The Peloponnesian War convulsed Athens, her allies, and her opponents for nearly thirty years in the fifth century B.

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